Newsworthy

‘Deadliest Six Months’ for Civilians in Afghanistan

U.S. Building New Jails across Afghanistan

Iran Rejects US Claims of Role in Iraq Attacks

Libya Says 1,100 Dead in NATO War Crimes

Unfolding the Syrian Paradox

Canada: The Gift That Keeps Giving to Israel

CIA Officer May Face War Crime Charges

The “Secret” PATRIOT ACT

Lawmaker: US Airports are not Secure Enough

A False Narrative About Fannie Mae

Select Editorials

The New “Let Them Eat Cake!”

The Military Industrial Complex: The Enemy From Within

Wasted & Stolen Trillions for War

The Media’s Endless Propaganda for War

How Has Murdock Improved With Age

Video- The Secret History of the CIA: The CIA in Business with the Parent Group to Al-Qaeda?

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The CIA’s Secret Sites in Somalia

Officials: NATO Kills 16 Civilians in Afghan Air Strike

Next Up: Pakistan- Ominous signs of a major new war

Why Ahmed Wali Karzai was so controversial

Ahmed Karzai: From dishwasher to drug kingpin

Anger spreads in Egypt as military warns protesters

UK Police Intel Expert: Government, Not Islam, Real Terror Threat

Petraeus at the Head of the CIA: Business as Usual?

What Panetta Saw—and What We Got

Citing Secret Order, Federal Court Dismisses Airline Passenger Lawsuit against DHS & TSA Over Scanners, Virtual Strip Searches & Full-Body ‘Rub-Downs’

Robert Fisk: Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11

Video: Aloha Hawaii New World Order

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I am going to start with a piece of news you all have already seen and read. I am listing this only because I will be posting a relevant commentary tomorrow, so here we go, starting with an article by Guardian:

Ahmed Wali Karzai’s assassination leaves gaping hole in Afghan politics 

Amid the confusion of breaking news reports following Ahmed Wali Karzai’s assassination, I mentioned the name of the alleged assassin, Sardar Mohammed, to someone close to the murdered man. The reaction was a gasp of disbelief.

Mohammed, who commanded a force of men who ran checkpoints close to Ahmed Wali’s hometown of Karz, had worked for the Karzai family for years and was from the same Popolzai tribe and district. The fact that he was allowed to bring his weapon into Ahmed Wali’s presence shows just how trusted he was. It seems likely that there was a personal motivation behind the attack, despite the Taliban claim of responsibility. Kandahar is a hotbed of long-running personal vendettas.

Isaf [the International Security Assistance Force) now has a chance to push for more inclusive politics in Kandahar, if it is sufficiently deft and willing to engage directly with those Ahmed Wali had marginalised. But his death leaves a massive hole in the fabric of Kandahari power politics, and shows the dangers inherent in a strategy that relies on individual powerbrokers.

Ahmed Wali was the linchpin of the south’s pro-Karzai network, a pan-tribal alliance brought together by money and mutual security. There is now no clear successor to Ahmed Wali, and certainly no one who can combine his vast financial influence, iron-fisted methods and closeness to the president. …More 

The following article will give you a better idea on who Ahmed Wali Karzai really was:

Afghan CIA Drug Kingpin Shot Dead by Own Bodyguard

Ahmad Wali Karzai, the half brother of Afghan president Hamid Karzai, was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards Tuesday morning. Friend and trusted head of security Sardar Mohammed shot him in the head and chest. Mohammed was in turn shot and killed by fellow bodyguards. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the assassination.

In 2009 it was reported that Karzai was a major player in the Afghan opium trade. According to reports, other members of the Karzai family are involved “head-to-heels” in the drug business.

Ahmad Wali Karzai also worked for the CIA.

“The CIA has been complicit in the global drug trade for years,” a former intelligence official told Newsmax in 2002. “The CIA did almost the identical thing during the Vietnam War, which had catastrophic consequences – the increase in the heroin trade in the USA beginning in the 1970s is directly attributable to the CIA.” … More

You’ll have my comments on this tomorrow. Until then, as far as Ahmed Wali Karzai goes.

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Another great article by Pepe Escobar on Pakistan:

Pakistan ‘punished’ in Pipelineistan

Before the end of 2011, Pakistan will start working on its stretch of the IP (Iran-Pakistan) gas pipeline – according to Asim Hussain, Pakistan’s federal minister for petroleum and natural resources. The 1,092 kilometers of pipeline on the Iranian side are already in place.More

IP, also known as “the peace pipeline”, was originally IPI (Iran-Pakistan-India). Although it badly needs gas for its economic expansion, faced with immense pressure by the George W Bush – and then Barack Obama – administrations, India still has not committed to the project, even after a nearly miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008. …

And this one from Afghanistan front:

US Moves Toward Afghan Guerilla War

The United States is beginning an interesting new dimension to the 10-year-old war in Afghanistan. Counter-insurgency efforts will be complemented by an expanded unconventional warfare campaign in many insurgent-controlled areas. This change in approach may have a considerable impact on the stalemate and hasten meaningful negotiations.More 

The US is training scores of Special Forces teams to infiltrate into and operate in areas that the Taliban and other insurgent forces have gained control of in the past few years. Such operations have been in effect for a few years now, but the program is enjoying greater support. Many recently retired special forces personnel …

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Drone strikes are police work, not an act of war?

Launching an air strike in another nation would normally be considered an act of aggression. But advocates of America’s rapidly expanding unmanned drone programme don’t see it that way.

They are arguing, as Tom Ricks writes on his blog The Best Defense over at Foreign Policy, that the campaign to kill militants with missile strikes from these unmanned aircraft, is more like police action in a tough neighbourhood than a military conflict.

These raids conducted by sinister-looking Predator or Reaper aircraft in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen – and since last month in Somalia - should not be seen as a challenge to states and their authority. Instead they are meant to supplement the power of governments that are either unable to or unwilling to fight the militants operating from their territories.

They are precise, limited, strikes aimed at taking down specific individuals, and in that sense are more like the police going after criminals, rather than a full-on military assault. Ricks writes: 

“Police work involves small arms used precisely. Drones aren’t pistols, but firing one Hellfire at a Land Rover is more like a police action than it is like a large-scale military offensive with artillery barrages, armored columns, and infantry assaults.” … More

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 American Jew refused entry to Israel on suspicion of converting to Islam

With regard to a young American Jew named Harald Fuller-Bennett, the Taglit-Birthright project to some extent achieved its goal. The project brings young Jews from around the world for a trip in Israel “in order to diminish the growing division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world; to strengthen the sense of solidarity among world Jewry; and to strengthen participants’ personal Jewish identity and connection to the Jewish people,” to quote its own words. And indeed, about two years after coming on a Taglit-Birthright tour, Fuller-Bennett intended to visit Israel again.

But this time, the people working to diminish the distance between him and Israel were two Tel Aviv lawyers, Omer Shatz and Iftach Cohen, and Jerusalem District Court Judge Yoram Noam. Together, they overturned a bizarre attempt by the Shin Bet security service to accuse him of having connections with terrorists and intending to convert to Islam – for which reasons it barred him from entering Israel for 10 years.

Fuller-Bennett is now 30 years old. On his Taglit-Birthright tour in January 2008, he said, “I gained a lot of sympathy for Israelis and for the multitude of challenges they face (and the many mistakes the government is currently making in facing them ). We had a number of engaging Israeli military members on our bus. I am still Facebook friends with some of them. My conversations with them taught me much about the complexity of modern Israel, and the difficulty of being born into a state with a siege mentality.”

Fuller-Bennett joined a group within the Taglit program called “Peace, Pluralism and Social Justice.” He is not certain that this subgroup of Taglit is still active, but the fact of its existence shows the organizers recognized that there are young Jews whose interest in Israel has not eliminated their capacity for criticism. “We had questions about Israel but wanted to see for ourselves,” Fuller-Bennett said. … More

Israel withheld video evidence of Rachel Corrie’s killing, says her father Craig

The family of Rachel Corrie, the US activist killed in Gaza while protesting against house demolitions in 2003, on Monday claimed the Israeli military authorities withheld video evidence during the Corries’ civil lawsuit and misled US officials on crucial details.

Craig Corrie, Rachel’s father, told a press conference in Jerusalem that the footage from a surveillance camera near the scene of his daughter’s death submitted to the court was “incomplete”. Additional video material obtained by the family showed Rachel’s body in a different spot to the place identified by some military commanders, he said. He also alleged that the Israeli military had misled US officials on the position of Rachel’s body when she was killed. … More

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Here is an interesting commentary on media:

Empire and the Criminalization of the Media: The Fourth Estate is Bankrupt

From the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth imperialism was the dominant national ideology, transcending class and party divisions. Britain was saturated in the ethos and attitudes of empire. They infused plays and books and, later, films. They informed school textbooks. They inspired paintings, prints and engravings. They filled newspapers and magazines. They figured in advertisements and packaging. The impact was arguably greater than that of any previous dominant ideology because its pre-eminence coincided with the rise of the mass market and the mass media. – ‘Imperialism and juvenile literature’ edited By Jeffrey Richards. Manchester University Press, 1989

So what’s changed? Not much really. Today of course, the ideology of imperial expansion now masks itself as ‘humanitarian intervention’ or ‘democracy-building’.

Our Victorian ancestors were less coy about colonizing, claiming to be on a ‘civilizing mission’. But ‘civilizing’ the Libyans, the Iraqis or the Afghans would be a step too far in these allegedly politically correct times but it’s the same thing by another name.

Yet the abyssmal failings of Western ‘democracy’ are all around us. We have governments that regardless that an ‘opposition’ exists are effectively one-party states and have been ever since the early years of the 20th century. …More

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And finally an excellent video report by our partner James Corbett for Global Research.ca on Drone Wars:

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Here are two news articles on Pakistan-US relations (While reading the following recall my related article here on Bin-Laden Death Script):

Pakistan Seeking Even Closer Ties with China 

ISLAMABAD – Pakistan’s increasingly “close and effective defense ties” established with China during the past decade will allow Islamabad to “fill the gap” arising from the prospect of reduced military aid from the United States, a senior Pakistani official said on Sunday after reports emerged of cuts of up to $800 million in U.S. aid.

Amid tense relations with the United States, Pakistan officials have increasingly pointed towards Beijing as the country’s natural ally, offering the possibility of becoming at least a half-substitute to ties with the US. … More 

Pakistan Defiant as U.S. Cuts off $800 Million in Military Aid

The Obama administration leaks critical stories on a seemingly daily basis to the American press, which riles Pakistani public and official opinion against the United States. Many in Pakistan believe that there is a concerted American effort to weakened Pakistan and its armed forces, among the largest in the world.

“The U.S. can’t decide they if they want to stay in this relationship or cut Pakistan off,” said Cyril Almeida, a columnist with Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper. “And Pakistan needs to work out whether it wants to be on the wrong side of international opinion and on the wrong side of the U.S.”

Since 2001, the U.S. has provided $21 billion in civilian and military assistance to Pakistan, including $4.5 billion in the 2010-2011, according to a report from the Congressional Research Service. Two bills in Congress over the last week, which were voted down, would have cut off aid to Pakistan altogether. …More

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I guess it is time for the administration to step up the Iran propaganda … again; here is what I mean:

Top al-Qaida Ranks Keep Footholds in Iran

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — On a cold March morning last year, an Iranian diplomat was flown home nearly 15 months after being kidnapped by gunmen in an ambush on the Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass.

Iran hailed the release as a victory for its intelligence agents, who they claimed staged a rescue mission into the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Western officials and others saw it differently: A turning point in Iran’s dealings with al-Qaida.

Negotiations to free the captive diplomat are believed to have reached high-level al-Qaida figures, Western officials say. In return for its help, al-Qaida demanded better conditions for dozens of people close to Osama bin Laden who have been held under tight security in Iran, including some of the terror chief’s children and the network’s most senior military strategist Saif al-Adel. …More

US concerned about Iran arming Iraq militants-Panetta

(Reuters) – Leon Panetta, on his first visit to Iraq as U.S. defense secretary, said on Monday the United States is concerned about Iran providing weapons to Iraq militants and will take unilateral action when needed to deal with the threat.

“We are very concerned about Iran and the weapons they are providing to extremists here in Iraq. And we’re seeing the results of that,” Panetta said. “In June we lost a hell of a lot of Americans as a result of those attacks. And we cannot just simply stand back and allow this to continue to happen …”

Iran threatens to attack Iraq-based Kurdish rebels

(Reuters) – Iran threatened Monday to take military action against the Iraq-based Kurdish rebel group PJAK, saying the head of Iraq’s Kurdistan region had handed the group land without telling the government in Baghdad.

A senior Iranian military official accused Masoud Barzani, the Kurdistan president, of “giving 300,000 hectares of land to the PJAK terrorist group without the knowledge of the central government in Baghdad,” the semi-official Fars news agency said. …More

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Noteworthy Editorials

Two Million Dead- Now what’s That South Sudan Independence About?

The New York Times produced a nice article the other day covering Independence Day in the new country of South Sudan. It mentioned all kinds of things, from the dignitaries who attended the ceremony, the history of warring that resulted in two million deaths, the continued threat from multiple insurgencies, the religious differences that divided the South from the North of Sudan (North: Muslim, South: Christian and Animist), the hellish heat dogging the festivities. It even noted that the new president wore his signature black cowboy hat, a gift from George W. Bush, and that someone in the crowd held up a sign reading, “Thank You George Bush.”

Just one teensy thing it nearly skipped: oil.

You have to wait, kid you not, 24 paragraphs (including after the hat-tip to Bush) to get this gem—which itself was nicely nestled in the midst of other sentences:

And relations with the north are still dicey. Negotiators have yet to agree on a formula to split the revenue from the south’s oilfields, which have kept the economies of both southern and northern Sudan afloat.

The key point is buried, and then buried again, and made to sound obscure. But make no mistake about the significance. Sudan is the third-largest producer of oil in sub-Saharan Africa. Or, should we say was. Because 85 percent of that oil came from the south. …More

The Business of America is War

Noted trends analyst Gerald Celente said it, and it’s true. In fact, America’s business is war, more war, multiple wars, permanent wars, pillaging one nation after another for wealth, power, and dominance, while homeland needs go begging.

America never was and isn’t now the “land of the free and home of the brave.” In fact, it’s become a “Let ‘em eat cake” society.

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The empire never sleeps or tolerates anti-war activism, threatening its quest for unchallengeable “full spectrum dominance” over all land, surface and sub-surface sea, air, space, electromagnetic spectrum and information systems with enough overwhelming power to fight and win global wars against any adversary, including with nuclear weapons preemptively.

September 11, 2001 served as pretext to consolidate power, destroy civil liberties and human rights, and wage permanent wars against invented enemies for global dominance over world markets, resources, and cheap labor – notably at home and throughout … More

Torture Whitewash

How convenient is it that a door shuts on the Bush administration’s global program of extraordinary rendition and torture, just as America’s military-industrial complex plays musical chairs — with Republican holdover Robert Gates leaving as defense secretary, to be replaced by Leon Panetta, who has spent the last two years as the director of the CIA, while Gen. David Petraeus, the military commander in Afghanistan, takes over Panetta’s role at the CIA?

The answer has to be that it would be hard to conceive of a neater example of how the military and the intelligence agencies — or the CIA, at least — are at the very heart of government. …More

Col. Travers: Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children shows that it does not seek peace

Today I talked to Col. Desmond Travers, a member of the Goldstone mission on the Gaza conflict, who lives in the Republic of Ireland, about the Israeli treatment of children in the occupied territories.

Col. Travers: If the British had behaved toward children who threw stones at them in the manner that is the norm on the West Bank for the Israeli security forces– whereby children are rounded up in the evening and taken to places of detention, hooded, beaten, and in some cases tortured– the northern Ireland problem would not be resolved today. It would still be a place of conflagration.

Why is that? … More

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And here is a video clip on a recent Fethullah Gulen coverage by FOX News. I guess the MSM has started the nibbling process:

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Pepe Escobar returns to our show to discuss the ever-changing, constantly-shifting, and holes-filled script in the US raid that allegedly killed Osama bin Laden. He reports on the news accounts on the Arab uprising in Egypt and the rarely reported realities of the Libya War, the conflicted responses of the United States to the uprising in Egypt and Libya versus those in other places such as Bahrain and Tunisia, and the hypocritical stand on Saudi Arabia. Mr. Escobar talks about the US assembly line of Boogiemen used as catalysts for conflicts and wars, the conflicting accounts on the Bin Laden Death Operation that have been completely censored by the US media and the official narrative as an elaborate PSYOP, the critical turning point in US-Pakistan relations and the China factor in the region, the Central and South Asia geopolitics factor, and more!

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He is an investigative journalist with three decades of experience in covering politics and conflicts around the globe. He’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering stories and cases from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was in Afghanistan and interviewed the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Masoud, a couple of weeks before his assassination. Mr. Escobar has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of three must-read books: Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War, Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge, and Obama Does Globalistan.

Here is our guest Pepe Escobar unplugged!

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It has been over two weeks since the orchestrated ever-changing Bin Laden Death. The question of what happened remains the same except it doesn’t seem to matter any longer. The US media is done after making their initial splash, and the majority is left with one conclusion: the SOB is dead, and who gives a da… how it happened. Whether Osama held an AK-47 while using some damsel in distress as a shield, whether there was a real fight or not, whether it was really Osama’s body in an organic edible shell we fed to the endangered sharks, whether the full credit goes to the CIA or the White House or the Pentagon …no longer seems to matter. Dizzy-fying confusion induced by dozens and dozens of lies and discrepancies and denials has given way to post-adrenaline-rush exhaustion. The question of what happened has been classified as moot and irrelevant. Right or wrong I’ll leave that question behind, at least for now, and instead, go back to focus on the more important question- the question of ‘why and why now.’

As I stated during the first few days of covering the Bin Laden Death Script, when it comes to DC dirty politics, when it comes to the new world order machine, and when it comes to US presidents, timing is everything and there are no such things as coincidences:

Considering the mainstream media’s sensationalism and propaganda tactics and their cemented role as an extension of the establishment, one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing. Only after that, after putting the pieces together instead of dumbly staring at the images spread before us by the media, we have a chance to get a grasp of the reality-facts; or at least a chance to come up with real questions.

In the past two weeks, after talking with many experts and sources, both nationally and internationally, Pakistan has been surfacing as the common thread holding the most rational explanation of ‘why and why now.’ Interestingly, I came across the following statement by Rep. Ron Paul during his interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe:

“The helicopters that landed in Abbottabad won’t be the last to put American troops on the ground in Pakistan, I see the whole thing as a mess, and I think that we are going to be in Pakistan. I think that’s the next occupation and I fear it. I think it’s ridiculous, and I think our foreign policy is such that we don’t need to be doing this.”

I was planning to write a comprehensive piece based on information and analyses I have gathered from my solid intelligence and Pentagon sources. However, after watching the interview with Ron Paul (And he has his credible sources), I decided to go ahead and write a fairly quick commentary on why the question of ‘why and why now’ keeps pointing to Pakistan as the next probable occupation target for our never-dying neocon objective-makers. Actually the following is more of significant developments and a timeline than a subjective interpretation or commentary. I am going to put them together and have us look at the pattern and where these points point to, and that’s exactly what I meant by “one must step back and take in the entire landscape, the context, connections, and of course the timing.”

Let’s start with Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which was launched in 1997 and became known for leading the public campaign to oust Saddam Hussein both before and after the September 11 attacks. As many of my highly aware readers know, those neocons, their objectives and activities, never go away. They may change names or change a few front faces, but like a leech they always hold on to the system; the system they help put in place in the first place:

The blandly-named Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) – the brainchild of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, neo-conservative foreign policy guru Robert Kagan, and former Bush administration official Dan Senor – has thus far kept a low profile; its only activity to this point has been to sponsor a conference pushing for a U.S. “surge” in Afghanistan.But some see FPI as a likely successor to Kristol’s and Kagan’s previous organisation, the now-defunct Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which they launched in 1997 and which became best known for leading the public campaign to oust former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein both before and after the Sep. 11 attacks.

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So what’s their mission statement, and what have these neocons been cooking up with the new face, their new president, Obama? The following is from an article by Jim Lobe in 2009:

The mission statement opens by listing a familiar litany of threats to the U.S., including “rogue states,” “failed states,” “autocracies” and “terrorism”, but gives pride of place to the “challenges” posed by “rising and resurgent powers,” of which only China and Russia are named.

…FPI intends to make confrontation with China and Russia the centrepiece of its foreign policy stance. If this is the case, it would mark a return to the early days of the Bush administration, before 9/11, when Kristol’s Weekly Standard took the lead in attacking Washington for its alleged “appeasement” of Beijing… FPI has chosen to push for escalating the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan. The organisation’s first event, to be held here Mar. 31, will be a conference entitled “Afghanistan: Planning for Success”.

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For now, this is what I want you to take from the above on Obama’s Neoconistic objectives: fiercely counter China-Russia when it comes to establishing US hegemony, especially in Central and South Asia, with emphasis on Afghanistan. Next, let’s look at the strategic importance of the same region for China [All emphasis mine]:

In order for China to sustain its status as the emerging economic superpower, it must take all the necessary steps required in order to have sufficient energy resources for the near future. According to Pakistani think tank, BrassTacks, Chinese interests in the Indian Ocean became visible in 2002, when they invested heavily and began work on the Gwadar Port, located in Baluchestan, a province of Pakistan.

The Gwadar Port has its benefits for both Pakistan and China. According to Abdus Sattar Ghazali, executive editor for American Muslim Perspective, “The cost benefits to China of using Gwadar as the port for western China’s imports and exports are as evident as the long-term economic benefits to Pakistan of Gwadar becoming a port for Chinese goods.” Not only does Gwadar enable China to fulfill its energy needs, but it will also provide a strategic military footprint in the Arabian Sea, which has the United States worried.

