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.

David Albright, President of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), has a new book out (which I haven’t read) about AQ Khan and the nuclear black market called Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies.

In the “Acknowledgements” section of the book, Albright writes: “Many former government officials generously provided critical knowledge about the Khan Network, US policy, nuclear terrorism, and illicit nuclear trade. In particular, I would like to thank Richard Barlow, Joseph DeThomas, Robert Einhorn, Mark Fitzpatrick, Robert Galluci, Thomas Graham, Marc Grossman, Khalid Hassan, Fred McGoldrick, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Joseph Nye, Howard Shaffer and John Wolf.”

While most of these people are acknowledged experts in nuclear matters, the name Marc Grossman stands out as someone without particular expertise in this area. Since when has Marc Grossman been an informed source on these matters? Why is David Albright talking to Grossman? And why is Grossman talking to David Albright? And for how long has Grossman been plying Albright with ‘information‘?

Albright has been criticized by many in the intelligence community, and if Marc Grossman has always been a source, then it is no wonder that Alright is poorly regarded.

It is true that Grossman was a political officer at the Pakistan Embassy in the early 1970s when AQ Khan was getting started, and Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey from 1994-1997 when Turkish entities were involved in supplying the Khan network, and he was Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in 2003 when a US-based Turkish company was caught supplying the Khan network – so he could conceivably assist Albright in some of these matters, but as far as I can tell, nobody has ever turned to Grossman for expertise on any of these issues, at least not publicly.

Is it possible that Grossman has been offering himself as a ’source’ to various authors to spin the stories away from the truth?

First, let’s revisit some of the Grossman’s activities according to former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds. In an article in the American Conservative by Phil Giraldi, Ms Edmonds describes systemic blackmail operations where Richard Perle and Douglas Feith supplied Grossman with information about specific (sexual, financial etc) vulnerabilities which could be used to blackmail people who had access to secret information, including nuclear secrets. Grossman would then give the information “to foreign agents who exploited the vulnerabilities of these people to recruit them as sources of information.”

In the same article, Ms Edmonds also states that the criminal network also “had a network of Turkish professors in various universities with access to government information.” In order to maintain and expand the network, a key asset, who was a professor of nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “would place a bunch of Ph.D. or graduate-level students in various nuclear facilities like Sandia or Los Alamos, and some of them were able to work for the Air Force.” Ms Edmonds further stated that “If for some reason they had difficulty getting a security clearance, Grossman would ensure that the State Department would arrange to clear them.”

Under oath (PDF), Ms Edmonds stated that Marc Grossman was on the payroll of various players in the nuclear black market and that he actively hindered efforts by the CIA to penetrate and unravel the nuclear black market. Ms Edmonds said that, in 2001, Grossman alerted his ‘business associates’ that nuclear consulting company, Brewster Jennings, was actually a CIA front company which was investigating the proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Grossman’s outing of Brewster Jennings forced the CIA to shutter the company, doing untold damage to the anti-proliferation efforts, and putting many agents and sources in danger.

In short, Marc Grossman was actually a vital player in the so-called ‘AQ Khan network,’ and should be facing criminal charges.

David Albright’s use of Grossman as a credible source in a book about ‘arming America’s enemies’ is beyond ironic, and it undermines everything that Albright says or writes, and yet for some reason Albright is consistently presented as a serious expert on TV and radio, and given a chance to peddle his book.
 

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.