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Okay, now you have Obama’s Neoconistic objectives with China as its main target and competitor, and you have China competing for the same strategic area, Pakistan, to fulfill its energy needs and establish a strategic footprint in the Arabian Sea, and in the middle of it, the point where US-China strategic objectives intersect: Pakistan.

In order to halt this, the globalists need to block China’s access to the Arabian Sea by way of Gwadar. According to BrassTacks, to do this, “there needs to be a ‘new Pakistan’ as indicated in Operation Enduring Turmoil.” Operation Enduring Turmoil is PNAC’s plan to disassemble Pakistan into three parts. According to a “game plan” drawn out by Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, in a 2006 article of the Armed Forces Journal, “Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren [and] would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining ‘natural’ Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.” With this done, what was once the NWFP, a province of Pakistan, is now part of Afghanistan, and what was once Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan, is now its own state, Free Baluchistan. This would force China to impossibly go through Afghanistan and Free Baluchistan in order to reach the Arabian Sea. Such an arrangement would cut China’s route to the Arabian Sea.

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Now, please focus on our three main actors- China, US and in the middle, the strategically important Pakistan. Let’s use our common sense minus logic-clouding details, and consider what happens when the strategically crucial actor in the middle starts straying away from one main actor and moving toward the other.

This is from November, 2009:

China has sent out an interesting signal ahead of US president Barack Obama’s scheduled visit to Beijing by offering a set of advanced fighter jets to Pakistan. It has agreed to sell $1.4 billion worth of jets to Islamabad days ahead of the planned visit of the US president Barack Obama to Shanghai and Beijing on November 15-18.

The move is expected to jolt the US administration as it works on notes and talking points for Obama’s meetings with Chinese leaders. He is expected to discuss Beijing’s relationship with India and its role in internal conflicts in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Beijing is keen to reduce US influence on Pakistan, which will make it easier for it to deal with India, sources said. Washington’s recent decision to extend massive financial assistance to Islamabad is seen in some quarters as a policy setback for China.

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A year later, in October 2010, the following interesting perspective on how things were heating up between the US and Pakistan is published by Margolis:

The neoconservative far right in Washington and its media allies again claim Pakistan is a grave threat to US interests and to Israel. Pakistan must be declawed and dismembered, insist the neocons. Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is reportedly being targeted for seizure or elimination by US Special Forces. There is also talk in Washington of dividing Afghanistan into Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek mini-states, as the US has done in Iraq, and perhaps Pakistan, as well. Little states are easier to rule or intimidate than big ones. Many Pakistanis believe the United States is bent on dismembering their nation. Some polls show Pakistanis now regard the United States as a greater enemy than India.

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It is important to remember how Obama passed AIPAC neocons’ test on Pakistan during his presidential campaign in 2007. Obama said if elected in November 2008 he would be willing to attack inside Pakistan with or without approval from the Pakistani government,”If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.

Now, let’s fast-forward to early April 2011:

Pakistan’s ambassador to China used a recent celebration of his country’s Republic Day to give a rhetoric-filled talk about Beijing-Islamabad relations. If March 23, 1940, was the day the Muslim League decided to establish Pakistan, then the anniversary would be a time to declare that relations with China will define the way forward. ‘We shall take our bilateral relations to new heights,’ Masood Khan proclaimed. [...] Pakistan has been moving into China’s sphere of influence for decades and the countries routinely refer to each other as ‘all-weather’ partners.

This year will mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations. ‘Even when I was there in 1981, ’82, I could see Chinese military factories going up,’ says Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. Now, Pakistan represents a major market for China’s nuclear and military technology. According to SIPRI, a Swedish think tank, over 40 per cent of Chinese arms exports go to Pakistan—the largest share of any country China sells to.”

Obviously Obama’s day in day out bombing of Pakistan, his ‘let’s drone the hell out of them’ policy, had backfired, producing the opposite effect for his Neoconistic global hegemony objectives. Now, things begin to really heat up; this is from April 17, 2011:

President Obama’s rhetoric in Delhi had no substance except to rile the Pakistanis. The Delhi card didn’t quite work. The Chinese Premier visited Islamabad and pledged $20 billion in investment in Pakistan during the next five years. How about them apples? The Pakistani retort is what it has always been we need “Friends Not Masters”.

Britain as a colonial power practiced “Divide and rule” pitting religious and ethnic differences in the Middle East to rule continents. Bhutto famously theorized that the post-colonial powers were working on a “unite and rule” strategy forcing Pakistan to work with India against China.

“The idea of becoming subservient to India is abhorrent and that of cooperation with India, with the object of promoting tension with China, equally repugnant.” Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

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Most Pakistanis don’t want closer relations with Washington–they want to build closer relations with Beijing, and work on creating the Muslim Union (similar to the European Union) in Central Asia. Links with Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey are key to the future of Pakistan.

Islamabad is moving ever closer to China, both militarily and economically– and that’s a fact Jack.

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By mid April things start going downhill; very fast.

The transactional relationship between Washington and Islamabad is coming to an end. While US-Pakistani transactional relations are fraying at both ends, the opposite is true of Sino-Pakistani relations.

Pakistan supported China when she was recognized only by Albania, and built the bridge to the USA. This fact cannot be forgotten by the Chinese who mention it in every summit and mentioned it in this summit also

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There is renewed energy to pace up the development of Gwadar Port to provide China a shorter route and easy excess to world markets to dispatch its goods to Europe and America.

“The Gwadar port project will transform Pakistan’s Navy into a force that can rival regional navies. The government of Pakistan has designated the port area as a “sensitive defense zone.” The Gwadar port will rank among the world’s largest deep-sea ports. The port provides China a strategic foothold in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

Located at the entrance of the Persian Gulf and about 460 kms from Karachi, Gwadar has had immense Geostrategic significance on many accounts. The continued unstable regional environment in the Persian Gulf in particular as a result of the Iran/Iraq war, the Gulf war and the emergence of the new Central Asian States has added to this importance. Considering the Geo-economic imperative of the regional changes, the ADB’s Ports Master Plan studies considered an alternate to the Persian Gulf Ports to capture the transit trade of the Central Asian Republic (CAR) as well as the trans-shipment trade of the region.

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And finally, on April 27, according to my sources, the following catalyst prompts the Obama team to execute the Kill Osama Bin Laden Script. This is the pivotal point in the Bin Laden Death Operation Script as a catalyst for the soon to come Pakistan Occupation:

Pakistan is lobbying Afghan President Hamid Karzai against building a long-term strategic partnership with the United States, and urging him instead to look to Pakistan and its ally, China, for help in striking a peace deal with the Taliban and rebuilding the economy, according to Afghan officials.

…

Washington”s relations with Pakistan have reached their lowest point in years following a series of missteps on both sides, and Pakistani officials say that they no longer have an incentive to follow the American lead in their own backyard, the report added.

“Pakistan is sole guarantor of its own interest,” said a senior Pakistani official, adding: “We”re not looking for anyone else to protect us, especially the US. If they”re leaving, they”re leaving and they should go.”

…

The next day, on April 28, , a senior Pakistani government official said that the Export-Import Bank of China will loan Pakistan $1.7 billion to develop a city-wide train system in the eastern city of Lahore.

Since the holes-filled and never-explained ‘kill or capture’ operation, the presidential PR machine, the US media and their extension guised under ‘alternative’ have been beating the war drums. After all, as with any wars of ours, public opinion must be shaped, and public backing must be garnered. This is one of the latest reflecting just that: 

After the killing of Usama bin Laden in Pakistan, few American voters believe that country is an ally of the United States in the war against terrorism. Moreover, most doubt Pakistan is worthy of continued U.S. foreign aid.

That’s according to a Fox News poll released Wednesday.

Nearly three out of four voters — 73 percent — say the United States should stop sending foreign aid until Pakistan demonstrates a deeper commitment to the war against terrorism. Some 19 percent would continue to provide funding.

…

With the discovery that bin Laden apparently had been living in Pakistan for years, the consensus is Pakistan is not a friend (74 percent). A small 16 percent minority of voters views Pakistan as a strong U.S. ally in the war against terrorism.

…

You must be thinking: Pakistan must have tons in their own dossier to expose US government duplicities, lies, and nefarious activities. So why have they been relatively silent in all this? Why don’t they open the flood gate on ‘facts’ surrounding Bin Laden, his supposed role in 9/11, his supposed journey since 9/11, and his supposed death recently? And I have an answer for that: neither party has played all their cards yet. Just take a look at how Gates has been playing both sides carefully while measuring the outcome of various factors in play:

Gates reiterated the accusation that elements within the Pakistani government knew about the location of Osama bin Laden and were keeping that information from the United States. Bin Laden was killed in a US raid earlier this month.

At the same time, Gates echoed comments by other officials, conceding that the US has absolutely no evidence to that effect and that it is “pure supposition on our part.” The repeated accusations, despite being based on “pure supposition” have done major damage to US-Pakistan ties, and have spawned calls from Congress to suspend all aid to Pakistan to punish them.

Gates, who attended the conference with Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Michael Mullen, also said that the US raid that killed bin Laden had “humiliated” the Pakistani government, and that they had “paid a price” for bin Laden’s presence. Mullen added that the US ability to attack Pakistan with impunity was “a humbling experience” for the Pakistani military.

…

The White House neocons are in the midst of age-old diplomatic games, bluffing, and hedging their bets. They have the ‘foreign & military aid’ card. They have the ‘ISI dirt files’ card. They have the ‘ultimate China leaning’ card. And of course, they have the ‘mighty power of preemptive occupation war’ card which is always blessed and supported by NATO and overlooked by their butlers in the UN.

China has its own set of cards; whether it is their biggest market for dumping goods, or carrying the US debt, or who knows what else. For now they are using the ‘talk’ card with no real strings attached:

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao assured his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani of China’s “all-weather friendship” on Wednesday, during a visit that sharply contrasted with anger between Washington and Islamabad.

“I wish to stress here that no matter what changes might take place in the international landscape, China and Pakistan will remain forever good neighbours, good friends, good partners and good brothers,” Wen told Gilani at the start of a meeting in central Beijing’s Great Hall of the People.

Suffice it to say that not all cards have been placed on the table. As the famous Kenny Rogers’ Gambler lyrics go:

You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

As for us the people, we’ll be sitting and waiting for the three parties to conclude this stage of their global hegemony game. We’ll be reading and watching and listening to their PR machine in the media give us one concocted fantasy after another. As in all other wars of ours we will have zero to say, zilch to gain, and plenty to lose. They have the cards, and we are the piled up tokens on the table.

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I am going to list a few noteworthy articles and commentaries from this past week, and I am going to make it very brief. I am sure you have heard that before. Okay, it will be relatively brief; emphasis on ‘relatively.’ Those of you who have gone through selling your house, while living in it, especially with a kid or two or three …, well, you know how annoying it can be. You get a short notice, you run around trying to organize, clean, put away toys (including those hidden under the sofa, tucked behind the sink …), and then, you have to ‘evacuate’ your house for the potential buyer…Now you have the reason behind the ‘relatively brief’ round up.

I hope you enjoyed our interview with Tom Woods. We also recorded a great interview with Grant Smith on Israel and the Israel Lobby which will be posted next Friday. I don’t know why but I’ve been getting tons of good comments/responses at Facebook, and very little feedback here at BFP. Any ideas as to why? Please let us know.

Here are my noteworthy items from this week:

The Good Taliban, The Bad Taliban, The Ugly Taliban- different or one & the same?

In May 2009 I wrote an article on the Obama presidency and the current American political party system as ‘Two Sides of the Same Coin … Heads-Heads.’ Here is what I wrote on our confused Afghan strategy:

It is another war with no time table. It is the continuation of the same abstract ‘War on Terror’ without any definition of what would constitute an ‘accomplished mission.’ One minute there is pondering on possible ‘reconciliation’ with the Taliban, and the next minute seeking to topple it. In fact, to confuse the matter even further, we now hear this distinction between ‘Good Taliban, Bad Taliban, and the Plain Ugly Taliban.’ As stated by Karzai on Meet the Press on May 10, 2009, not all Taliban are equal!!

And the following related news came out this past week:

Afghan Taliban to Open Office in Turkey 
Voice of America

The Turkish foreign minister has confirmed that preparations are underway for opening an office in Turkey for the Afghan Taliban.  During a recent visit to Turkey, the president of Pakistan, together with his Turkish counterpart, made a commitment to support political initiatives to end the war in Afghanistan. Ankara has been calling for talks with the Taliban, and having strong ties with both Afghanistan and Pakistan is seen as a key element in facilitating talks.

Turkey says it is willing to host a political office for Taliban militants from Afghanistan in order to promote talks to end the war there. An unnamed Afghan official is quoted as saying that planning for the office is already in progress.

…

But wait, that’s not the most noteworthy aspect of this news. You know how they say the devil is in the details? Well, here is the ‘devil’ in this development [emphasis all mine]:

Last week, a senior Afghan official, Mohammad Massoom Stanekzai, secretary of the Afghan High Peace Council and an adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, announced a US$50 million donation from the United States government to the council – the body responsible for seeking peace talks with the Taliban – in support of reconciliation efforts.

This is the beginning of official; up-front peace negotiations with the Taliban, which to date have taken place in backrooms. However, in stark contrast to US hopes, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that al-Qaeda was gradually returning to the eastern Afghan provinces of Nuristan and Kunar, setting up bases for the first time in years in the wake of the withdrawal of US troops from the area to more populated centers.

Okay, let’s ask it out loud: who exactly have we been bombing in Afghanistan? Pakistan? Al-Qaeda? Taliban? Only the Bad Taliban?  All of the above? None of the above? A mixture of good, bad, and [plain ugly Taliban? And, which Taliban are we funding and opening international offices for? I have a pretty good theory (maybe a hypothesis) on this, but that will have to wait for another time and another article…

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The Devolution of the People & the Government of the Czars

Language and words people use tell a lot about their culture, values, even geographic characteristics and forms of government under which they live. But then again the situation, circumstances, change or evolve, and with them the language and the use of some words. Once upon a time, here in our country, government workers were referred to as public servants, and it wasn’t that unusual to hear expressions like ‘government of the people, by the people…’ Back then, people hated words associated with kings, queens, emperors … But then, things devolved. Really, devolved big time. We went from a small government to a gigantic one; from public servants to czars and czarinas. And, looking at the frequent and accepted usage of words reflecting this devolution, our society seems to have accepted the position of servants ruled by their masters…Here is what I had to say in an article:

I can go on listing cases of Mr. Obama’s change on change. Whether it is his reversal on protection for whistleblowers, despite his campaign promise to the contrary, or his expansion of the Un-American title of ‘Czardom,’ where we now have more czars than ever: Border Czar, Energy Czar, Cyber Security Czar…Car Czar…maybe even a Bicycle Czar!

…

President Obama Won’t Abide by Provision in Budget Bill
Jake Tapper, ABC News

In a statement issued Friday night, President Obama took issue with some provisions in the budget bill – and in one case simply says he will not abide by it.

…

One rider – Section 2262 -- de-funds certain White House adviser positions – or “czars.” The president in his signing statement declares that he will not abide by it.

“The President has well-established authority to supervise and oversee the executive branch, and to obtain advice in furtherance of this supervisory authority,” he wrote. “The President also has the prerogative to obtain advice that will assist him in carrying out his constitutional responsibilities, and do so not only from executive branch officials and employees outside the White House, but also from advisers within it. Legislative efforts that significantly impede the President's ability to exercise his supervisory and coordinating authorities or to obtain the views of the appropriate senior advisers violate the separation of powers by undermining the President's ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

…

During his presidential campaign, then-Senator Obama was quite critical of the Bush administration’s uses of signing statements telling the Boston Globe in 2007 that the “problem” with the Bush administration “is that it has attached signing statements to legislation in an effort to change the meaning of the legislation, to avoid enforcing certain provisions of the legislation that the President does not like, and to raise implausible or dubious constitutional objections to the legislation.” Then-Sen. Obama said he would “not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law.” 

…

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And here are a few more links and excerpts for you:

Halfhearted Gestures & Another Case of a For-Show-Only Congressional Performance

Rep. Chaffetz seeks to limit pat-downs of children after new TSA controversy
Pete Kasperowicz, the Hill

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) on Wednesday introduced legislation that would prohibit Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials from conducting pat-downs on minors without consent from a parent. 

Chaffetz's bill, H.R. 1510, was spurred by video footage posted online over the weekend of a 6-year-old girl being patted down at an airport gate by a TSA official as her mother objected. Chaffetz wrote to TSA chief John Pistole on Wednesday to complain about what he called an "invasive pat-down at the hands of TSA personnel."

…

Chaffetz, who chairs the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, warned Pistole that he would be introducing legislation, and said the agency "must get serious" about how it tries to balance national security and personal privacy."At the very least, it cannot continue to operate under the belief that little girls and handicapped children pose such a serious threat that [TSA officials] must abandon all manner of decency when interacting with them,” he wrote.

…

Okay, do you want to know what triggered this latest for-show-only performance; soon to be forgotten ultimatum? Here it is, watch it.

Obama’s Drone Obsession: They say a man obsessed with really big cars has a small…But what do they say about a man obsessed with drones?

US Ignores Pakistan Warning, Continues Drone Strikes
Jason Ditz, AntiWar.Com

Though Pakistani officials were quite clear on Monday in their demand that the US put its entire drone strike program “on hold” for the foreseeable future, drones were active again today in South Waziristan, attacking a village and killing at least six people.

…

The latest strike spawned another quick rebuke from officials, who insisted the attacks are “counterproductive” and are indeed being used as a recruitment tool by militant factions. The US has launched scores of such strikes since President Obama took office, killing massive numbers of people, many of them civilians.

…

The continued strikes had previously been done in the context of some backdoor agreements with officials to keep them going, but in the absence of those it seems the Obama Administration is betting Pakistan just doesn’t care enough about the constant bombardment of their tribal areas to actually do anything about it.

…

What Could Halt US Arms Sales to Any Middle Eastern Country? Nothing, really.

U.S. reviewing Mideast arms sales
Andrea Shalal-Esa, Reuters

The U.S. government is reviewing arms sales to Middle Eastern countries on a “case-by-case basis” given turmoil in the region, and has already halted some sales, a Pentagon official said on Monday.

Richard Genaille, deputy director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, said that two of the biggest deals on the table have been cleared to proceed: a $29.4 billion sale of 84 Boeing Co F-15 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and a $7 billion sale to the United Arab Emirates of an advanced missile defense system built by Lockheed Martin Corp.

A team of officials from his agency, the State Department, military commanders and the White House National Security Council were carefully reviewing planned arms sales to the region, Genaille told Reuters in an interview after a speech at the annual Navy League conference.

Unrest and violence spreading across the Middle East have sparked questions about U.S. arms sales to the region, deals that many U.S. defense companies had hoped would offset an expected decline in U.S. defense spending in coming years.Genaille said the current reviews affected specific parts of arms sales that had already been approved by Congress and were being readied for delivery to Middle Eastern countries.

…

Earlier, Genaille told the conference that he expected continued strong foreign demand for U.S. weapons, predicting that the overall level of foreign military sales could exceed the currently forecast level of $46 billion in fiscal 2011, which ends on September 30, buoyed by the Saudi arms sales.The agency that oversees foreign arms sales reported $31.6 billion in new sales in fiscal 2010, according to its website.

The Saudi arms sales are likely to buoy sales in 2011, although the overall level will likely drop off and stabilize between $30 billion and $40 billion for several years.In October, the Obama administration notified Congress of a proposed arms sale to Saudi Arabia worth up to $60 billion over 15 to 20 years. It would be the largest arms deal on record if all purchases are made, including 84 Boeing F-15 fighter jets and upgrades to 70 more F-15s that the Saudis already have.

…

Hope you all had a nice weekend so far; enjoy the rest of it 

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has chosen a new special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan: a long-time controversial neocon, a man who has been famous for parading as a foreign agent in the lobby circuit, the scandalous former diplomat Marc Grossman. The not-so-gradual resurrection of the old neocon cabal under the Obama administration, led by Hillary Clinton, should not come as a surprise. According to Washington insiders, Richardl Perle and Douglas Feith have been consulted more than a few times in their ‘unofficial’ capacity, but are not far down in the queue to receive ‘official’ acknowledgement. This shouldn’t come as a surprise; at least to those who’ve been following the steady momentum building at the Obama White House towards a soon-to-come Neocon Easter.

Hillary Clinton appointed Dennis Ross as Special Advisor for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia; a man well-known as a hard-core neocon,  Paul Wolfowitz’ protégé, cofounder of the AIPAC sponsored Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and one of the loudest advocates for the Israel lobby. A man who is known to consider himself more Israeli than American; a Jewish American who is known to have spent ‘a lot of time’ in Israel to find his real identity-nationality.

We had Frederick Kagan, a neocon of choice for Mr. Obama, who was hired to manage General Petraeus on Afghanistan. A man whose father was born into a Jewish family in Lithuania; a man cherished by his bosses at the American Enterprise Institute; a man who authored the book, While America Sleeps, arguing in favor of a large increase in military spending and warned of future threats, including the imaginary WMD program in Iraq. We are talking about the man who was one of the main signatories of Project for the New American Century manifesto – the Neocon Bible. The man who was one of the Bush-Cheney administration’s favorite masterminds when it came to perpetual wars.

Let’s jump to our newest and by far the boldest Neocon addition to the Obama-Clinton Whitehouse. Marc Grossman is chosen by the administration to fill the seat vacated by Richard Holbrooke; another Jewish American Neocon who had been a man of choice for every administration in the last four decades. I suggest you read the article titled ‘Obama’s Neocon’ if you want to know a bit more about the old neocon shoes Mr. Grossman will be filling. As for our media’s usual sanitized version for Mr. Grossman’s background, the following by the neocon circle PR machine, the Washington Post, sums it up well:

In a nearly three-decade career at the State Department, Grossman served as assistant secretary of state for Europe and ambassador to Turkey. His last assignment, before retiring from the foreign service in 2005, was undersecretary for political affairs during the first administration of George W. Bush.

He now is vice chairman of the Cohen Group, which advises international business clients on overseas enterprises. Although the consulting group, headed by former defense secretary William Cohen, has several clients with contracts in South Asia, administration officials said they did not foresee any problem in clearing Grossman for the post.

…

From the mainstream media reporting similar to the above, ordinary Americans should at least gather this much:

Mr. Grossman had to be a Bush-Cheney administration favorite to be appointed as the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the State Department’s third-ranking official, in 2001. In 2004, Grossman attained the Foreign Service’s highest rank when the President appointed him to the rank of Career Ambassador.

Grossman works for the sin city’s (Washington DC) lobby industry. Not only that, he actually represents foreign governments, foreign businesses and interests. The Cohen Group represents some of the country’s largest weapons manufacturers, companies that stand to benefit from weapons sales: Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Sikorsky…among others. Their list of controversial and or criminal entities includes companies such as DynCorp International. Through their partnership with DLA Piper, the Cohen group also serves foreign clients such as the Turkish government and business interest groups, Australia’s scandalous AWB, India and UAE. 

And here is what many Americans won’t be getting from the US media:

-  The investigative reports on Marc Grossman and his role in planting moles in US nuclear facilities:

An unnamed high-ranking State Department official helps a nuclear smuggling ring connected to Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan and Pakistan’s ISI to plant “moles” in US military and academic institutions that handle nuclear technology, according to FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. The State Department official apparently arranges security clearance for some of the moles, enabling them to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities, including the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent. The high-ranking State Department official who is not named by Britain’s Sunday Times is said to be Marc Grossman…

 
- John M. Cole, a former FBI Counterintelligence and Counterespionage Manager, has publicly confirmed FBI’s decade long investigation the former State Department Official, Marc Grossman:

John M. Cole, a former FBI Counterintelligence and Counterespionage Manager, has publicly confirmed the FBI’s decade long investigation of the former State Department Official Marc Grossman. Cole worked for 18 years in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. According to Cole, as in over one hundred cases involving Israeli espionage activities directed against the US government, the Grossman case was covered up and buried despite mountains of evidence that was collected.

Here is the public response from John Cole after the publication of The American Conservative magazine’s cover story:

“I read the recent cover story by The American Conservative magazine. I applaud their courage in publishing this significant interview. I am fully aware of the FBI’s decade-long investigation of the High-level State Department Official named in this article, Marc Grossman, which ultimately was buried and covered up. It is long past time to investigate this case and bring about accountability…”

-Marc Grossman was the originator of the Plame Leak:

Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, prepares a memo about former ambassador Joseph Wilson’s trip to Niger to ascertain the truth or falsity of claims that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from that nation (see February 21, 2002-March 4, 2002). The memo refers explicitly to Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, as a CIA official and identifies her as Wilson’s wife, using the name “Valerie Wilson.” The second paragraph of the memo is marked with an “S,” denoting that Wilson is a covert operative for the agency.

-In late December 2005, Grossman joined Ihlas Holding, a large and alleged shady Turkish company which is also active in several Central Asian countries. Grossman is reported to receive $100,000 per month for his advisory position with Ihlas.

-In May 2010, DLA Piper, one of the world’s largest international lobby-law firms, hired Marc Grossman as their front man for their Turkish operations. The man in charge of one of DLA Piper major accounts-Turkey is none other than our good ole Dennis Hastert. That makes two former FBI criminal targets for one firm;-)

Now, with all these murky qualifications, you’d think the mainstream media would have a field day with Marc Grossman’s appointment by the Hillary-Obama administration; right? Wrong. So far, not a peep from the US media and that includes both the ‘R’ and the ‘D’ fronts. Same goes for the quasi alternatives. Not even a word about the ‘revolving door’ aspect of this scandalous appointment: A Foreign Agent, A Lobbyist, A man on the payroll of a shady foreign company for over $1 million a year…But then again, less than a month ago we witnessed another envoy, another appointment, with a major ‘CONFLICT OF INTEREST’ flag rising to its top that went completely censored in the US media. The scandal was widely reported by foreign media, such as the Independent, who actually broke the story, and even after that, we barely heard a peep:

Frank Wisner, President Barack Obama’s envoy to Cairo who infuriated the White House this weekend by urging Hosni Mubarak to remain President of Egypt, works for a New York and Washington law firm which works for the dictator’s own Egyptian government.

The US State Department and Mr Wisner himself have now both claimed that his remarks were made in a “personal capacity”. But there is nothing “personal” about Mr Wisner’s connections with the litigation firm Patton Boggs, which openly boasts that it advises “the Egyptian military, the Egyptian Economic Development Agency, and has handled arbitrations and litigation on the [Mubarak] government’s behalf in Europe and the US”. Oddly, not a single journalist raised this extraordinary connection with US government officials – nor the blatant conflict of interest it appears to represent.

…

Mr Wisner is a retired State Department 36-year career diplomat – he served as US ambassador to Egypt, Zambia, the Philippines and India under eight American presidents. In other words, he was not a political appointee. But it is inconceivable Hillary Clinton did not know of his employment by a company that works for the very dictator which Mr Wisner now defends in the face of a massive democratic opposition in Egypt. So why on earth was he sent to talk to Mubarak, who is in effect a client of Mr Wisner’s current employers?

…

Patton Boggs states that its attorneys “represent some of the leading Egyptian commercial families and their companies” and “have been involved in oil and gas and telecommunications infrastructure projects on their behalf”. One of its partners served as chairman of the US-Egyptian Chamber of Commerce promoting foreign investment in the Egyptian economy. The company has also managed contractor disputes in military-sales agreements arising under the US Foreign Military Sales Act. Washington gives around $1.3bn (£800m) a year to the Egyptian military.

Mr Wisner joined Patton Boggs almost two years ago – more than enough time for both the White House and the State Department to learn of his company’s intimate connections with the Mubarak regime. The New York Times ran a glowing profile of Mr Wisner in its pages two weeks ago – but mysteriously did not mention his ties to Egypt.

…

I find this sentence in the above quotes really funny: “Oddly, not a single journalist raised this extraordinary connection with US government officials” As far as our media goes, what’s odd about that?! They’ve been really consistent at remaining very ‘odd’ when it comes to reporting on ‘crucial, troublesome & very relevant’ facts like this one. And, Marc Grossman’s recent unofficial appointment to be official this Friday is another perfect example:

A long-time neocon, a Jewish-American with questionably strong ties to Israel, a long-term target of FBI counterespionage and counterintelligence investigations, a lobbyist, a foreign agent, an employee of a shady foreign business, a man associated with major treason scandals, Marc Grossman, is making his way back to the ‘new’ administration, following his several other co-species who’ve been sitting inside, leading the way for the rest of the co-species who’ve been eagerly waiting to be granted official entry cards. Thanks to the media, while the public is sitting in the dark, the Obama-Hillary White House is changing color to pastels,  getting ready for their Neocon Easter and the resurrection of the previously, and dubiously, advertised as long-gone and dead breed – Neo-cons.

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In February 2004 Behrooz Sarshar provided the 9/11 Commission’s investigators with specific documents and names of the related witnesses, including the full name and contact information of the key “FBI Asset/Informant” in an FBI case titled ‘Kamikaze Pilots.’ However, the commission chose not to contact or interview any of these witnesses, including FBI Director Robert Mueller. The Commission’s final report did not mention a single word of this documented testimony, and their recently released memorandum omitted the entire interview with no explanation provided.

The following information was provided by Mr. Sarshar to several Congressional offices and investigators, including staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Committee’s leading Democrat at the time, Senator Patrick Leahy, and the Justice Department’s Inspector General Office.  I was present during at least four meetings where the briefings were recorded and documented. While working at the Bureau I was briefed on this case by not only Mr. Sarshar but another firsthand witness, and I saw the actual 302 forms filed with the unit’s squad supervisor (FBI language specialists get to keep a copy of their reports/forms). Further, I personally briefed the 9/11 commission investigators on the details of this particular case, which is confirmed by the commission’s memorandum.

I have only deleted sensitive personal information related to the FBI informant-Asset, and as you’ll see every single deleted item (by me-indicated as S.E.) has been indicated in bold-italics. Other than that, the information below is exactly what was recounted by Mr. Sarshar on four occasions:

FBI File Name: “Kamikaze Pilots”

In the early 90s the Bureau hired an Iranian man as an informant, placed him on its payroll at approximately fifteen hundred dollars per month, and used him and his information in several criminal, counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations and investigations. Over time this informant, a man in his (Informant’s Age Information Deleted by S.E.), proved to be extremely reliable, and his information was found to be trustworthy.

This man had been the head of SAVAK, Iran’s main Intelligence agency, counterintelligence unit during the Shah’s regime. His area of operations involved the East and Southeastern region of Iran, and the countries under him were Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. He also managed the unit’s intelligence gathering operations in Sistan and Baluchistan, two semi-independent regions on the border with Afghanistan. Unlike U.S. agencies, the intelligence agency in Iran conducted most, if not all, of its surveillance and information gathering operations via human intelligence and sources. The man, the informant, was very good at what he did; he had established a large number of sources and informants scattered in the strategically most important areas within these countries.

Immediately after the Islamic Revolution, he planned his escape out of the country. All former SAVAK and military intelligence had been placed on the black list of the new regime, and death warrants had been issued for them. He successfully escaped Iran, and then spent several years in (Names of the informant’s previous residences/countries deleted by S.E.) where he tried to obtain a U.S. visa and come to the states, where many of his relatives and friends had already settled. In the late (date of Informant’s US entry deleted by S.E.) he succeeded and moved to the United States.

His reputation and his fame of having a wealth of resources for information all over the world had somehow reached the FBI by the early 1990s – around 1991-1992. Via a middleman, the Bureau was able to contact the man and persuade him to become an informant. He was placed on the payroll and began providing the Bureau with extremely useful and reliable information. The Bureau was so pleased with his performance that it began using him both as an informant and as an asset. On a regular basis, almost monthly, agents from the FBI HQ and WFO would meet with him at … and …and … (Meeting locations Deleted by S.E.) to obtain information and intelligence on various on-going operations and investigations.

Since the informant didn’t speak English very well, was by no means considered fluent, often if not always, the agents took an interpreter, a translator, with them to these regular monthly meetings. This is where Amin and I came into the picture. For these sessions the agents would have either Amin or me accompany them. By sheer coincidence, I happened to recognize the man during the first meeting from a gathering I frequented. I knew where he lived, and I had his phone number.

Around the end of April, 2001, I was asked to accompany two special agents from the FBI-WFO, Tony and John, to a meeting arranged with this informant; we hooked up with him somewhere near the (Meeting Location Deleted by S.E.). The agents and I were working on a particular criminal investigation that was going to court in (Possible sensitive date deleted by S.E.), and the informant’s information played an extremely important role in building the case.

We met the informant in this park-like area and spent nearly an hour discussing the case, asking detailed questions, and of course, with me translating the communication which went back and forth. Once we were finished with the session and ready to head back to the WFO, the informant urged us to stay for a few minutes and listen to something very important and alarming he had recently received from his sources. We looked at one another and sat down on the bench; we were all ears.

The informant said:

‘Listen, I was recently contacted by two extremely reliable and long-term sources-neither one Iranian; one in Afghanistan; the other in Pakistan’s border region with Afghanistan. In the past, these guys had provided me with inside information and intelligence that was extremely hard to come by, considering the tightly-based networks and groups they were able to enter and penetrate. They notified me that an active mujahideen group led by Bin Laden had issued an order to attack certain targets in the United States, and were planning the attack as we spoke.’

Now the informant had our full attention; the agents seemed very alarmed, since their main unit of operation was under the WFO Counterterrorism division. They asked the guy to stop, asked him to repeat that again, and ordered me to take verbatim notes as I translated. They too took notes.

The informant continued:

‘According to my guys, Bin Laden’s group is planning a massive terrorist attack in the United States. The order has been issued. They are targeting major cities, big metropolitan cities; they think four or five cities; New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and San Francisco; possibly Los Angeles or Las Vegas. They will use airplanes to carry out the attacks. They said that some of the individuals involved in carrying this out are already in the United States. They are here in the U.S.; living among us, and I believe some in US government already know about all of this (I assumed he meant the CIA or the White House).’

Tony, one of the agents asked ‘did they say when? Did they give any specific dates? Did they say how they were going to use airplanes; bombs or high jacking?’

The informant paused for a second:

‘No specific dates; not any that they were aware of. However, they said the general timeframe was characterized as ‘very soon.’ They think within the next two or three months.’ He then added: ‘As far as how they are going to use the planes to attack; your guess is as good as mine. My bet, it will be bombs; planting bombs inside these planes, maybe the cargo, then have them blown up over the populated cities.’

The agents nodded and took extensive notes. I took my notes in Farsi; I usually did that, and later after returning to the office, sat down and translated them verbatim. We stood up and were ready to leave, when the informant urged us to report this immediately and act on it:

‘If I were you guys, I’d take this extremely seriously. If I had the same position I had in SAVAK, I’d put all my men on this around the clock. I can vouch for my sources; their reliability. Make sure you put this in the hands of the top guys in Counterterrorism.’

The agents nodded and thanked him for the information. We drove back in silence. After we parked the car, while walking to the elevators, the agents were discussing the best person, the top person; they should submit this warning to. They decided on Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Thomas Frields, who was in charge of the WFO Counterterrorism division and who used to lead the division that dealt with Iran’s Hostage Crisis in 1980s. I reminded them that although the informant was Iranian, his sources were not; and that they were in Pakistan and Afghanistan; not in Iran; Bin Laden was not Iranian but a Saudi. They acknowledged that, but made the point that Frields was in charge of the Counterterrorism unit in the WFO.

Once we got to the office, I went straight to my cubicle and began translating the entire conversation verbatim and typing it into a formal report. The agents went to their section and filled out the necessary 302 forms. These forms, the 302s, are forms used by agents to report information gathered from the Bureau’s assets and or informants. The agents, Tony and John, filled out two sets of 302 forms; one for the ongoing criminal case and the informants’ information related to that; the other, on the warning, with the initial code name ‘Kamikaze Pilots,’ as information related to Counterterrorism operations.

The agents called me up on my extension and asked me to escort them inside the language unit. I walked them over to my desk, where we sat, compared notes, and finalized and coordinated our report. They had me make several copies of the translation report for them to be submitted with their report. I took it upon myself to make a set of copies of their 302 forms for my own file; my own record. At the end of the day, around five o’clock, they submitted the 302 forms and my translation report. They submitted the warning report to SAC Frields; with a note, a yellow stick-up, on the top saying ‘VERY URGENT: Kamikaze Pilots’

Neither of us heard back from Frields or the Counterterrorism division. No one asked for any follow-ups or additional information. Two months went by. Around the end of June 2001, I accompanied the two agents to another meeting with the Iranian Informant. This time we met in (Location Details Deleted by S.E.).

After going over the target criminal investigation; now only …(Specific Date Deleted by S.E.), as we were ready to turn around and leave, he stopped us:

‘What did you do with the information I gave you two months ago? Did you report it to your bosses?’

The agents nodded. One of them said: ‘Yes; we sent it up. We submitted it to the top guy.’

The informant was animated now,

‘Well; are they going to do something about it? Because, three days ago I heard back from one of those two sources; in Pakistan. He swore the attack was on its way; any time now; a month or two max.’

Tony said: ‘I know; I hear what you are saying, man; but doing something about this won’t be up to us. Plus, we don’t have enough information to take any action here. We don’t know when, how, or exactly where. The only thing we have is: Mujahideen, Kamikaze Pilots, Bin Laden, five cities, and airplanes. That ain’t enough.’

The informant reasoned:

‘I’ve been thinking about this; trying to make more sense out of it myself. The source mumbled something about tall buildings. Maybe they will blow up the plane over some tall buildings; I don’t know. Maybe the FBI can get more specifics from the Pakistanis; ISI. Have they tried? After all they are your guys, and they already know all about this.’

The agents were getting exasperated and impatient, ‘We’ve got to go; we have a lot of work back there. We have done all we could. We reported it to the guy in charge; now, it is up to them.’

As we turned around and walked away, the informant yelled in Farsi:

‘Why don’t you discuss it with the CIA? They know. Tell the White House. Don’t let ‘them’ sit on this until it is too late…’

I asked Tony, ‘Maybe sharing this with other agencies is not a bad idea. What do you think?’

He rolled his eyes ‘not up to us Behrooz. As far as the White House goes, the HQ guys will include it in their briefings; I’m sure they’ve already done so. Frields is obligated to submit what he got, everything he gets under Counterterrorism, to the HQ guys in charge of Whitehouse National Security Briefings. He always does. So, the White House and other agencies have already heard about this. Let’s drop this man; will ya?’

That was the last time we ever discussed this case before the 9/11 attacks took place. The only other person I told this to and showed the 302 forms and the translation report, before September 11, was Amin here. Then, on that Tuesday morning on September 11 everything came back to me and hit me on the head like several tons of bricks.

That morning, we heard the news, and all of us ran out to the next unit to watch the CNN footage on the TV screens installed out there. As soon as I saw the planes hitting those buildings I said to myself: ‘Oh my God, oh dear God; we were warned about this; we were told about this; very specifically’ I almost fainted; I kept hearing the informant’s words; I kept hearing his last warnings begging us to do something fast. And we had done NOTHING. Now it was already way too late. I felt nauseous; I felt sick.

A few minutes later I saw one of the two agents; I started making my way into the crowd gathered in front of the TV screens, hundreds of people, and walked toward the agent. He spotted me before I got to him; we locked eyes; knowing eyes. He felt what I was feeling; he knew what I knew; he thought what I was thinking; we were responsible for this. Someone in the FBI would be hung for this.

When I got close to him I asked ‘what are we going to do? What should we do next?’ He shook his head and whispered: ‘I don’t know. I cannot even think straight right now. I don’t know Behrooz. We fucked this up; the Bureau fucked our country. Why?! Oh God; we let this happen.’ With that said he ran out of the room. I went back to check my drawer and make sure that I still had everything: the 302 forms, from both meetings, my translation reports; both of them. They were all there.

A few days later, when I got together with both agents and Amin to go over an assignment, I brought up the topic. They avoided eye contact with me. I asked the agents what they were going to do; if they’d already done something. At first they were evasive. Then, after I insisted, one of them, Tony, said: ‘Listen; Frields called us into his office and gave us an order; an absolute order.’ I asked them what the order was. He said ‘we never got any warnings. Those conversations never existed; it never happened; period. He said this is very sensitive…and that no one should ever mention a word about this case; period.’

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I just finished reading an interesting article at Asia Times on the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is characterized by some as Central Asia’s most aggressive militant group. The main focus of the article is placed on the status, recent expansion and transformation of IMU: The IMU is no longer a small band of militants focused on taking down the Uzbek regime and replacing it with an Islamic state. Today, it has a much wider reach and more ambitious goals, and has underlined its revival with attacks that suggest a presence across a wide swathe of South and Central Asia.

Considering my own focus, which I am sure many of you are pretty familiar with by now, the following bits and pieces, none of which happen to receive any elaboration or even a slight explanation by the author, deserve the real attention:

The IMU or its affiliates have been named in connection with a number of recent attacks at home and abroad. One, the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), has been blamed for attacks in Uzbekistan in May 2009 and made headlines around the world this fall after Western intelligence determined they were planning Mumbai-style attacks on European soil… The IJU, considered a more radical affiliate of the IMU, attracts recruits from Germany’s burgeoning Turkish Diaspora and Turkic nations, leading observers to suggest that it is driven by pan-Turkic aims.

…

And this:

“The most essential things that need to be addressed are the control of the movement of militants and the control of their finances,” Babar says. “What finances them? We believe that the drug trade is financing them…

As you can see in the article the Central Asian context-states-players are: Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan-Tajikistan along Afghanistan’s northern borders, and with that we are back to my previous coverage of the trio in terms of unwritten and unspoken US foreign policies:

Things certainly haven’t been looking up for our MIC, Oil, and related mega companies in that part of the world. And this kind of situation puts our ‘real’ foreign policy makers in their ‘enemies-of-our-enemies’ are needed mode. And when that happens the rest will follow: contracts for our good ole Mujahideen friends, convenient terrorism related incidents and pipeline sabotages right and left, a more aggressive control of the opium trade to finance unwritten-unspoken foreign policy practices …

…

I suggest you read the recent article by Asia Times, and please keep in mind the cases of Mysterious Helicopter Activities in Northern Afghanistan and BF Post’s coverage  here and here. Because when it comes to answering the ‘real’ questions, the questions of funding and sponsorship, we need context, historical records, and a bit of critical thinking, and that my friends, has been largely missing in this article and similar media coverage. And finally, keep an eye on the upcoming Wikileaks’ cables for 1996-2001 Central Asia & Caucasus related goodies…that is, if they are included, or, if they are not among ‘insurance files,’ or, if the internet is not filtered & controlled by then, or…

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I go on line and check out the major newspaper headlines, and to my delight there is a TSA related headline or two in every one. In the last few days two in every three e-mails I’ve received (and I receive hundreds a day) carry TSA related heads up or action items in their subject lines. The blogosphere has been simmering with the same outrageous issue. Yet the entire thing gives me pause. A long one. The pattern, the order, the intensity, the lingo, the reaction…all remind me of something or some things. It is a bit, maybe more than a bit, like a sense of déjà vu. The feeling that we’ve been here; more than once, actually many times. Make that too many times. I keep thinking of a yoyo. In fact, I can’t get the image of a yoyo out of my head. I am asking myself, and you, the following question: Are we Americans exhibiting yoyo-like and short-lived reactions? In short-lived jerky motions?

Let’s step back for a second and take a look at this consistent pattern:

NSA illegal wiretapping of American citizens is exposed. We, some of us, are outraged. We can’t stop reading about it. We write about, talk about it, and blog about it nonstop. For a while. The media waits a little, then takes the cue, decides to ride the same wave, however selectively and reluctantly. For a while. The Congress follows the fashion. They are into fashion. They wear this particular fashion like a Halloween costume, over the top of their usual long-term clothing, with every intention of shedding it off at the end of the parade, as soon as it is announced out-of-fashion.

Within a few weeks the media goes back to ‘normal,’ and acts as if ‘it’ never happened, or, it happened but no longer carries newsworthiness since ‘it’ has become another ordinary fact of life to live with and forget it is even there. The Congress likes to remain fashionable. When the media stops, the costume is out-of-fashion; to be discarded. Their usual clothing underneath are ‘classics,’ politically that is, the kind that never go out of fashion, politically, that is. So they go back to the good old classics until the next fashion trend breaks in the news. During this phase, we the people gradually stop reading, talking, writing, and blogging about ‘it.’ We are exhausted from over-excitement. Frankly, we are bored with the topic. For weeks we all had run in the same direction; fast and furious. Everyone within our circle had covered the same ‘topic,’ and the topic started getting too familiar, too common, too ordinary, too tedious and too massive to go against. All in a very short time, but nonetheless.

…and this when the next ‘scandalous’ issue hits. Hooray! We have another scandal and another cause; another outrage. Maybe it is torture, and thousands of documented pictures and reports to go along with it; all committed in our name and with our money. Maybe it is the FBI raiding peaceful protestors’ homes for exercising their constitutionally guaranteed rights. Maybe it is major intentional falsifications of facts to drag us all into another war, where we spend billions, kill, and get killed for some made-up cause enriching a few cause-makers. Maybe it is the TSA fondling, groping, and pretty much raping we the people on a daily basis for some made-up, perceived secuity.

No matter what the ‘current,’ or, ‘fashionable,’ or ‘newsworthy’ cause, scandal, or issue, we run back and forth like yoyos, run towards the ‘new cause,’ hold on to it for a short-while, repeat the above steps with the media taking up the trend and Congress sporting the fashion, blogs fuming collectively… basically going around the same circle, completing the same short-lived cycle, then eventually we retreat, and after that, another case of major violation or abuse breaks or gains momentum, we run towards it, pose to confront and challenge it, write-talk-blog about it…

You do see the yoyo I am talking about here, don’t you? What happened to our outrage, a handful of posturing lawsuits, and relentless pledges declared in the face of being illegally wiretapped and spied upon? How long has it been since we found out and became outraged, signed on to hundreds of petitions against it, bombarded the ‘fashionable’ representatives with mails-e-mails and calls? How long has it been since we’ve seen it covered in bold by our media? How long has it been since we’ve heard it discussed or even referred to by those elected as ‘an issue’ or ‘problem’? Here is the most important question of all:

How long has it been since we have either acknowledged or consciously thought about the fact that we are actively, unconstitutionally, and belligerently under surveillance by our government and their plentiful contractors and collaborators?

Please don’t take me wrong. I stand by my word in the introduction section of this article. I am truly delighted by what I see in terms of movements in reaction to TSA’s raping of our rights and dignity. It is just that I see this particular abuse-violation as one of many symptoms of our broken system, suspended Constitution, and a corrupt and abusive system of No-Checks & Many-Imbalances. The real diseases are not getting much, if any, attention. And we the people seem to be inflicted by a chronic case of a symptoms-chasing yoyo syndrome. It is way past time to look to curing and rehabilitating ourselves from this freedom-threatening syndrome, and go after the real diseases and causes.
 

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According to news reports, the Obama administration is once again reevaluating how to deal with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai out of fear that it may now be holding him to unrealistic standards of U.S. law enforcement. This comes after a summer of news that Karzai continues to find new ways of resisting Washington’s efforts to rein in rampant corruption in his government.  Now we hear from legendary Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that the U.S. has intelligence showing Hamid Karzai is under medication for manic depression and that Obama’s national security team doubts that “his strategy in Afghanistan” (whatever that may be at the moment) can work. The tug of war between Kabul and Washington has become so desperate, former CIA Near East, South Asia Chief Dr. Charles Cogan recently opined that the situation was fast approaching a “Diem Moment.” Cogan even suggested that while Diem’s removal had been “horribly botched,” “a removal of Mr. Karzai might turn out to be more straightforward.” Given the similarities to America’s quagmire in Vietnam, invoking Diem raises more than a few dark memories. Yet despite vast differences in the two wars another even more deeply unsettling similarity is emerging. Hamid Karzai is in a political fight for his life like South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem. But (strange as it might seem) his contradictory behavior and the chaos and corruption surrounding it may be no accident. In fact it could be exactly the consequence that his main neoconservative backer, former RAND director, U.S. Ambassador and Special Presidential Envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, had long intended.

According to Thomas Ruttig, a United Nations official present at the mid-2002 Kabul Loya Jirga that installed Karzai, “Khalilzad was the driving force behind THE mistake committed in the post-Taleban period that basically and fundamentally undermined the – possible! – emergence of a stable Afghanistan by bringing in the warlords again and allowing them unrestricted access to the new institutions…  Re-empowered militarily and politically, the warlords expanded the realms of their power into the economy. With their [U.S. Special Forces] Alpha Team seed capital they took over that part of the economy that matters in Afghanistan, the poppy and heroin business. With the profits from this they expanded into what remains of the licit economy: import of luxury goods, cars, spare parts, fuel and cooking gas [and] real estate often by occupying government-owned land…”

When asked in the spring of 2010 whether Khalilzad should be invited back to assist the Obama administration, former Special Assistant to President Reagan, Reagan-Doctrine Architect and honorary Afghan “Freedom Fighter,” California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher told Huffpost interviewer Michael Hughes, “He [Khalilzad] oversaw the establishment of a government that was unable to function in Afghan society. And on top of that he browbeat people into accepting Karzai. He even browbeat the ex-King of Afghanistan Zahir Shah into accepting him. Khalilzad was not in the anti-Taliban camp in the 1990’s, so why the hell would we bring him in now? By forcing Karzai into office, Khalilzad snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory because the Taliban were beaten at that point.”

To both Ruttig and Rohrabacher, Khalilzad’s ultimate crime – like the U.S. manipulation of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in Vietnam – was that his corruption of the Karzai regime had created so much internal chaos that no amount of outside effort could undo it. Yet the idea that chaos, as a form of extreme social engineering, may have actually been the plan cannot be ignored.

If anyone embodies the Cold War neoconservative philosophy that came to dominate American foreign and military policy from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush, it is Zalmay Khalilzad. Khalilzad first came to the United States as a high school exchange student.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from American University in Beirut and his doctorate degree from the University of Chicago where he met and studied along with Paul Wolfowitz under the RAND nuclear warfare theorist, former Trotskyite and father of neoconservatism, Albert J. Wohlstetter.  It was Wohlstetter’s early 1970s series of articles in the Wall Street Journal and Strategic Review that prompted the politicized CIA analysis known as the Team B experiment. It was the Team B’s adherents both inside and outside the Carter administration who set the stage for undermining détente and luring the Soviets into the Afghan trap and holding them there while Afghanistan disintegrated. And it was the same Team B brain-trust of Wohlstetter acolytes including Khalilzad that went on to provide the philosophical template for the politicized intelligence process that led to the strategic military disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. 

In her 1972 book about Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, author Frances FitzGerald wrote of the perverse illogic of another of Wohlstetter’s onetime RAND protégés, Herman Kahn.

“Just before his departure for a two-week tour of Vietnam in 1967, the defense analyst, Herman Kahn, listened to an American businessman give a detailed account of the economic situation in South Vietnam. At the end of the talk – an argument for reducing the war – Kahn said, ‘I see what you mean. We have corrupted the cities. Now, perhaps we can corrupt the countryside as well.’ It was not a joke. Kahn was thinking in terms of a counterinsurgency program: the United States would win the war by making all Vietnamese economically dependent upon it. In 1967 his program was already becoming a reality, for the corruption reached even to the lowest levels of Vietnamese society.”

In a country as poor as Afghanistan after three decades of war it took little time and less effort to corrupt every level of Afghan society, but in Afghanistan, official corruption, both American and Afghan was built in. Overseen by Khalilzad, a bizarre marriage of America’s pro-business, neoconservative Washington and Afghanistan’s pro-business and often pro-Taliban right wing took root to direct and guide Afghanistan’s reconstruction.

A 2007 report by Canadian journalist Arthur Kent described the DNA that coursed through the bloodstream of the Bush administration’s Afghan agenda. Kent writes, “Within Khalilzad’s makeshift provisional authority in Kabul, he championed a creation called the Afghanistan Reconstruction Group. ARG, achieved two cherished goals for the administration: putting a select group of loyal American and Afghan-American business hawks in charge of US-funded development projects; and doing so while completely bypassing the State Department.”

Outside the boundaries of normal oversight procedures while under the auspices of Donald Rumsfeld’s office at the Pentagon, ARG became a watering hole of high priced contracts for well-placed friends of the Bush administration. In 2005, when Khalilzad’s successor, career diplomat Ronald Neuman tried to break up ARG and return contracting to the State Department, Khalilzad arranged for a “political audit.” The result was Neuman’s replacement by the White House.

In a U.S. Congressional report published in June 2010 titled  Warlord, Inc.,  Representative John F. Tierney’s Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs painted a sordid picture of the chaos, deception and corruption in Afghanistan that now stands as the legacy of America’s neoconservative brain trust. But given the history of America’s covert and overt involvement in Afghanistan, none of this should have come as a surprise. The U.S. fostered destabilization of Afghanistan’s governments in the 1970s, backed Pakistan’s ISI and their Islamist protégés, lured the Soviets to defeat and watched as the country descended into anarchy. It then hatched a Frankenstein movement called the Taliban together with the ISI – all the while pretending it was indigenous to Afghanistan. After 2001 it then allowed the movement to regroup and grow stronger as they slaughtered moderate Pashtuns and claimed the mantle of Pashtun nationalism for themselves. Whatever the future holds for Hamid Karzai, President Obama’s AfPak war was built upon a chaos, designed and programmed from its inception by the highest intellectual circles in the United States. As his administration approaches another winter trying to resolve it, it might as well face up to the fact that whether it likes it or not, it is getting exactly the chaos that it asked for.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

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This post is similar to what I usually publish under my ‘Weekly Round Up’ series, only with a caveat: the time period covers more than a week, make that more than a month. I’ve been saving links and articles of interest, either those I’ve been coming across or ones sent by my loyal friends with good noses, and meaning to publish them as ‘weekly round ups.’ Then of course, due to ‘this or that,’ those ‘round up’ points ended up piling up week after week. Where did they get piled up? As ‘saved’ e-mails in my e-mail box and marked as ‘unread.’ Why that way? Because that’s one of my ‘supposed’ motivating strategies to prevent ‘delays & procrastination;’ seeing these piled up e-mails in my box every day, usually several times a day, bugs me big time…

Well, obviously, and for truly justifiable reason(s), that so-called strategy/method didn’t work, and I ended up with over one hundred e-mails of this particular category sitting in my mail box, glaring at me. Last night I decided I couldn’t take it any longer. After putting my daughter in bed for the evening, I sat behind my PC, scrolled down to the bottom of my e-mail box where the oldest e-mails sit, clicked and read. I eliminated (deleted) many due to the time-sensitive nature of those articles/analysis/editorials, and saved (technically ‘re-saved’) those timeless and or worthy-of-listing ones. And, at 10:30 p.m., began typing away!

I hope ‘some’ of you will find ‘some’ of this information worthy or useful; I did. Maybe we’ll get a chance to discuss these in the comments section… Oh, also, I am going to preempt a few finicky readers: I am mostly listing the links & the headlines/titles rather than adding my usual fairly long commentaries to each and every one of the links, because I don’t have the time; hope you understand. And finally, I am looking forward to tomorrow morning, when I’ll check my mail box and won’t see those glaring ‘months’ old e-mails;-) So here we go!

…………………………………………………………

Last year I did a piece on Vietnam & Agent Orange. The following is another awful footprint left by one of our many wars, reminding us once again of our established record as the number one nation in using WMD (and going for ‘preemptive wars’!)…Truly sad; truly sad.

New case for US reparations in Laos
Melody Kemp, Asia Times

Laos carries the tragic distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in the history of modern warfare. Thirty-five years after the United States wound up its so-called “secret war” against communist guerillas, the impact of its unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to take a heavy human and economic toll.

A new report published jointly by UXO Lao and the Lao National Regulatory Authority (NRA) has shed more light on the damage caused by the US’s UXOs. The research surveyed 94% of Lao households and concluded that an estimated 20,000 people had died from UXOs since the conflict ended after the communist takeover in 1975.

…

COPE’s research shows that the US government, corporations and private foundations have given over $39.5 million for UXO clean-up since 1993 – a trifling sum compared with the billions it has allocated for its new generation of wars. A US Senate committee recently recommended committing $7 million for UXO clearance in Laos in 2011 and $3.5 for similar activities in Vietnam. The US Congress allocated about $5 million and the US State Department $1.9 million for UXO clearance in Laos this year.

The US war in Laos was shrouded in intrigue and disinformation. An Australian-made film entitled Bomb Harvest contains footage of a US government spokesperson saying that internationally accepted rules of engagement were suspended during the campaign in Laos. Legally, that means there are still unresolved questions over who should bear primary responsibility, the US government
or the private companies who produced the weapons, for UXO victims and other legacies of the war in Laos.

As warfare is increasingly outsourced to private companies, questions are emerging about the legal liability of private companies that supply and profit from war. From a common law perspective, US negligence and injury in Laos are easy to prove, say international lawyers. However, the tenets of war reparations have been generally designed so that the vanquished are economically punished for both their aggression and loss

…

Laos, which had an estimated one ton of ordnance per capita rained on it by US bombers, has more recently emerged as a global icon for the movement against cluster bombs. It is estimated by the US State Department’s Walk the Earth With Safety bureau that about 30% of those bombs did not explode on contact with the ground. Canisters dropped from US B-52s could have carried up to 600 cluster bomb units and distributed them over a wide terrain on impact.

A new research report entitled National Survey of UXO Victims and Accidents reveals that, apart from cluster munitions, land mines, artillery shells and other US ordnance also continue to cause significant casualties decades after the end of the war. Indeed, many areas of the country where injuries have recently occurred were not adjacent to known combat zones.

During the conflict, the largest numbers of bombing-related fatalities came among soldiers. Nowadays, it’s farmers, fisherfolk, foresters and women and children foraging for food in UXO-contaminated areas. That is, those being killed now by what is known to be US ordnance are civilians merely trying to make a living. Many of those killed and injured, such as the five children killed in southern Champassak province in February this year, were not even alive during the war.

…

Military adventurism for less ideological reasons, including access to and control over natural resources, has changed the face of modern warfare. However, some wonder whether reformed reparation laws that forced state aggressors and the private companies that supply them with weaponry to pay for all injuries and assistance to non-combatants would reduce the risk of future armed conflicts.

Vietnam tried for years to win US compensation for its victims of US chemical warfare, including the US’s use of the defoliant Agent Orange, but ultimately failed to secure a US court decision in its favor. Laos has not collected comprehensive data on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants on its southern territories, but the recent $300 million deal Vietnamese stakeholders reached with the US panel could change that.

Meanwhile, signatories to the Convention on Cluster Munitions are scheduled to meet in Vientiane in early November. The US is notably not a signatory to the munitions-curbing treaty, but 107 other nations are, 40 of which have formally ratified the agreement. The convention took effect on August 1, 2010, and the meeting in Laos will be the first since its enactment.

…

I encourage you to read the rest here. And below are two clips I filmed while in Vietnam: First, Victims of Agent Orange, and the second, an interview I conducted (with Le Ly Heyslip) while in Vietnam on Agent Orange:

The Latest ‘Pitch & Tone’ on Central Asia

The following links are on one of the most important topics unknown to and or ignored by the majority here in the States: Central Asia & the Caucasus. I picked the following three since they reflect the latest ‘trend’ and the ‘advertised tone’ by the Obama-Hillary Clinton Administration. The first analysis/report was published by the Council on Foreign Relations, so it’s independence and purity should be pretty self explanatory. The following two pieces by the same author, published by Asia Times, are a bit hard to judge; as far as intentions & interests are concerned… Okay, take a look at them and you’ll see what I mean.

Reimagining Eurasia
Samuel Charap and Alexandros Petersen,  Foreign Affairs

As Kyrgyzstan descended into chaos after President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in April 2010, most observers were focused on the fate of the key U.S. airbase there. They feared that Moscow had orchestrated the unrest as revenge for Bakiyev reneging on his alleged promise to shut down the base and would now demand that the new government follow through on that pledge. But instead of indulging in geopolitical gamesmanship as usual, Russia and the United States actually worked together, pursuing back-channel talks that facilitated Bakiyev’s safe escape into exile. Periodic consultations since April have thus far managed to prevent conflict between the Cold War adversaries in the one country where both have military outposts. This marked a tectonic shift in the geopolitics of Eurasia. For the first time in over a decade, what Russia calls its “near abroad” was a locus of cooperation, not confrontation, between Russia and the United States.

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This shift has opened a window of opportunity to fundamentally rethink U.S. foreign policy in Eurasia — a term used here to refer to the countries of the greater Black Sea region and Central Asia — a strategically situated area with massive natural resource wealth and great economic potential. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has formulated its approach to countries as diverse as Azerbaijan and Ukraine through a Russia-centric lens; U.S. policy toward the region as a whole became a function of its plans for dealing with Moscow. Although Washington focused on ensuring Eurasian states’ independence in the 1990s, the past decade saw U.S. policy toward these countries devolve, becoming mired in outright U.S-Russia strategic competition. Although that competitive dynamic has diminished significantly over the past year and a half, its legacy still defines Washington’s engagement with the states of the region.U.S. policymakers must abandon the tired Russia-centric tack and develop new individualized approaches to the states of the greater Black Sea region and Central Asia. By treating each country based on its merits, as opposed to approaching the region as a set of contested territories, Washington can serve long-term U.S. interests and avoid re-creating a nineteenth-century-style Great Game.

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You can read the rest here

Russia and US march in post-Soviet step
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times

An unprecedented military parade in Red Square in Moscow on Sunday, when servicemen from the major North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries will march alongside Russian soldiers, will be a commemorative event marking the 65th anniversary of Victory Day in World War II. Arguably, it is not a parade of NATO troops but rather of Russia’s erstwhile allies in the coalition against Adolf Hitler.

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You can read the rest of this fairly brief, and equally light-weight on the analysis-front, piece here.  I think Bhadrakumar misses on several extremely important points, what I call ‘reality check,’ but what do you think?

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Here is another piece by the same author, Bhadrakumar. This one is a bit better, relatively speaking, that is

A Kosovo on the Central Asian steppes
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times

A robust geopolitical thrust by the United States aimed at creating a role for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in resolving conflicts in Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan promises to rewrite the great game rivalries in Central Asia in anticipation of an Afghan settlement. The US initiative poses political challenges to Russia, which is a member of the 56-member OSCE, and China, which is not. The security vehicles piloted by each the respective two regional powers – the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – are being outmaneuvered by the US.

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Paradoxically, Russia and China could seize the initiative if the OSCE plan to stabilize the situation in Kyrgyzstan somehow crash-lands and ethnic tensions, violence and anarchy ensue. But that would be a dubious blessing as Russia and China too are stakeholders in regional stability in their own ways.

‘B team’ for the Afghan war
The unkindest cut of all is that it is Kazakhstan, which both Moscow and Beijing counted to be their most sober and thoughtful regional partner, which is heading the OSCE chariot. As Kazakh President Nurusultan Nazarbayev firmly asserted, “There is no doubt a new OSCE strategy on Afghanistan is necessary.”

The US is delighted, and as a quid pro quo, Washington has accommodated the Kazakh leaderships’ desire to chair an OSCE summit meeting within the year in Astana and thereby claim a legacy on the world stage. The last time the OSCE held a summit meeting was in 1999. This is also the 35th anniversary of the Helsinki Final Act..

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Again, I don’t consider the piece heavy-weight by any means, and in fact that’s exactly why I am listing it here…It may open up a few of our readers whom I know to be very savvy in this area;-) Now, the following piece seems to have somel dose of realism:

Bad Blood in Baku
Thomas Goltz, FP

If I were still a journalist, I would have had juicy scoop last Saturday when I learned of the imminent but still unannounced arrival in Azerbaijan of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates. Gates had been tasked with hitting the reset button — there are a lot of those in the former Soviet Union these days — on Washington’s increasingly problematic relationship with Baku.

I learned of the emergency visit when an old friend of mine called to say he knew I was in the Azerbaijani capital, and that his former boss, a U.S. intelligence officer, wanted to buy me a few beers and chat about my nearly 20-year hobby of reading tea leaves and goat entrails in the Land of Az.

“The American chargé d’affaires told me not to talk to you, but he is State Department and I am not,” the official said — I’m paraphrasing from memory here, but closely — putting initial pleasantries out of the way. “I am here to set up the Gates visit tomorrow. We finally decided to give the Azerbaijanis something before this thing deteriorates any further.” Then he sort of smirked while saying the following: “We frankly don’t care about human rights or democracy-building, or Israel and Turkey, or peace in Karabakh or Georgia, or even Azerbaijani energy. There is only one thing we really care about right now, and that is Afghanistan.”

I was not surprised, but had to ask: “Afghanistan,” he said, and then repeated the word

Azerbaijan’s role in that war is fairly well known: The country has donated a symbolic company of 90 soldiers (which has suffered no casualties to date) and shared intelligence with the United States. But Azerbaijan’s main contribution to the U.S.-led war effort has been geographic: The country’s location in the Caucasus is a gateway between Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and Baku has provided a vital transportation alternative by opening its air, rail, and seaport space to NATO.

There has been no murmur of a threat to close or restrict the Azerbaijan corridor, but even the remote possibility that the Azerbaijanis would do so has apparently worried Pentagon contingency planners — enough so that a decision was made to show Baku some respect, in the form of a personal letter from President Barack Obama to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Delivering the missive was the purpose of Gates’s visit, and news of the surprise stop-off was regarded as important enough that the usual Associated Press and Reuters stories about the visit and the letter were soon splashed across the front pages of most international and virtually all American newspapers — even small ones, such as my local rag in Bozeman, Montana.

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All right, let’s not violate the ‘quote’ limits, at least not too much; here is the link.
 
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The Fear Mongering & Opportunist 9/11 Commissioner, Phony Reports & More

Here is another from last May. I was away, travelling, so I don’t know if this piece of nothing coming from a less-than-nothing weasel was ever publicized by the media that is good at publishing nothing noteworthy or truth-worthy… 

Former Gov. Tom Kean says U.S. more vulnerable to terrorist attacks since 9/11

The United States is more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than any time since the 2001 assault on the World Trade Center, according to the chairman of the 9/11 commission.”This is the most dangerous time I’ve seen since 9/11,” former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean said. “Al Qaeda is constantly learning our weaknesses, and the U.S. intelligence community is dysfunctional.

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Both Friedberg, who was deputy national security adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and Kean also agreed the new face of terrorism is increasingly “home-grown.” Faisal Shahzad, for example, is a naturalized citizen allegedly responsible for last month’s abortive attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square.”Thank God no one was hurt, but terrorists have learned that they don’t have to be successful to disrupt our lives and our economy,” Kean said. “So now they’re looking to recruit home-grown (American) operatives who can move around at will under the radar of our intelligence community.”

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Who really cares about what this omission-er guy says? Is there anyone left out there who doesn’t recognize this guy as a phony little fear-mongering joker badly in need of some publicity? Please tell me he was totally ignored by our phony-loving MSM on this particular case! Did they put his face on MSNBC/CBS for this? Again, I was gone, and (maybe blissfully!) missed the coverage (or lack of) of stooges like Kane/Hamilton…

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Speaking of commissioners, ‘ommosioners,’ and laughable reports, here is a good one:

Bhutto probe: More than enough blame
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times

Pakistan has suspended eight police officials following the release of a United Nations report into the assassination of former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, but no action has been taken against any members of the military or intelligence agencies, even though the report implicates the military in the events surrounding Bhutto’s death on December 27, 2007.

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Bhutto’s assassination after leaving a campaign rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi two weeks before general elections has been the subject of intense controversy, and while the report does not give any definitive answers it is most likely to intensify divisions between the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the military establishment, both of which are tainted by the report.
Current officials, the report says, were less than helpful. “The investigation was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials, which impeded the search for the truth,” Heraldo Munoz, chair of the Bhutto Commission of Inquiry and permanent representative of Chile to the UN, said. “These officials, in part fearing intelligence agencies’ involvement, were unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken,” he said.

The commission’s report, based on interviews with 250 people in and outside Pakistan as well as other evidence, says the official investigation focused on “low-level operatives and placed little or no focus on investigating those further up the hierarchy in the planning, financing and execution of the assassination”.

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Read the rest here. Doesn’t it sound like our very own investigations here?! You know, BCCI, Iran Contra, 9/11 …Please bring in your own reasoned theories, speculations, interpretation, or just plain good ole comments…

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You’d think this latest on Dr. Kelly’s highly suspicious ‘suicide’ would make it to the front pages, and stay there. Well, not surprisingly it is not the case…I wonder what kind of a ‘commission & commissioners’ will be ‘set up’ by the Brits to handle this latest…of course, with another phony report attached at the end of it…

British Medical Experts Seek Full Inquest on Iraq Inspector Kelly’s Death
Thomas Penny & Chris Peterson, Bloomberg

A group of U.K. doctors and lawyers called for a full inquest into the death of David Kelly, the government scientist who was the source of a story saying the official dossier justifying the Iraq war had been “sexed up.”

Kelly, a former weapons inspector working for the defense ministry, was found dead in a wood near his home in southern England in 2003 after he was revealed as the origin of a BBC report about the way information about Iraqi arms had been used to make the case for the U.S.-led invasion that toppled President Saddam Hussein.

The group, including two former coroners and an intensive care specialist, said in a letter published by the Times of London newspaper today that, based on the evidence currently in the public domain, it was “extremely unlikely” that Kelly had bled to death after slitting his wrist.

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The letter-writers, who include former coroners Michael Powers and Margaret Bloom, as well as Julian Bion, a professor of intensive-care treatment, said it was “extremely unlikely from a medical perspective” that Kelly’s severed ulnar artery would have bled enough to be the primary cause of death.

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I think this is a good place for the next link dealing with another repeating joke: The State Department’s ever-alteration of terror list!
State Department to Leave Chechen Rebel Group off Terror List
Josh Rogin, The Cable

The State Department’s update of its annual list of official terrorist groups is imminent, but the group that just attacked Moscow won’t be on the list.

The Caucasus Emirate, which has been waging a jihad against the Russian government, is led by Doku Umarov, who calls himself the “emir of the North Caucasus.” He was previously President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, but dissolved that Republic and established the Emirate in its place in 2007 in order to impose sharia law in his territory.

Umarov declared all the way back in 2007 that his group was expanding its struggle to wage war against the United States, Great Britain, and Israel. Last month, he released a video claiming credit for the suicide attacks in Moscow in March that resulted in the deaths of 39 people.

But apparently, the State Department chose not to include Caucasus Emirate in the newest update to its list of foreign terrorist organizations, according to Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-FL, who is calling on the State Department to add the group for the sake of national security and U.S. -Russia relations.

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Foreign Lobbies & Serving Elected Officials: Jane Schmidt Story

We’ve been talking about the speedy transitions of former elected officials from public office to foreign lobby firms as foreign agents… Well, this particular ‘representative’ is in a real hurry! She ain’t waiting! Why would she? Who’s watching? Who is reporting? With no worries she’s been doing lap dances for the foreign lobby, and yes, she’s been getting paid…

Who’s paying Schmidt lawyers?
Malia Rulon, Enquirer

Rep. Jean Schmidt isn’t Turkish, and there aren’t many Turks in her southern Ohio district, but the Miami Township Republican is deeply invested in a legal battle stemming from the Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide. And that battle could land her in a heap of trouble. At issue is whether Schmidt accepted what foes estimate to be at least $200,000 worth of free representation from a Turkish legal group so she could file two cases against former opponent David Krikorian, who is of Armenian descent.

Schmidt spokesman Bruce Pfaff told The Enquirer that the Schmidt campaign hired the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund to represent her in both cases against Krikorian. Pfaff said she is in the process of setting up a legal expense fund to pay the organization’s fees.

Krikorian, who ran unsuccessfully as an independent in 2008 and as a Democrat in this year’s primary, has filed a complaint over this issue with the Office of Congressional Ethics, which forwards complaints of merit to the official House ethics committee for further action. Investigations aren’t typically made public unless a sanction is made. Krikorian’s complaint is dated July 13.

He alleges that Schmidt, or her campaign, accepted free legal services from TALDF, which would be a violation of campaign finance laws or House gift rules, or both. If it turns out she violated campaign finance laws or House rules, she could face a fine, a reprimand, or much more – such as an ethics investigation.

Haven’t gotten the bill yet

Since her first case filed with the Ohio Elections Commission in May 2009, Schmidt’s campaign finance reports have not indicated any payment or debt for legal services, or any in-kind gifts from TALDF for the work. A separate lawsuit was filed against Krikorian this past June. Again, no payments were listed in her latest campaign finance report, which covers activity until June 30.
Schmidt spokesman Pfaff said that’s because the cases are still going on. He turned down a request to speak to the congresswoman directly.

“I don’t believe that there has been a bill for their services to this point,” he said, adding that the lawyers are waiting for the legal expense fund to be set up before submitting a bill. But statements made under oath in August 2009 by Bruce Fein, who handles cases for TALDF and is representing Schmidt, and former Schmidt chief of staff Barry Bennett seem to contradict this. They suggest the TALDF would pay the legal bills for Schmidt’s case. When asked whether TALDF had charged the Schmidt campaign any money for representation, Fein said: “The answer is no. We stated that we would do this and we would not charge them legal fees.”

Krikorian’s lawyer asked Bennett, “And there’s no ethics issue associated with Turkish American Legal Defense Funds paying for Ms. Schmidt’s legal fees?” Bennett replied: “No, not that I’m aware of.” These statements were made in depositions taken for the Ohio Elections Commission case. They were submitted to the Office of Congressional Ethics as part of Krikorian’s request for a formal investigation.

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In May 2009, right after filing the Ohio Elections Commission complaint against Krikorian, she traveled to Turkey, courtesy of the Turkish Coalition of America. The following month, an editorial she wrote was published in Today’s Zaman, a Turkish newspaper.
In Congress, she has praised the founding of Turkey on the House floor, opposed legislation recognizing the Armenian genocide, and joined the Caucus on U.S.-Turkish Relations. She has also marched as grand marshal in a Turkish Day Parade, lunched with a group of Turks at Cafe Istanbul in Newport, and raised thousands in campaign contributions from Turkish Americans.
According to the last census, there are just 3,159 Turks in Ohio, including 297 in the 2nd Congressional District.

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And here is an update on our Bryza story:

Controversy Continues Over Obama’s Pick for Ambassador to Azerbaijan
Richard Solash, RFERL.Org

At a July 22 hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bryza said the criticism was to be expected given the high tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan. “Being criticized or being thought of as being closer to one side or the other is part of the game,” he said.
But at the request of Senator Barbara Boxer (Democrat, California), who represents the largest Armenian-American constituency in the country, the committee’s vote on Bryza’s nomination was put on hold. Boxer and her legislative colleagues are far away from Washington at the moment, so they’re unlikely to have picked up a copy of the August 23 “Washington Examiner,” a conservative-leaning D.C. daily.

In a guest opinion-page column that day, former Republican Senator Conrad Burns came to Bryza’s defense. Burns wrote: “It appears this opposition [to Bryza's nomination] is based upon senators responding to special interest groups whose sole purpose is to oppose all things related to Azerbaijan.” The apparent reference was to efforts by the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), an influential Armenian lobbying group, to stop Bryza’s confirmation.
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And here is the juicy part:

After the column was published, the ANCA contacted the newspaper to point out a detail in Burns’ background that wasn’t mentioned in the piece: the senator himself can be linked, albeit in a roundabout way, to the family of President Aliyev.
The former senator is a senior adviser to the Gage Company, a Washington-based lobbying firm. The CEO of Gage is Leo Giacometto, a former political aide to Burns. In addition to being CEO of Gage, Giacometto sits on the board of a company called Silk Way Holding.

As revealed in an investigative report by RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service earlier this month, Silk Way Holding — which owns more than a dozen aviation industry companies in Azerbaijan — is partially owned by Arzu Aliyeva, the 21-year-old daughter of President Aliyev.

“It came, sadly, as no surprise at all that the people defending Bryza are exactly the people who are close to the Aliyev regime,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee, who added that he used the information uncovered by RFE/RL to connect the dots.
But it was apparently a surprise to the editorial-page editor of “The Washington Examiner,” who published Burns’ piece.

Two days after the piece appeared, Mark Tapscott wrote a special column that said, “Burns’ relationship to a special interest that may benefit by the Bryza appointment should have been revealed by Burns’ spokesman when the [editorial] was first proposed. When ‘The Examiner’ pointed this out to the spokesman after becoming aware of it, Gage Vice President Ryan Thomas offered no explanation or apology.”

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You can read the rest here

Speaking of Turkey, Fethullah Gulen is Back in the News

Objectives of charter schools with Turkish ties questioned
Greg Toppo, USA Today

They have generic, forward-sounding names like Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science and Beehive Science & Technology Academy. Quietly established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators, these 100 or so publicly funded charter schools in 25 states are often among the top-performing public schools in their towns.

The schools educate as many as 35,000 students — taken together they’d make up the largest charter school network in the USA — and have imported thousands of Turkish educators over the past decade. But the success of the schools at times has been clouded by nagging questions about what ties the schools may have to a reclusive Muslim leader in his late 60s living in exile in rural Pennsylvania.

Described by turns as a moderate Turkish nationalist, a peacemaker and “contemporary Islam’s Billy Graham,” Fethullah Gülen has long pushed for Islam to occupy a more central role in Turkish society. Followers of the so-called Gülen Movement operate an “education, media and business network” in more than 100 countries, says University of Oregon sociologist Joshua Hendrick.

Top administrators say they have no official ties to Gülen. And Gülen himself denies any connection to the schools. Still, documents available at various foundation websites and in federal forms required of non-profit groups show that virtually all of the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired “dialogue” groups, local non-profits that promote Turkish culture. In one case, the Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield in 2005 signed a five-year building lease with the parent organization of Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which promotes Gülen’s philosophy of “peace, mutual respect, the culture of coexistence.” Gülen is the foundation’s honorary president. In many cases, charter school board members also serve as dialogue group leaders.

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Utah’s State Charter School Board launched an investigation last year after American teachers complained that Turkish colleagues got hiring and promotion preferences. The charter school board looked into Beehive’s ties to Islam and found them “circumstantial,” but a financial probe found that the school was $337,000 in the red — and that Accord officials had loaned it thousands. The board last April revoked its charter, but in June voted to keep the school open on probation.

Dunnigan, the state lawmaker who requested the legislative audit, says the financial details, such as personal loans and public funds spent recruiting overseas faculty, are what concern him. “When they’re in such financial difficulty, should they spend $53,000 to bring these people over from another country?”

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Those of you who’ve been following our Gulen discussion will find this very interesting. Read the rest here

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Israel’s Success Recipe: Covert Operations to Pocket the US Media & Publication Industries

Here is a very important release with an attached report on Israel’s covert operations targeting the US media. Many thanks to Metem (as always;-) for bringing it to my attention:

Declassified Senate Investigation Files Reveal Clandestine Israeli PR Campaign in America
PRNewswire-USNewswire

Declassified files from a Senate investigation into Israeli-funded covert public relations and lobbying activity in the United States were released by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) on July 23rd, 2010. The subpoenaed documents reveal Israel’s clandestine programs for “cultivation of editors,” the “stimulation and placement of suitable articles in the major consumer magazines” as well as U.S. reporting about sensitive subjects such as the Dimona nuclear weapons facility.

Documents are now available for download from http://IRmep.org/ila/azc include:

Dimona (excerpt): “The nuclear reactor story inspired comment from many sources; editorial writers, columnists, science writers and cartoonists. Most of the press seemed finally to accept the thesis that the reactor was being built for peaceful purposes and not for bombs.” http://www.irmep.org/11-121960AZC.pdf

Content placement and promotion (excerpt): “The Atlantic Monthly in its October issue carried the outstanding Martha Gellhorn piece on the Arab refugees, which made quite an impact around the country. We arranged for the distribution of 10,000 reprints to public opinion molders in all categories… Interested friends are making arrangements with the Atlantic for another reprint of the Gellhorn article to be sent to all 53,000 persons whose names appear in Who’s Who in America…Our Committee is now planning articles for the women’s magazines for the trade and business publications.” http://www.irmep.org/09101961AZC.pdf

Pressure campaigns (excerpt): “It can be said that the press of the nation…has by and large shown sympathy and understanding of Israel’s position. There are, of course, exceptions, notably the Scripps-Howard chain where we still need to achieve a ‘break-through,’ the Pulliam chain (where some progress has been made) and some locally-owned papers.” http://www.irmep.org/11-121960AZC.pdf

Magazine Committee achievements (excerpt): “We cannot pinpoint all that has already been accomplished by this Committee except to say that it has been responsible for the writing and placement of articles on Israel in some of America’s leading magazines….” http://www.IRmep.org/10301962_AZC.pdf

According to Grant F. Smith, director of IRmep, “It is frightening how easily some in the American news media surrendered to a foreign public relations campaign that spent the 2010 equivalent of $36 million over two years. Time has proven most of the planted content to be misleading, if not dangerous. These historical documents hold many important lessons for Americans who have long needed—but rarely received—straight reporting on key Middle East issues.”

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper. It retains 1%-3% of the most important documents of business conducted by the United States Federal government. The Israel Lobby Archive, http://IRmep.org/ila is a unit of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington.

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I agree with Metem ‘And this is especially timely given the recent purchase of Newsweek by Jane Harman’s husband.’ Let’s repeat the golden quote in this release by Grant Smith:

“It is frightening how easily some in the American news media surrendered to a foreign public relations campaign that spent the 2010 equivalent of $36 million over two years. Time has proven most of the planted content to be misleading, if not dangerous. These historical documents hold many important lessons for Americans who have long needed—but rarely received—straight reporting on key Middle East issues.”

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And finally, here is an interesting observation on the latest Wikileaks story sent to me by Linda (Linda, thank you for all your e-mails with great links). As you may already know I have refrained from making comments on this case, but I think this particular article is harmless enough to take a chance on…:

Wikileaks: that sinking feeling
Mark Pesce, ABC

Reading a recent lengthy and detailed Sydney Morning Herald article
detailing the latest charges against Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange, I can only nod my head knowingly. This was always going to be the way things worked out. From the time last year when we all became aware of Assange, I felt a twinge of fear, an inner voice saying Something isn’t right here. It took me a few weeks to articulate that feeling into a real, grounded rationale for my dread.

Long ago, before I moved to Australia, before I’d done any of the work that I’m known for within the technology community, I had some peripheral contact with the ‘hacker’ world (In this usage, ‘hacker’ means folks who break into computers, not the folks who stay up all night programming them in weird and wonderful ways).

One of the things I learned very early on was a simple rule of thumb to separate the accomplished from the n00bs and fools: only a n00b would brag about their exploits. Only a n00b would tell others that he’d broken the law. Those who do crimes keep silent about their darker doings. Those who wannabe, they’re loud about it.

When Assange suddenly became the public face for the increasingly fascinating Wikileaks, it confused me on several levels.

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You can find the rest here

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Since the end of the cold war, the U.S. had been looking for an enemy to match the Soviet Union and came up empty handed until 9/11. Refocusing the efforts of the world’s largest and most expensive military empire on Al Qaeda would provide the incentive for a massive re-armament,  just the way the Soviet “invasion” of Afghanistan had done two decades before.  According to a Washington Post report within nine years of America’s invasion of Afghanistan, hunting Al Qaeda had become the raison d’être of the American national security bureaucracy employing 854,000 military personnel, civil servants and private contractors with more than 263 organizations transformed or created including the Office of Homeland Security.  The sheer scope of the growth and the extensive privatization of intelligence and security was so profound that it represented “an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in oversight.”

But the report admitted that after nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the labyrinth of secret bureaucracy put in place after 9/11 was so massive and convoluted that its ability to perform its stated function to keep America safe was impossible to determine. Even worse, it was becoming clear that the bureaucratic monster had taken on a life of its own with the U.S. lost in a maze of its own creation, trapped in an expanding web of spies and counter spies that far surpassed the worst paranoia of its old nemesis, the Soviet Union. The logic train of the war on terror and its fundamental rooting in Afghanistan had finally become clear. The perpetual Taliban/Al Qaeda threat fueled a perpetual war that could never be won, justifying an endless string of restrictions on civil liberties and governmental transparency, which then prevented Americans from seeing how their money was spent. Locked out of this “alternative geography of the United States,” Americans have become helpless to stop their democracy and their economy from being lifted right out from under them.

 Thanks to the revelations the word was finally out that whatever impact the “war on terror” had made on terror worldwide ( which many claimed it made only worse)  it was above all, a spectacular boondoggle. 

The shocking, Sunday July 25, WikiLeaks release of 92,000 documents by the New York Times  Der Spiegel and The Guardian, was the acid test for Washington’s beltway experts to square themselves with the fatal collapse confronting them and who was to blame for it. According to the New York Times , “Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks.”  The documents also revealed numerous embarrassing specifics that had either been downplayed or avoided entirely by the U.S. military in the 9 year old war including: that the Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against NATO aircraft; that the U.S. employs secret commando units to “capture/kill” insurgent commanders that have claimed notable successes but have at times also gone terribly wrong by killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment; that the military’s success with its Predator drones has been highly over-dramatized. Some crash or collide forcing Americans to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban could claim the drone’s weaponry.  In addition, the reports reveal that retired ISI chief, Lt. General Hamid Gul, “has worked tirelessly to reactivate old networks, employing familiar allies like Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.” If anything was a guide to who’d been drinking the Washington K Street Kool-Aid, it could be measured by the degree of acceptance to the new information. According to the Boston Globe, Congressman James McGovern, a Worcester Mass. Democrat maintained, “that the documents show a far grimmer situation than members of Congress have been told about in classified briefings,..” Mass. Senator John Kerry initially declared that the documents raised “serious questions,” about policy. But under pressure from the White House, by Monday, Kerry was echoing the official line, defending Obama administration policy while insisting there was little new in the documents. The reasons for Kerry’s second thoughts were obvious. Matt Viser of the Boston Globe writes, “Kerry has what is seen as a special relationship with Pakistan; he has welcomed the country’s army chief to his house for dinner and accepted flowers from the country’s president. ‘There’s no question that Senator Kerry was instrumental in leading the initiative to triple our economic assistance to Pakistan,’ said Molly Kinder, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development, which tracks US aid to Pakistan.”

Left out of the release,  the Washington Post hissed and fumed, editorializing dismissively that the 92,000 documents contained little of interest while citing counter terrorism expert Andrew Exum as comparing the importance of the documents to the discovery that “Liberace was gay.”  Had the documents amassed an equal amount of evidence that Iran or Syria were working with Al Qaeda to carry out attacks on American troops in Afghanistan, the bombers would have been warming up on the flight decks by sundown. But when it came to Pakistan, there was only restraint. To the beltway insiders the actual revelations disclosed by the leaked documents were less important than the exposure of systemic failure they represented. The disclosures had taken the floor out from under the assumptions of the war on terror imposed following 9/11.  But to the beltway it was business as usual and reality had little if anything to do with it.

Little wonder that the world’s population had lost faith in the American enterprise in Afghanistan. Even the Afghan people themselves had come to believe the United States wasn’t really there to fight the Taliban, but pretended to fight as an excuse for remaining in the region. The WikiLeaks reports are the raw data from American troops fighting in the field.  But the reaction from official Washington was as if the U.S. had come to be ruled by a city of isolated mandarins from another planet, completely detached from the world they governed and dismissive of any efforts to bring them down to earth. 
# # # #

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The upcoming campaign for the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar will be the crucial test for the United States’ military and the Obama administration’s AfPak strategy. It will clearly be an epic military battle and a test of the intellectual movement for counterinsurgency within the military known as COIN. But, like the battle for Marja in February, will the battle for Kandahar be more about the “perceptions” of American victory than about real success? That battle featured what General Stanley McChrystal described as “government in a box,”  a kind of franchisable, political “happy meal” for Afghanistan with a pre-selected government administration, mayor and police force, ready to go the minute the shooting stopped.

In the end, General McChrystal’s government in a box turned out to be more like a government in a coffin. Dead on arrival.  Authors Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason  likened U.S. policy in Afghanistan to nothing less than British literature’s most famous pipe dream, Alice in Wonderland. “Lewis Carroll’s ironically opium-inspired tale of a rational person caught up inside a mad world with its own bizarre but consistent internal (il)logic has now surpassed Vietnam as the best paradigm to understand the war in Afghanistan.”

Johnson and Mason described Marja as nothing more than a massive exercise in public relations, with one intention only; “to shore up dwindling domestic support for the war by creating the illusion of progress,” while the media gulped down the bottle labeled “drink me,” and shrank into insignificance.

But what can the world expect of American policy in the aftermath of what promises to be an even larger opium-inspired tea party in Kandahar? And what happens if the U.S. achieves a military victory, but fails to address the gaping political vacuum necessary to keep the Taliban from returning?

It remains unclear exactly what the U.S. is trying to accomplish politically in Afghanistan with a Karzai government that neither Washington nor the Afghan population appears to want. According to experts, Washington remains divided over whether to engage with the Taliban leadership or follow the Pentagon’s line of fighting while talking. The Obama administration has narrowed its military objective down to ridding Pakistan and Afghanistan of Al Qaeda and finding Osama bin Laden. But that leaves a dozen affiliated radical groups like the Tehrik-i-Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani network to organize, train and expand their networks under the ponderous assumption that they can be cut from the influence of Al Qaeda and kept from them.

And what about NATO? Will a public relations victory be enough to convince an increasingly reluctant NATO to hang in for the long term? Absent from much of the public discussion is the growing schism between Washington and European capitals, with cold war hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madeleine Albright trying desperately to breath new life into what the U.S. military’s own thinkers describe as “a discredited Cold War rule set.”

Europe and the U.S. remain deeply divided over American policy toward Afghanistan and their role in it. In September 2009, former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski issued a somber admonition at a gathering of military and foreign policy experts in Geneva warning that the U.S. was running the risk of replicating the fate of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and that if Europe left the U.S. on its own there, “that would spell the end of the alliance.”

According to its latest mission statement,  written by a team headed by former U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, “NATO must win the war in Afghanistan, expand ties with Russia and even China, counter the threat posed by Iran’s missiles, and assure the security of its 28 members.”

But not everyone sees NATO’s demand for a European rededication to a cold-war-global-security-order ruled over by a diminished United States, as a desirable policy for what may lie ahead. Neither do they see a commitment to winning in Afghanistan as necessary to European security, as the political consensus for NATO’s expanded mission cracks apart.

Foreign policy commentator William Pfaff wrote on May 18, from Paris,   “The United States has, since the end of the Cold War, wanted NATO to become an American military auxiliary, largely under the sway of the Pentagon, and on the whole this has happened,.. At the NATO experts’ meeting Monday, which considered proposals for what NATO should become by 2020, former U.S. Secretary of  State Madeleine Albright asked why the Europeans should pay twice for their defense. I can think of one unspeakable but not unthinkable reason why European countries might wish to defend themselves. What if it should prove one day that the threat the Europeans need to defend themselves against is of American and Israeli origin?”

Pfaff admitted that his speculation of a European vs. American/Israeli conflict is an “Hysterical geopolitical fantasy.” Yet, the very idea that Pfaff should find such a development thinkable, is something Americans must open their minds to. In fact, the U.S. military’s own thinkers are preparing for a new world in which the U.S.’s containment policy folds in upon itself.

Nathan Freier of the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute writes, “Imagine, ‘a new era of containment with the United States as the nation to be contained,’ where the principle tools and methods of war involve everything but those associated with traditional military conflict. Imagine that the sources of this ‘new era of containment’ are widespread; predicated on nonmilitary forms of political, economic, and violent action; in the main, sustainable over time; and finally, largely invulnerable to effective reversal through traditional U.S. advantages.”

Following World War II, the U.S. built a cold war containment policy that straightjacketed its communist enemies as well as American thinking. Today, the word on the street is, if the U.S. can’t find a way to rethink this policy at a major turning point in its empire, it will soon find itself contained by a straightjacket of its own making.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of the law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast. Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake! A Man For All Seasons
 

With the U.S. already having cut down every law in the forest when it comes to terrorism in the last 9 years, there was nothing left for Barack Obama’s war cabinet to do but risk a hazardous new escalation of its AfPak war following the attempted bombing in Times Square by Pakistani Taliban-trained Faisal Shahzad.

The administration sold its own version of the Afghan war originally by narrowing it to hunting Al Qaeda in Pakistan regardless of the moral, ethical, legal or even political consequences. It continues to claim success in its greatly expanded use of Predator drone assassinations. But as the administration scrambles to counter something that was apparently beyond what it thought possible, it must now face the grim reality that warfare, no matter how high tech or expensive, is and will continue to be a two way street. It must also finally face up to the fact that its glaring lack of sophistication in its dealings with Afghanistan and Pakistan have made the U.S. more vulnerable to attack and not less.

The entire strategy for a draw-down of U.S. forces in 2011 rests on the blindly unrealistic assumptions that a NATO-trained Afghan Army and police force can somehow magically replace American “boots on the ground,” while the drone campaign will deter the enemy’s leadership from acting effectively and frighten away potential recruits. Up to now, the administration’s policy has rested on the claimed effectiveness of these strikes to weaken the Taliban and make them more receptive to a peace agreement that would bring them into the Afghan government. But in a gaping breach of logic, the possibility that they might actually retaliate on U.S. soil, was never even factored into the equation.

The efficacy of assassinating Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects with such weapons challenges at least two major assumptions. The first is that the weapons themselves are not a technically suitable replacement for human counterinsurgency forces (which in and of themselves are beset by problems). The second and perhaps more important, is whether high tech warfare – with all its imperial-death-from-above implications – isn’t actually self-defeating, given the negative political impact it has on the local population. Critics of the Predator attacks have warned of the potential blowback for years.

In 2004, Robert A. Pape, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago warned of the negative consequences of an over reliance on drone technology in a Foreign Affairs commentary. “Decapitating the enemy has a seductive logic. It exploits the United States’ advantage in precision air power; it promises to win wars in just days, with few casualties among friendly forces and enemy civilians; and it delays committing large numbers of ground troops until they can be welcomed as liberators rather than conquerors. But decapitation strategies have never been effective, and the advent of precision weaponry has not made them any more so.”

According to counterinsurgency experts David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum, the strategy of predator drone strikes in Pakistan fails on all counts by creating a siege mentality among Pakistan’s civilian population, “exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion,” while actually being only a “tactic,” masquerading as a “strategy,” which only “encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of [British] colonial-era policies.”

Kilcullen and Exum explain the ill-logic of the U.S. Predator campaign. “Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.”

Drone attacks and targeted assassinations have already opened a Pandora’s box of legal demons for the United States that will someday have to be faced. On February 14, 2010 the Washington Post reported on the gory details of how the administration had come to deal with the inflammatory legal issue of jailing terror suspects by choosing to kill, rather than capture those it deemed terrorists.  But, in the ten days following the failed terror attack in New York, instead of pausing to reconsider the consequences of  such draconian tactics, the U.S. responded by threatening Pakistan with a direct U.S. military “boots-on-the-ground” expansion  while accelerating pilotless attacks in the tribal area of North Waziristan even further, firing 18 missiles on May 10, alone.

That the Obama administration continues to believe its response to the “almost” Taliban attack in New York will “soften up” Pakistan’s Taliban after 9 years of softening, is a bad omen for America. Having already discarded the “benefit of the law,” for our own safety’s sake, it will only be a matter of time before the devil comes knocking again. 

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The region today delineated as both Afghanistan and Pakistan has known many borders over the millennia, yet none have been more artificial or contentious than the one today separating Pakistan from Afghanistan known as the Durand line but referred to by the military and intelligence community as Zero line. A funny thing happened to the United States when the Obama administration decided to cross Zero line and bring the Afghan war into Pakistan. Instead of resolution, after nearly two years into the administration’s AfPak strategy, it would seem the gap between reality and the Washington beltway has only widened.

Instead of moving into a new future that defused India and Pakistan’s nuclear rivalry and promised “a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people,” the U.S. is falling back on its old cold war relationships that created the problem in the first place. But as the costs of maintaining an archaic cold war posture mount, the world’s economy crumbles and the contradictions tear the war’s flimsy logic to shreds, it’s clear that, the U.S. is facing a bigger enemy than it ever imagined.

Before the Obama administration even set foot in office it promised to shift its attention, time, money and energy away from Iraq towards Afghanistan. The president’s AfPak policy was intended to correct the mistakes of the past while addressing the war in a more realistic fashion that focused as much on the actions of Pakistan’s military as it did the actions of the Afghan government.

The Obama administration’s decision to actively address Pakistan’s behavior emerged only after Washington’s military/intelligence community reluctantly accepted proof that Pakistan’s ISI was aiding Taliban actors such as Malawi Jalaluddin Haqqani. It also emerged after solid evidence suggested that Pakistan itself was on the verge of caving in to their own Taliban extremists, known as the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP .

Despite being the single largest focus of the American military, much of what the United States does in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains a military secret. A report issued by the Center For Strategic and International Studies by Anthony H. Cordesman in September 2008, declared alarmingly. “No country or international organization provides useful unclassified overview data on the developments in the fighting [in Afghanistan] in anything like the depth that the US Department of Defense provides in its quarterly reports on the Iraq war. The [limited] reporting that is available also decouples the fighting in Afghanistan from that in Pakistan. Accordingly, public official reporting on the growing intensity of the war since 2006 ignores one of the most critical aspects of the conflict.”

Evidence of the strain facing America’s cold war-trained bureaucrats now appears regularly as the contradictions deepen. Defense Secretary Robert Gates crossed his own personal zero line in an address to the National Defense University in February when he criticized Europe’s growing anti-war sentiment as a dangerous threat to peace. The Obama administration rails at the Karzai government’s corruption but denies it the guidance and expertise necessary to make it effective at governance. The U.S. then diverts power and money to regional tribal leaders whom many fear (including U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry) will simply become a new class of warlord, once the U.S. departs.

Since January 2009, U.S. Predator Drone strikes are reported to have killed at least 529 people in the tribal areas of Pakistan of whom 20 percent may have been civilians. Considered to be a clear violation of international law by American legal scholars, the cross border strikes inflame Pakistani opinion against the U.S. Yet, the Pentagon praises their new anti-terror weapon while at the same time continuing to deny that the program even exists.

As the Obama administration struggles to reconcile Washington’s special interests with those posed by Iran, Pakistan, India, China and Russia, it should be remembered that the Soviet Union faced a similar challenge in Afghanistan. But in the end the biggest enemy the Soviets faced was not the Stinger missiles or the disunited Mujahideen Jihadis. The Soviet Union’s biggest enemy was the archaic cold war structure of the Soviet system itself, and that is a lesson that Washington refuses to accept.

The United States has fought on both the Pakistani and Afghan sides of the Durand line. In the 1980s it fought on the side of extremist-political Islam. Since September 11, 2001 it has fought against it. But the border separating the two seemingly incompatible behaviors remains largely a dark mystery. It is therefore appropriate to think of Zero line as the vanishing point for the American empire, the point beyond which its power and influence disappears; the line where 60 year’s worth of American policy in Eurasia confronts itself and ceases to exist. The Durand line separating the two countries is visible on a map. Zero line is not.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration. Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media. Their next book Crossing ZeroThe AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire will be published February, 2011.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

In 1999 Richard Armitage joined an “advisory team” put together by Condoleezza Rice for the George W. Bush presidential campaign. Other members of this “advisory team” included Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Zoellick, and Donald Rumsfeld all of whom, along with Armitage, were signatories to the 1998 PNAC letter to President Clinton that advocated regime change in Iraq through the bogus “Weapons of Mass Destruction” argument. It should have been no surprise, therefore, to see where these “advisors” were to lead as soon as they were appointed to key positions in the Bush administration in early 2001.

Armitage was appointed as the number 2 man at the State Department but not without protest from a certain former Republican congressman:

“General Colin Powell has named Richard Armitage to the key position as his deputy secretary of state.

“Mr. Armitage served in the Pentagon back in the 1980s and, in the process, caused so many problems that by 1989 he twice had to withdraw his name from consideration for high-ranking positions in the first Bush administration.

“Simply stated, the U.S. Senate would not confirm him for any job.

“The FBI agent in charge of compiling the ‘file’ on Armitage said at the time, ‘The Armitage file is the thickest file ever for any nominee for any position.’”

“Now, 12 years later, the new Bush administration is again trying to ram Armitage through the confirmation process. Powell wants him because ‘Rich Armitage is my best friend in the world.’”

Both Armitage and Powell had served in Vietnam and it’s worth remembering that prior to his performance at the UN National Security Council in early 2003, Colin Powell was best known for helping to cover up the My Lai Massacre.

Armitage was confirmed by the Senate as the Deputy Secretary of State in late March, 2001, in plenty of time to implement the plan for regime change in Iraq that he had supported in 1998 and which PNAC had argued for in September, 2000:

“Further, the process of [US military] transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

The “new Pearl Harbor” that was so desired by Armitage and the rest of the PNAC crowd occured on 11 September, 2001. Immediately after 11 September, Armitage threatened to “bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age”:

“During last week’s US media blitz to promote his new book, Musharraf claimed soon after 9/11, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage warned Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, head of ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, the US would ‘bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age’ if it did not immediately turn against its Afghan ally, Taliban, and allow the US to use military bases in Pakistan to invade Afghanistan.

[ . . . ]

“I’ve heard various versions of Armitage’s exact words. But I know whatever he said put the fear of god into Pakistan’s military leadership.

“ISI sources say the Bush Administration threatened to bomb faithful old ally Pakistan, cut off its oil, collapse its banking system, and call in its loans. More frightening, Washington also threatened to ‘unleash’ India against Pakistan, either allowing India to conquer the Pakistani-held portion of disputed Kashmir, or give Delhi a green light to invade all of Pakistan, possibly with American assistance.”

Such language by Armitage would be consistent with other ultimatums issued by the US government, such as this gem by a Bush administration State Department negotiator to the Taliban in August, 2001, more than a month before the “new Pearl Harbor”:

“At the final meeting with the Taliban, on Aug. 2, 2001, State Department negotiator Christine Rocca, clarified the options: ‘Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold [for 'secure access to the Caspian Basin for American companies'], or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.’ With the futility of negotiations apparent, “President Bush promptly informed Pakistan and India the U.S. would launch a military mission into Afghanistan before the end of October.”

“This was five weeks before the events of 9/11.”

Almost a year later, Armitage was sent by the Bush administration to deliver, perhaps, the same message to the Pakistanis:

“Bush has stopped short of publicly admonishing Pakistan, Washington’s key ally in the war on terror, but he’s dispatching burly Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage to Islamabad next week, and his mission will be to deliver a heavy, private bruising. ‘If anyone can threaten to crack Musharraf in half, it’s Armitage,’ says one State Department source.”

“Bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age”? “Crack Musharraf in half”? It should be no surprise that Armitage was tasked with delivering these messages. He was sent by the Reagan administration to deliver a similar message to Manuel Noriega a year before the US invasion of Panama:

“The Reagan Administration sent a high-ranking Pentagon official on a secret mission to Panama last week to press its strongman, Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, to step down and allow free elections in the country, State Department and congressional sources said Thursday.

“The emissary, Richard L. Armitage, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, held what one U.S. official called ‘a lengthy session’ with Noriega early last week to urge him to withdraw from politics.

“Armitage was picked to deliver the Administration’s strongest direct message to date to Noriega because the Panamanian strongman is a ‘military man’ and Washington wanted “the most effective interlocutor possible,” the official said.”

Having arrived in the US a week before 11 September “on a regular visit of consultations”, the ISI’s General Mahmoud Ahmed met with State Department officials, including Armitage, on 12 and 13 September:

“The press reports confirm that Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad had two meetings with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, respectively on the 12th and 13th. After September 11, he also met Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the powerful Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate.

“Confirmed by several press reports, however, he also had ‘a regular visit of consultations’ with US officials during the week prior to September 11, –i.e. meetings with his US counterparts at the CIA and the Pentagon.

“What was the nature of these routine ‘consultations’? Were they in any way related to the subsequent ‘post-September 11 consultations’ pertaining to Pakistan’s decision to cooperate with Washington, held behind closed doors at the State Department on September 12 and 13? Was the planning of war being discussed between Pakistani and US officials?”

The article continues:

“The meeting behind closed doors at the State Department on September 13 between Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Lt. General Mahmoud Ahmad was shrouded in secrecy. Remember President Bush was not even involved in these crucial negotiations:

“‘Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage handed over [to ISI chief Mahmoud Ahmad] a list of specific steps Washington wanted Pakistan to take’. ‘After a telephone conversation between [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Pakistan had promised to cooperate.’ President George W. Bush later confirmed (also on the morning of September 13th) that the Pakistan government had accepted “to cooperate and to participate as we hunt down those people who committed this unbelievable, despicable act on America’.

[ . . . ]

“Armitage was one of the main architects behind US covert support to the Mujahedin and the ‘militant Islamic base’, both during the Afghan-Soviet war as well as in its aftermath. US covert support was financed by the Golden Crescent drug trade.”

We know that Armitage was no stranger to the Golden Crescent drug trade.

General Mahmoud Ahmed met with someone else in those days immediately following 11 September, and that “someone else” worked directly under Richard Armitage. That “someone else” was none other than Marc Grossman:

“ISI Chief Lt-Gen Mahmood’s week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council. [ . . . ] But the most important meeting was with Mark Grossman, US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. US sources would not furnish any details beyond saying that the two discussed ‘matters of mutual interests.’”

Or, as Sibel Edmonds stated back in 2005:

“Although Grossman ‘has not been as high profile in the press’ FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, ‘don’t overlook him – he is very important.’”

Chris Deliso elaborates further:

“Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America’s key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other “aid” were delivered by Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

[ . . . ]

“Grossman’s professional ties with Pakistan apparently long outlived his nine-year tenure there. The Guardian, among others, mentioned the fact that in the days immediately preceding Sept. 11, 2001, Pakistani ISI chief Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed – financier of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta – paid a visit to senior administration officials, including Grossman, then undersecretary of state for political affairs.”

As The Times reported in January, 2008 (although not mentioning Grossman by name), Grossman was so deeply involved in the sale of nuclear secrets to Pakistan that he was under FBI surveillance. Since Grossman was directly responsible to Armitage, what did Armitage know about Grossman’s dirty dealings?

That question does not stretch the imagination because Armitage became involved in another event that Grossman was also involved with–Plamegate and the exposure of CIA front company Brewster Jennings, and those events will be included in our next post.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Soon-to- be- Launched Boiling Frogs Exclusive Video

I’m going to start with an exciting update on our Boiling Frogs Exclusive Video Project. Again, I’m not known for being very patient, and in this case I’m not able to contain my excitement.

Kristina Borjesson and Katrina Rill have been working very hard on the production side, and have been doing it under extraordinary circumstances. Kristina’s brother lives in Haiti and for almost 4 days they were unable to establish contact with him, know about his well-being or whereabouts. They heard from him yesterday, after days of frantic phone calls, e-mails, and stressful waiting-pacing. I am so very happy and relieved. Additionally, during that chaotic period they had to resolve several software-hardware related problems and glitches. Fortunately, they have now arrived at the ‘happy-satisfied-exciting’ stage where they are putting their final touches on our first four-part video series.

The upcoming video series will be based on exclusive interviews with Larry Wilkerson, with great footage. I don’t believe anyone has ever heard or seen some of the extraordinary revelations and commentaries contained in these clips; at least I hadn’t. Here is a glimpse of what I’m talking about from the transcript:

Larry Wilkerson on Israel:

I have not mentioned one other motivation in here which was, I think very much at work. And that’s Israel… Douglas Feith, for example as many people often said in the state department, including the highest members of the state department, was a card carrying member of the Likud Party… what it meant of course was that he had a double set of interests in mind at most times and those interests were not just America’s interests, they were Israel’s interests…

We have a situation today in both Israel and the United States created in part because of incompetent leadership but in part because of very venal leadership in exploiting the politics of fear, that can’t bring us peace—either of us—and is making lots and lots of money as Andrew Basevitch said, off not bringing us peace. Lots of money.

there are a group of people in this country who have an interest in Israel’s security that goes beyond America’s interests…. When the Cold War ended, Israel in that regard became a strategic liability, not an asset…

LW on our Disappearing Civil Liberties:

…So we’re moving away rapidly from all those things—the constitution, the rule of law, operating within our own revenues instead of debt, debt, debt and so forth, all because the presidency has become so powerful that it can do these things and it has become powerful in some respects because of the politics of fear…

LW on the Role of Military Industrial Complex:

In our country, money is negating democracy. It is doing it in a host of ways. It is doing it in a way Dwight Eisenhower warned it would do in 1961 when departed the Oval Office…

…there’s nothing out there that will tell you how to deal with this. This is not the president of Lockheed Martin, the president of uh, of uh General Dynamics or Graumann or whatever plotting at night to take over Washington or to take your money away from you. This is much more insidious than that. It is power, and building over time as we decided after world war two to build a national security state and to make security the end all and be all of our existence. Just listen to the democratic candidates the other night in the debate. Every one of them I believe as I recall even the guys on the fringes they essentially said the first requirement of any president is to protect the United States of America. Hogwash. The first requirement of any president is to protect the Constitution. The Constitution will, if it’s adhered to, protect America.

…….

Okay, you see what I mean? How could I not be ultra excited?! The interview is loaded with macro points and facts long ignored by the media and others, and issues and realities that have been chosen by our public to be denied rather than being faced and dealt with.

Buckle up and get ready for our soon to be launched video series. For some of you who have not registered with the site, this is a good time and even a better reason to go ahead and do it. The full-length clips will be available only to Boiling Frogs Registered Users, those I refer to as members of the Irate Minority Club.

………

Boiling Frogs Podcast

We had a great interview session with Chris Hedges. After reading his sound analytical pieces, hearing him articulate issues relevant to our discussion, and knowing a bit about his sincere and non-partisan outlook, I decided to add his ‘corner’ to my ‘must-read’ daily list. I say corner, because I don’t particularly like some of the angles and partisan approaches of the general site, and I believe that’s mutual, since those operating it happen to not like mine either On the other hand, I try to give credit where it’s due, and in this case, having Chris Hedges on board is a major positive.

This week we’ll interview Professor Julien Mercille and Coleen Rowley. I know I’ve said this a gazillion times, but I truly enjoy these sessions, and end up learning so much. I’m looking forward to having both guests this coming week.

Coming up on Friday: Our interview with Andy Worthington.

………….

And here is a round up of a few headlines and news of interest:

US Public Majority: Willing to Sacrifice Liberties for Perceived Security

The following makes us truly members of the irate minority club:
 

           Most OK with TSA full-body scanners
           By Thomas Frank, USA Today

Air travelers strongly approve of the government’s use of body scanners at the nation’s airports even if the machines compromise privacy, a USA TODAY/Gallup poll finds.

Poll respondents appeared to endorse a Transportation Security Administration plan to install 300 scanners at the nation’s largest airports this year to replace metal detectors. The machines, used in 19 airports, create vivid images of travelers under their clothes to reveal plastics and powders to screeners observing monitors in a closed room.

…

In the poll, 78% of respondents said they approved of using the scanners, and 67% said they are comfortable being examined by one. Eighty-four percent said the machines would help stop terrorists from carrying explosives onto airplanes. The survey was taken Jan. 5-6 of 542 adults who have flown at least twice in the past year.

…

And, this one:

            Poll: Most Americans would trim liberties to be safer
            By Steven Thomma, McClatchy

After a recent attempted terrorist attack set off a debate about full-body X-rays at airports, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll finds that Americans lean more toward giving up some of their liberty in exchange for more safety. The survey found 51 percent of Americans agreeing that “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism.” At the same time, 36 percent agreed that “some of the government’s proposals will go too far in restricting the public’s civil liberties.”

…

Here are my questions for the ‘majority’ who support giving up privacy and liberties for perceived security:

Let’s say the next attack, or attempted terrorist attack, takes place in a shopping mall on a busy Saturday. What should be our government’s measures and so-called solutions afterwards? Should they place metal detectors at all main entrances of all US shopping malls? And since they happen to be ‘ineffective,’ should they go all the way and have these body-scanners instead? But then, some terrorist or terrorist wanna-be or just mentally deranged person may try to pull the explosive truck in the parking lot trick. Then what? Should we also place search guards and detectors at all entrances of all US shopping malls?

Please feel free to replicate the example, scenario above, for all the mega movie theaters, mega hotels, mega amusement parks, mega restaurants, museums… Each one of them a possible target. Each one of them vulnerable. Each possible attack with a possible large civilian death toll. So I’m asking those supporters of giving up privacy and liberties for some irrational and perceived security: What would you want to be done to make you feel secure, safer? Will you be willing to stand in long lines and check points, spread your legs and arms before government patters, maybe even bend over for a good ole cavity search and enema, for shopping, dining, entertainment…? And don’t pull that ‘oh, that’s different’ line with me. Because it isn’t. Because there are millions of ways for those who are willing to execute terror plots, and there are thousands of places to be targeted. Even if we were to turn the entire country into a massive check point with scanners and patters, even if we were to turn our entire population into security guards and police… So, what you gonna do? Maybe ignorantly do the following:

Fail-Proof Way of Creating Hatred & Terrorism

           Afghan, US forces shoot, wound five civilians: NATO
           AFP

KABUL — Five Afghan civilians were shot and wounded by US and Afghan troops outside a military base in a restive area of the war-torn country, NATO said Friday, also reporting the death of an American soldier.The incident involving the civilians took place in the Garmsir district of Helmand province on Wednesday, NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement — where a violent demonstration took place a day earlier.

An ISAF spokesman said warning shots were fired as a crowd of up to 400 people gathered outside the gate of a military base, Combat Outpost Sher.

On Tuesday seven people were killed during a demonstration sparked by rumours that foreign soldiers had desecrated a Koran in an operation the previous day, officials said earlier this week.Referring to the Wednesday incident, Lieutenant Todd Breasseale told AFP: “The five Afghan civilians were wounded by bullets.”

…

Or this:

           Troops Opened Fire on Motorcycles in southern Kandahar Province
           Antiwar

In what appears to have been the latest in a growing string of civilian killings by the international alliance in Afghanistan, Kandahar police are confirming today that NATO soldiers shot and killed two civilians along the highway.

…

Or this:

           US steps up missile attacks in Pakistan
           AP

The United States has unleashed an unprecedented number of missile attacks by unmanned drones in northwest Pakistan over the last two weeks, including one Thursday that officials said killed 12 alleged militants at a meeting of Taliban commanders.

…

A U.N. investigator said the surge added to the need for the cloak of secrecy to be lifted from the CIA-run program, which has killed civilians as well as insurgents. Critics say the program does more harm than good because it fans anti-U.S. sentiment and anger at Pakistan’s own government.

…

And of course, thanks to our media the following doesn’t register with the Let’s Give Up Liberties-for-Perceived Security majority:
 
           Were Afghan Children Executed By Us-Led Forces? And Why Aren’t The Media Interested?
           Zcommunications

Ignoring or downplaying Western crimes is a standard feature of the corporate Western media. On rare occasions when a broadcaster or newspaper breaks ranks and reports ‘our’ crimes honestly, it is instructive to observe the response from the rest of the media. Do they follow suit, perhaps digging deeper for details, devoting space to profiles of the victims and interviews with grieving relatives, humanising all concerned? Do they put the crimes in perspective as the inevitable consequence of rapacious Western power? Or do they look away?

One such case is a report that American-led troops dragged Afghan children from their beds and shot them during a night raid on December 27 last year, leaving ten people dead. Afghan government investigators said that eight of the dead were schoolchildren, and that some of them had been handcuffed before being killed. Kabul-based Times correspondent Jerome Starkey reported the shocking accusations about the joint US-Afghan operation. But the rest of the UK news media have buried the report.
…

Another Random Story of a Political System Termite
 
           Rep. Gary Ackerman may have broken House ethics rules with no-money-down stock deal
           By Benjamin Lesser & Greg B. Smith, NY Daily News

U.S. Rep. Gary Ackerman hosted a meeting between Israeli officials and a defense-contracting firm in which he had invested money — and made a big profit, a Daily News probe has found.The Queens Democrat put no money down when he obtained private stock in the company, Xenonics Inc., relying on $14,000 borrowed in 2002 from the company’s top shareholder, a longtime friend.The sweetheart loan required no collateral and had no written payback date, a potential violation of House ethics rules.

…

In the last few years, Ackerman arranged a meeting in his Washington office between Xenonics founder Alan Magerman and two Israeli officials, Magerman said.Magerman said he tried to convince the Israelis to buy Xenonics’ NightHunter, a high-powered flashlight used by the U.S. military. Magerman said Ackerman was “trying to be very helpful.”

…

Other Noteworthy Stories

           George W. Obama
           Nat Hentoff, VillageVoice

           Obama wants record $708 billion for wars next year
           AP
 
           America’s next security measure: ‘Israelification’ of airports?
           The National

           Groups seek to challenge U.S. gov’t on seized laptops
           ComputerWorld

           Franken expresses support for Obama’s Afghan troop increase
           StarTribune

           Turkey: Diplomatic spat with Israel won’t scupper $190 million drone deal
           Haaretz

           Empire reloaded
           Pepe Escobar, ATimes

           Balochistan halts $3.5bn copper project
           Syed Fazl-e-Haider, ATimes

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

A major snow storm in effect with seven inches of snow already on the ground, fireplace roaring in the background, an ultra large mug of traditionally brewed Darjeeling tea sitting next to my pc, and my now 17 month old daughter playing right in front of the window where she can have a full view of the winter wonderland, make up the personal side of my update for this Saturday.

As for site updates, not much to report. Our site traffic this week was simply amazing, which is what it takes to get me going and make my ambitious to-do list even longer and more outrageous than it already is!

Peter B and I had a very interesting and informative string of interview sessions: Daniel Ellsberg, Nafeez Ahmed, and Andy Worthington. There will be no new interview posted next week, since I’ll be taking a real break from my computer for a few days starting on Wednesday, Dec 23. After that, I still have our interview with Mark Klein (AT&T-NSA) to post, and after that we’ll have the new year series starting with Dan Ellsberg.

I’ve been working with two producer-editor friends on a very exciting new project for Boiling Frogs Post. We’re planning to produce and publish an exclusive online documentary series, and we are already rolling! I won’t give out too much here, but in a month or so we’ll have much more to report on this. Stay tuned.

Now, here are a few items of interest:

Obama’s Preferred Killing Machines: Drones, drones, and more drone attacks

President Obama and his hawks are planning to increase the number of drone attacks. Since the new administration has taken office, the campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, which ironically began during the final months of the Bush administration, has intensified significantly. The US establishment media’s reporting on this issue has been limited to cursory and ultra-shallow pieces with a cosmetic line or two to give the effect of covering all sides; I’m sure all are vetted, approved, and dictated by the usual puppet masters. Absent in almost all these reports are: the real number of civilian casualties and the implications, and the real assessment of the purpose and effectiveness of our new president’s preferred killing machines in our undeclared wars.

Let me give you a few examples and a bit of a context:

Here are a few excerpts from L.A. Times reporting on this:

Senior U.S. officials are pushing to expand CIA drone strikes beyond Pakistan’s tribal region and into a major city in an attempt to pressure the Pakistani government to pursue Taliban leaders based in Quetta.

Okay, so that’s the introduction. They sanitize the real purpose with key words: Taliban Leaders. They want the reader to take that as the purpose.  Next is this:

The proposal has opened a contentious new front in the clandestine war. The prospect of Predator aircraft strikes in Quetta, a sprawling city, signals a new U.S. resolve to decapitate the Taliban. But it also risks rupturing Washington’s relationship with Islamabad.

As you can see it is indirectly, but not very subtly, justifying and cheering the drone attacks. Pay special attention to the following: ‘A new U.S. Resolve’- As in a strong, determined new administration, and ‘decapitate the Taliban’- as in wiping out the big bad evil shalvars-wearing curly-bearded cavemen who have been somehow declared, without technically being declared, as the terrorists and culprits in 9/11.

The side effect, the only tiny side effect aka risk cited is: oh it may put a little dent in our relationship with Pakistan.

The propaganda piece published by the stenographers at LA Times first offers the mike to the proponents of upping the killing machines:

The concern has created tension among Obama administration officials over whether unmanned aircraft strikes in a city of 850,000 are a realistic option. Proponents, including some military leaders, argue that attacking the Taliban in Quetta — or at least threatening to do so — is critical to the success of the revised war strategy President Obama unveiled last week.

As for the opponents, they only site the possibility of some dents on our relationship with Pakistan:

But others, including high-ranking U.S. intelligence officials, have been more skeptical of employing drone attacks in a place that Pakistanis see as part of their country’s core. Pakistani officials have warned that the fallout would be severe.” We are not a banana republic,” said a senior Pakistani official involved in discussions of security issues with the Obama administration. If the United States follows through, the official said, “this might be the end of the road.”

And finally, the stenographers continue with this glowing report on this now widely popular war machine strategy, albeit stating a false and unproven success record:

The CIA has carried out dozens of Predator strikes in Pakistan’s tribal belt over the last two years, relying extensively on information provided by informant networks run by Pakistan’s spy service, Inter-Services Intelligence.

The campaign is credited with killing at least 10 senior Al Qaeda operatives since the pace of the strikes was accelerated in August 2008, but has enraged many Pakistanis because of civilian casualties.

….

The so-called report conveniently omits the number of civilian casualties, the ratio between the actual targets hit and the innocents murdered, the real cost, and the implications when it comes to probable violation of sections 4 and 5 of Article 51, which prohibits attacks that treat military and civilian objects as one and the same. Yap, as always, the establishment media provides zip zip zilch on all the important facts and issues that really matter. Now, please read this propaganda trash that is being marketed by not only the L.A. Times stenographers but almost all the other establishment propaganda machines collectively referred to as the US Media.

Now, let’s look at some facts and reality points involving these drone attacks our new president seems to be so enamored with:

The US Drone Attacks, its Casualties, and the Implications

How long have we been hearing and reading glowing reports by our establishment media on ‘allegedly killed Al Qaeda Leaders’ and the glowing success of our drone attacks? And, once in a while, in small print, back-page, after-the-fact, corrections saying ‘ooooppps, now they say it couldn’t be confirmed whether these top Al Qaeda targets were actually killed’? You know exactly what I’m talking about. So, where are the balancing reports that are alleged, and in some cases supported and confirmed, from the other side?

For instance, there are reports that allege that between January 2006 and April 2009, U.S. drone attacks have killed 687 civilians and 14 al-Qaeda operatives, amounting to a ratio of 50 civilians killed per one al-Qaeda target killed. In other words, our drone attacks civilian death ratio has been around 95%. Or that of 60 drone strikes only 10 of them hit actual al-Qaeda targets, because of either faulty intelligence or reasons deemed top classified.

Here are some excerpts from a piece analyzing these alleged reports from the other side, the side our media fails to mention in almost every report:

This report utilizes well-established principles of both treaty and customary international law as a measuring stick for attempting to determine the legal and moral legitimacy of the covert U.S. policy of using drones to attack targets in Pakistan. This analysis is unique in that it uses both broad assessments as well as pertinent individual case studies with the purpose of chronicling the details of several drone attacks over a period of 45 months in the interest of legal evaluation. Drawing from a vast collection of reliable press reports, independent human rights testimonies, and the most prominent, mainstream studies, this report is quite possibly the most comprehensive analysis on the topic to date and likely the first of its kind to appear in the wake of the US-Pakistan drone controversy.

The most cited and controversial report to date on the casualty results of U.S. drone strikes is the April 2009 report published by Pakistan’s leading English daily, The News.[2] The report was authored by Amir Mir who is known by leading American strategic analysts as “a well-regarded Pakistani terrorism expert.”[3] The report, relying on internal Pakistani government sources, alleges that from January 14, 2006 to April 8, 2009, U.S. drone bombings killed 687 civilians and 14 al-Qaeda operatives, amounting to a ratio of nearly 50 civilians killed for every al-Qaeda operative killed, or a 94% civilian death rate. Out of 60 total strikes, only 10 hit any al-Qaeda targets. The sources attributed the failed drone attacks to “faulty intelligence information” which resulted in the “killing [of] hundreds of innocent civilians, including women and children.” It goes on to detail the numbers of deaths, the statuses of the victims, and the dates of specific attacks, all within annual and monthly time frames.

This report has since been cited and endorsed by several relevant and mainstream commentators, despite the fact that it has been largely ignored, or at best, marginalized and down-played, by the mainstream media in the United States. Most notably, in a meeting with Congress this past May, former senior counterinsurgency advisor to the U.S. Army, David Kilcullen, told the U.S. government to “call off the drones” noting that “since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area.“

I encourage you to take the time and read this important and interesting analysis, and especially the well-documented sources and links cited at the end of it.

Obama: Armed & Dangerous with States Secrets Privilege

You may be sick and tired of me citing and writing about the new administration’s nonstop assault on our civil liberties since taking office last January, and you would think I would be even sicker and more tired of writing and reporting on these assaults; you would be right. However, we can’t just ignore, look the other way, and avoid this extremely important area of our lives: Our Liberties. So I’ll keep writing about it, and I ask you to please keep reading and talking about it…at least until we actually ‘do’ something about it.

Okay, let’s see what this fraud of a president and his administration have been doing lately in depriving our nation of its civil rights and liberties:

San Francisco Gates reports on another Obama attempt to play the State Secrets Privilege and other secrecy cards to prevent another court hearing on torture:

A lawsuit accusing a Bay Area flight-planning company of aiding an alleged CIA program of kidnapping and torturing terror suspects threatens national security and is too sensitive to discuss fully in a public courtroom, an Obama administration attorney argued Tuesday.

“The case cannot proceed without getting into state secrets,” Justice Department lawyer Douglas Letter told an 11-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

Several judges noted that most of the essential facts of the case have been widely aired – the existence of the “extraordinary rendition” program under President George W. Bush, the five plaintiffs’ accounts of their abduction and torture, and the alleged participation by Jeppesen Dataplan of San Jose – and asked why the case is too sensitive for the courts to hear.

Letter said he could reply only in a closed session. For the record, he said, “the U.S. government will not confirm or deny any relationship with Jeppesen.”

Read the entire article here. And, you can read my previous commentaries and articles here, here, and here.

Here is even a more Kafkaesque and simply outrageous case where the fraud man and his administration are trying to compete with the previous administration on the degree and the boldness of the assault on civil liberties, and in fact succeeding! The following are the excerpts from an article from the Kentucky Enquirer:

What do sex, age, race and disability discrimination have in common? They are considered state secrets when air marshals claim they are discriminated against by their federal bosses and subjected to retaliation when they report the alleged abuse.

Federal prosecutors have been largely successful in arguing national security in sealing – and closing the courtroom for hearings and trials – in a half dozen civil rights lawsuits filed by Erlanger-based air marshals in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. The latest was filed Nov. 24 at the federal courthouse in Covington.

SSI has figured in a series of lawsuits across the nation, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. He said some judges have ruled that SSI was cited to illegally to keep information secret.

Aftergood said it’s the judges’ responsibility to review the materials, and consider arguments on both sides, before sealing court documents on the basis they contain information that could threaten national security.” To say the records were improperly sealed is a criticism of the court as much as it is of the government,” Aftergood said. “In a way, the government can’t be faulted for pursuing its own interests.”

So, what do you think? How does Obama measure up against Bush on secrecy and abuse and misuse of States Secrets Privilege? Is he bolder and even more vicious, as if we thought that could be possible?! You decide. You know my answer.
…

I’m running out of time, but here is another noteworthy links with a few excerpts:

China, Kazakhstan unveil landmark gas pipeline

AP News reports:

The leaders of Kazakhstan and China jointly unveiled Saturday the Kazakh section of a natural gas pipeline that will tap into Central Asia’s vast energy riches and loosen Russia’s influence over the region. The pipeline, due to come online in days, is part of China’s efforts to secure energy supplies for its booming economy.

The 1,300-kilometer Kazakhstan-China pipeline is the Central Asian nation’s first export route that completely bypasses Russia.

Gas deliveries to China through the pipeline are expected to hit around 13 billion cubic meters in 2010, with supplies fulfilling pipeline capacity by 2013, after the route has been definitively completed. Building the Kazakh section cost $6.7 billion and took more than 4,000 workers to complete in under two years, KazMunaiGaz said.

The entire 7,000-kilometer (4,300-mile) Turkmenistan-China pipeline cuts through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan into China’s far western Xinjiang region. Commencement of gas deliveries from Turkmenistan to China comes as the former Soviet nation remains mired in a dispute with Russia.

Turkmenistan has until recently sold most of its gas to Russia. However, supplies have been suspended since a pipeline blast in April that Turkmenistan blames on Gazprom.

Read the brief article here.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Pepe Escobar shares with us his background and experience as a roving journalist for over three decades. He provides us with an overview of President Obama’s recent trip to China, relevant analysis of ordinary Chinese people’s point of view and reaction, and China’s political and economic position today within the global context. Mr. Escobar discusses energy issues and the current struggle over the resource-rich Central Asia-Caspian regions as the new battle ground for the competing interests of Russia, China, Europe, and the United States, including various strategic alliances currently under way to tap into this oil-gas rich region. He talks about the absence of real coverage of the Eurasia region by the US media, the rarely-discussed and often obscured facts and realities involving the Bagram Prison in Afghanistan, and more!

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He is an investigative journalist with three decades of experience in covering politics and conflicts around the globe. He’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering stories and cases from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He was in Afghanistan and interviewed the military leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Masoud, a couple of weeks before his assassination. Mr. Escobar has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of three must-read books: Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War, Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge, and Obama Does Globalistan.

Here is our guest Pepe Escobar unplugged!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

On a beautiful sunny spring afternoon in 2006, I was sitting outside in the deck area of a neighborhood café in Alexandria with a friend who is a well-known journalist and an accomplished writer, for whom I happen to have the utmost respect. We were discussing the topical ‘Afghanistan & Terror Financing’ issue. Based on well-established trust between us my friend felt comfortable and open in sharing some ‘significant’ tidbits gathered from ‘credible’ sources within the CIA and DIA, and from British Intelligence officers. As I listened, the extent of credible information and documented incriminating evidence gathered excited me to the point where I had to stop this friend to ask:

‘When are you going to have this published?!’

The response was: ‘This was not the main topic I was investigating for my work. These ‘tidbits’ came to me as an ‘inevitable attachment’ due to relevancy…’

I had to stop the conversation again: ‘So? This is explosive. Even bigger than the main topic you’ve been chasing for the last year or so. No one has ever reported this, so you’ll be the first.’

My friend shook her/his head and said: ‘No one has done it because this topic is considered a ‘career ender.’ You know what happens to naïve reporters who actually try to get into this area, don’t you?’

Amazed by this line of reasoning and unable to really process it all I pressed harder: ‘What are you really afraid of?! Government interference? Classification?’
The answer that followed was even more amazing to me – due to my own naivety back then.

‘Government is the least of my worries. It’s the industry – the media. They go after anyone who dares touch this area – CIA, narcotics and terrorism. They will attack, label, and marginalize you, and before you know it your career as a reporter is over. For good.’

That day and in the days that followed I spent hours upon hours researching the topic; this ‘forbidden zone.’ I studied several cases where reporting on government-narcotics relationships, even though obtained and reported based on thoroughly documented credible sources and witnesses, had proven to be ‘career suicide.’ I met with several veteran DEA agents who presented me with even more cases and unreported criminal deeds, buried in the same journalistic ‘forbidden zone’ in the U.S. press. In the months and years that followed I paid much closer attention to reporting on current topics that skirt upon this forbidden area, and in my own time I analyzed and dissected these reports based on my own research and on information received from intelligence sources who are friends and members of my organization. And since I’ve been covering the U.S. MSM topic in ‘Dissecting the Mainstream Media’ series, I am going to present you with a few cases, reports, and analyses, and have your thoughts and views on this ‘Forbidden Apple of the U.S. Press.’

***

Gary Webb

In Part 3 of my ‘Dissecting the MSM’ series I discussed Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series and its consequences in detail, so I won’t repeat the details here. If you haven’t read it I strongly encourage you to go back and do so. In 1996, after publishing his three-part investigative series, “Dark Alliance,” a thoroughly documented and diligently sourced story, he was attacked, ostracized, and pushed out of the media circle by his colleagues in the mainstream media. Despite the damning information contained in the content of the CIA IG Report, the corroborating findings of the DOJ IG Report, various congressional hearings and investigations filled with direct or indirect admissions, the MSM never eased up on its attacks and criticism of Webb’s report, until they successfully ended his career.

In a well-executed piece written by Barbara Osborn she sites the following exchange which took place between Post Dark Alliance Gary Webb and his supportive colleague Robert Parry:

“…Gary Webb didn’t know what was at risk. When he first spoke with Bob Parry–the Associated Press reporter who, along with Brian Barger, broke the Contragate and Contra/drug stories–Webb thought Parry was being “overly cautious.” “I thought he was being kind of foolish,” Webb recalled, when Parry asked him: “Are you sure you want to ruin your career?”

Unfortunately Parry proved to be the ‘realist.’ He was proven right. After all, he had gone through a rough journey of his own during and after his solid reporting on Iran Contra – for taking a bite off the ‘forbidden apple’ of the U.S. mainstream media.

***

Robert Parry

More or less a decade earlier another major case involving a direct government and narcotics relationship had emerged. In 1985, Robert Parry as an AP reporter teamed up with Brian Berger and broke the Iran Contra Affair. He later exposed Oliver North’s involvement in the scandal while reporting for Newsweek. For his impeccable investigative journalism he won a Polk Award, and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

You would think a reporter with Parry’s credentials and solid track record would be revered and fought over by publishers in the U.S. mainstream media, no? Not so fast. First, this is what happened at the Associated Press where Parry broke the Contra scandal:

In late 1985, Parry teamed up with another reporter to report on a detailed and documented expose of drug-trafficking involving the Nicaraguan Contras. However, the AP editors blocked the story. Later Parry found out that his boss was regularly in touch with Oliver North and that he was conferring with him on a regular basis. Parry left the Associated Press.

And let’s read Parry’s own words gathered from an interview he gave on what took place at Newsweek:

,“As for my hiring at Newsweek, I think it resulted from how poorly the magazine had done on the scandal to that point. That said, Newsweek never liked the story and wanted it put to rest as soon as possible. Editor Maynard Parker was very sympathetic to the neoconservatives and became my nemesis. Evan felt that my presence so angered Parker that I had become an obstacle for Evan’s plans for the Washington bureau.”

Here is more:

“Though my finished article contained new information about the CIA’s relationship with Manuel Contreras, Chile’s intelligence chief and a key Letelier murder suspect, Maynard Parker and other Newsweek editors killed the story. I was told that Parker made some disparaging comment about me being “out to get” Bush.”

Of course, once again putting integrity in journalism first, Parry left Newsweek in 1990.

The Contra Scandal, especially the related Government-Narcotics relationship, was treated as an absolute ‘Forbidden Apple’ by the MSM. Webb and Parry were not the only ones; there were others. Here is another example involving reporter Ray Bonner and the New York Times – cited by Parry during an interview:

,“There were a number of journalists in the field in Central America, who were doing courageous work, people like Ray Bonner of the New York Times, who had been digging into the human rights problems in El Salvador, in particular. And he was—his career was very badly damaged, and he was made a sort of an example of what happens to you if you go into these areas too aggressively. Some reporters said that they were warned off from going after the North story, because that was seen as a career-ender.”

And of course Time Magazine as always, as an inseparable member of the MSM gang, followed the same trend:

“In the fall of 1987, Time assigned a staff reporter to assemble any evidence that the Oliver North network supplying guns to the Contras was also bringing cocaine into the U.S. The reporter found serious evidence, and wrote it up. As the former Time reporter explained to Extra!, after the article was written and rewritten, finally, a senior editor told the reporter to give up on the story. “The senior editor leveled with me,” the reporter told Extra!. “His words were: Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.’”

Here is a punchy and so very factual quote from Robert Parry:

“It used to be that you were admired if you took on a tough story. Now you’re portrayed as a nut.”

That’s right. Thanks to the U.S. MSM even today many don’t know the facts involving the Contra Affair. Despite numerous reports, congressional investigations and statements, and tons of proven evidence, some people still consider the Iran Contra scandal a conspiracy theory or mere allegations, and those who had dared to touch it as ‘nuts.’ They owe their ignorance to the mainstream media.

The Walsh Report, the Independent Counsel for the Iran Contra Scandal, began it’s conclusion with this paragraph:

“The underlying facts of Iran/contra are that, regardless of criminality, President Reagan, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves, however reluctantly, to two programs contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the President’s willful activities.”

The establishment did not have to concern itself with reports such as the Walsh Report or others produced by various IGs and Congress. These reports, the surfacing of facts exposing our Government’s direct hand in narcotics and illegal arms trade, did not matter a bit. Neither did they have to pay much attention to a handful of true investigative journalists who were determined and capable of informing the masses with their reporting. Of course not. Their extension, the United States Press, made certain that any concerns would be taken care of, thus the ‘real’ stories were quashed and blacked out, and those who dared to touch them were quickly attacked, labeled, marginalized, and ‘taken out.’

***

KLA, Narcotics, and the U.S. MSM

Remember our military intervention in Kosovo during 1998-1999 in order to stop what was referred to as ‘ethnic cleansing’? Our main ally, partner, over there was the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Kosovar Albanian guerilla group which sought the independence of Kosovo from Yugoslavia in the 90s. Up until 1998 the U.S. regarded the KLA as a terrorist group. Then, before the actual NATO-U.S. military intervention, while preparing for that ‘intervention,’ as U.S. Intelligence started establishing its intimate relationship with the KLA in the background, KLA’a terrorist label came off the U.S. government list. In effect our government ‘de-terroristed’ the KLA and cultivated ‘mutually beneficial’ diplomatic relations with KLA leaders.

Here are some excerpts from one of the very few articles printed by the U.S. MSM mentioning this, and ironically it is from the Washington Times, in May 1999:

“Last year, while State Department officials labeled the KLA a terrorist organization, saying it bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like bin Laden, the department listed the group as an “insurgency” organization in its official reports. The officials charged that the KLA used terrorist tactics to assault Serbian and ethnic Albanian civilians in a campaign to achieve independence.”

James Bissett, Former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, wrote the following:

“…as early as 1998, the Central Intelligence Agency assisted by the British Special Armed Services were arming and training Kosovo Liberation Army members in Albania to foment armed rebellion in Kosovo. The hope was that with Kosovo in flames NATO could intervene …”

Michel Chossudovsky, Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa, published extensively sourced and documented analyses of KLA as a gangster and terrorist entity, and its close ties to the CIA. The following except refers to what followed the State Department’s ‘de-terrorization’ of KLA:

“While KLA leaders were shaking hands with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at Rambouillet, Europol (the European Police Organization based in the Hague) was “preparing a report for European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs.”

Chossudovsky provides report after report from the DEA and Europol, Germany’s Federal Criminal Agency and reports from Belgrade, establishing KLA as a high profile global narcotics and money laundering cartel:

“The proceeds of the narcotics trade has enabled the KLA to rapidly develop a force of some 30,000 men. More recently, the KLA has acquired more sophisticated weaponry including anti-aircraft and anti-armor rockets. According to Belgrade, some of the funds have come directly from the CIA “funneled through a so-called “Government of Kosovo” based in Geneva, Switzerland. Its Washington office employs the public-relations firm of Ruder Finn–notorious for its slanders of the Belgrade government”.”

“75% of the heroin entering Western Europe is from Turkey. And a large part of drug shipments originating in Turkey transits through the Balkans. According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), “it is estimated that 4-6 metric tons of heroin leave each month from Turkey having [through the Balkans] as destination Western Europe.” A recent intelligence report by Germany’s Federal Criminal Agency suggests that: “Ethnic Albanians are now the most prominent group in the distribution of heroin in Western consumer countries.”

He then provides an excellent overview for this entire picture:

“Remember Oliver North and the Contras? The pattern in Kosovo is similar to other CIA covert operations in Central America, Haiti and Afghanistan where “freedom fighters” were financed through the laundering of drug money. Since the onslaught of the Cold War, Western intelligence agencies have developed a complex relationship to the illegal narcotics trade. In case after case, drug money laundered in the international banking system has financed covert operations.”

Here is an explosive article exposing the relationship between the CIA and the KLA before the NATO bombing. Not only that, the article exposes a very familiar figure: William Walker, the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to monitor the ceasefire in Kosovo in 1998-1999. Walker was nominated by Madeleine Albright, American Secretary of State. Guess what? A decade earlier, in 1988, Mr. Walker was the American Ambassador to El Salvador when Washington was helping the government there suppress leftist rebels, ‘while supporting the contra guerrillas’ against the government in Nicaragua. Coincidence? Not. This is the same Walker who served as Elliott Abrams’ Deputy Assistant Secretary for ‘Central American Affairs’ and accompanied him to all those Contra related meetings. During the investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair several felony charges were brought against Abrams by the special prosecutor, but he was not indicted because he entered into a plea agreement, had a conviction without imprisonment, and eventually was pardoned by President Bush.

Now back to the article for a few excerpts:

“AMERICAN intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia . The disclosure angered some European diplomats, who said this had undermined moves for a political solution to the conflict between Serbs and Albanians. Central Intelligence Agency officers were ceasefire monitors in Kosovo in 1998 and 1999, developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police.”

And this on William Walker:

“Walker, who was nominated by Madeleine Albright, the American secretary of state, was intensely disliked by Belgrade… Some European diplomats in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital, concluded from Walker ‘s background that he was inextricably linked with the CIA. The picture was muddied by the continued separation of American “diplomatic observers” from the mission. The CIA sources who have now broken their silence say the diplomatic observers were more closely connected to the agency.”

“Several Americans who were directly involved in CIA activities or close to them have spoken to the makers of Moral Combat, a documentary to be broadcast on BBC2 tonight, and to The Sunday Times about their clandestine roles. Walker dismissed suggestions that he had wanted war in Kosovo, but admitted the CIA was almost certainly involved in the countdown to airstrikes.”

And here is the real punch line on this entire article: This article, this news, was not published in the U.S. MSM. This was reported by the Sunday Times in March 2000. These facts, revelations, and scandalous ties were never truly touched by the U.S. MSM. There was an ‘action alert’ issued by FAIR in 1999 on Time Magazine’s censorship of the established facts and evidence on the ‘Real’ KLA, under the title ‘Time Magazine Ignores KLA Drug Charges’ and subtitle ‘Are editors following Contra tradition?’:

“Time magazine’s May 17 issue ran a feature on the funding of the Kosovo Liberation Army, titled “A Fighting Chance,” suggesting that the KLA is sustained by donations from ethnic Albanians outside of Kosovo. The article reports that the Republic of Kosova Fund holds “more than $33 million” in a bank in Albania, yet in a graphic titled “How the KLA Gets Its Money,” Time cheerfully reports that the KLA gets its money from “fund raisers, mailings and other sources.” What “other sources”? Bake sales? Time doesn’t say.”

“Fortunately, there has been some investigation into the question. The London Times on March 24 cited an intelligence report that indicated as much as half of the funding for the KLA’s guerrilla war comes from drug proceeds. And the San Francisco Chronicle on May 5 reported that European and U.S. law enforcement groups see officers of the KLA as “a major force in international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of narcotics through an underworld network that reaches into the heart of Europe.””

Here is how FAIR appropriately questioned Time’s motives and drew an even more appropriate parallel to show the ‘real’ reason:

“Why didn’t Time mention the ongoing international investigations of the KLA’s suspected role in the heroin trade? A look back at Time’s Iran-Contra coverage sheds some light.”

“In a 1987 investigation into allegations of drug-smuggling by the Nicaraguan Contras, Time staff writer Laurence Zuckerman found serious evidence of Contra-cocaine links, but his story was never run. Why not? A senior editor acknowledged to Zuckerman: “Time is institutionally behind the contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.””

Pretty hard-hitting piece, right? Can anyone question its validity? I certainly can’t see how. One more time the U.S. MSM showed it’s claws when it came to their ‘forbidden apple,’ – CIA and its narcotics and laundering deeds…

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Afghanistan & Heroin: The journey from Freedom Fighters to Fanatic Villains

I invite anyone who is interested in understanding the axis of U.S. Government, mainstream media, and our foreign policy involving unholy alliances to look at the last three decades of U.S. media coverage of Afghanistan’s Taliban-Al Qaeda, previously known and promoted as ‘Afghan Freedom Fighters’ and the Mujahidin.
In the 1980s the U.S. government supported the Afghan resistance forces, the Mujahidin, today known as Taliban and Al Qaeda, in the fight against the Soviet occupation. The CIA worked through Pakistan military intelligence (ISS) and worked with these guerilla groups who were close to the ISS.

In his well-researched book, The Politics of Heroin, Professor Alfred McCoy documents the parallel increase in Heroin production in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s when the U.S. Government collaborated and supported the Mujahidin directly and indirectly. While in 1979 Pakistan had a small and local opium trade and produced no heroin, by 1981, according to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, Pakistan emerged as the world’s leading supplier of heroin, became the supplier of nearly 60% of U.S. heroin supply, and took over major sections of the market in Europe.

“Who were the manufacturers? They were all either military factions connected with Pakistan intelligence, CIA allies, or Afghan resistance groups connected with the CIA and Pakistan intelligence. In May of 1990, ten years after this began, the Washington Post finally ran a front page story saying high U.S. officials admit that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [leader of the Hezbi-i Islami guerilla group], and other leaders of the Afghan resistance are leading heroin manufacturers. This had been known for years, reported in the Pakistan press, indeed in 1980 reported in McClean’s magazine. In fact in 1980 a White House narcotics advisor, Dr. David Musto of Yale University, went on the record demanding that we not ally with Afghan guerilla groups that were involved in narcotics.”

McCoy also documents interesting phenomena involving the DEA operations and actions (or inaction) in Afghanistan during the 80s:

“During the 1980′s from the time that heroin trade started, there were 17 DEA agents based in Pakistan. They neither made nor participated in any major seizures or arrests. At a time when other police forces, particularly Scandinavian forces, made some major seizures and brought down a very major syndicate connected with former president Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan.”

In an excellent article published by FAIR David Gibbs provides the following documented facts and analyses:

“Despite CIA denials of any direct Agency support for Bin Laden’s activities, a considerable body of circumstantial evidence suggests the contrary. During the 1980s, Bin Laden’s activities in Afghanistan closely paralleled those of the CIA. Bin Laden held accounts in the Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the bank the CIA used to finance its own covert actions (London Daily Telegraph, 9/27/01). Bin Laden worked especially closely with Hekmatyar–the CIA’s favored Mujahiddin commander (The Economist, 9/15/01). In 1989, the U.S. shipped high-powered sniper rifles to a Mujahiddin faction that included bin Laden, according to a former bin Laden aide (AP, 10/16/01).”

Now let’s go back and search U.S. press coverage of Afghanistan’s ‘Freedom Fighters’ during the 80s and try to find any coverage related to these U.S. backed and supported operations’ intersection with the global narcotics trade. Are there any? I’m afraid we know the answer to this question. Here is further coverage based on the report by FAIR:

“The press coverage of this era was overwhelmingly positive, even glowing, with regard to the guerrillas’ conduct in Afghanistan. Their unsavory features were downplayed or omitted altogether. While some newspapers favored some restraint in the degree of U.S. military support for the Mujahiddin (notably the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post) and others (like the Wall Street Journal) favored a more open-ended policy, these differences were only matters of degree. Virtually all papers favored some amount of U.S. military support; and there was near unanimous agreement that the guerrillas were “heroic,” “courageous” and above all “freedom fighters.””

“According to the L.A. Times (6/23/86): “The Afghan guerrillas have earned the admiration of the American people for their courageous struggle…. The rebels deserve unstinting American political support and, within the limits of prudence, military hardware.””

And here the axis of U.S. Government-U.S. Press- and the information spin or black-out:

“Another problem was direct manipulation of reporting by the U.S. government, which was supporting the Mujahiddin guerrillas during both the Carter and Reagan administrations. (Indeed, we now know that U.S. aid to the Mujahiddin was secretly begun in July 1979, six months before the Soviets invaded–International Politics, 6/00.) This press manipulation began early in the conflict. In January 1980, the New York Times (1/26/80) reported that the State Department had “relaxed” its accuracy code for reporting information on Afghanistan. As a result, the Carter administration generated “accounts suggesting Soviet actions for which the administration itself has no solid foundation.””

I am tempted to continue, keep going, and cover this same trend in a more current context, but I’ll limit myself to only highlights since this piece is already longer than what I intended it to be.

Afghanistan’s $40-50 billion worth of poppy production today is a gigantic leap from it’s approximately $5-10 billion before our invasion after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Similar to cases shown above our media’s selective coverage has been limiting it’s reporting to a few hundred million dollars of this industry which directly involves the Afghan farmers and warlords. Yet, uniformly missing from the coverage is the remaining $40+ billion! Based on numerous reports publicized by Europol, UN, and even our own State Department, over 90% of this industry is operated, managed and carried out by ‘others.’ These ‘others’ happen to include Turkey, Pakistan, and Albania; currently none of them on our ‘terrorist’ or ‘axis of evil’ list, thus the censored coverage.

As we can see, the U.S. press censorship trend when it comes to Government-Narcotics relationships has been replicated over and over: Contra-Cocaine, Cold War era Afghanistan-Heroin, KLA-Heroin, Post 911 Afghanistan-Heroin. This trend goes above and beyond the usual censorship and/or spins regularly exercised by our media. They seem to have collectively designated U.S. Government-Narcotics-Terrorist relations and operations as a ‘Forbidden Apple.’ Moreover, they seem to have been successful in ensuring the marginalization and downfall of any of their colleagues who have been bold and brave enough to take a bite of it. As stated by my good journalist friend ‘…can’t touch this.’