>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“It’s news to you…”<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Doug
Horne was the Chief Military Analyst for the Assassination Records Review Board
that was delegated to study the Kennedy assassination by Congress in 1992.
He says, quite frankly, "there was massive fraud in the evidence,"*
and that the autopsy results released after the autopsy at Bethesda Naval
Hospital are false, and conceal an exit wound that prove the fact that he was struck
by a bullet from the front, as well as the ones that hit him in the back of the
head.
In a unique position to know the truth, Mr. Horne claims that the real autopsy
reports have been destroyed, and the available documents are forgeries.[* recent interview with author Jim Marrs.]
EARL
NASH RECOMMENDS:
For
the definitive, documented book on who killed JFK, RFK and MLK read:
LEGACY
OF SECRECY by Lamar Waldron
with Thom Hartman, 2009, 903 pp., ISBN #978-1-58243-535-0, COUNTERPOINT, $24.95,
$16.47 Amazon (new) http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_15?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=legacy+of+secrecy&sprefix=legacy+of+secre
For years, there have been financial analysts that have been
warning of this day. They have been warning that when the Chinese and
other foreign governments start dumping Treasuries it will send interest rates
skyrocketing through the roof and it will crash the U.S. economy.
China has decided that now is the time to start dumping
U.S. Treasuries. The Treasury Department announced on Tuesday that
foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities fell by $53 billion in
December, which is an all-time record decline for one month. China
alone reduced its holdings by $34.2 billion. So is this because the U.S.
doesn't need to borrow as much money anymore? Of course not.
In fact, the Obama administration just released a new budget
which calls for a record 1.56 trillion dollar budget deficit. Obama has
publicly stated that the U.S. will be running trillion dollar deficits for the
foreseeable future.
No, China is not getting rid of U.S. Treasuries because
the U.S. doesn't need to borrow anymore. The U.S. needs to borrow from
China (and from everyone else) more than ever.
So what is going on?
The truth is that China recognizes that the long-term
prognosis for U.S. Treasuries is really bad. The U.S. government had
piled up the biggest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and when the U.S. dollar eventually collapses
(and it will) the Chinese could end up holding a trillion dollars of
worthless paper.
So they are slowly starting to slide towards the door, hoping
that everyone else does not suddenly catch on that the party is over.
The Chinese know that the great U.S. economy is slowly
spiralling into the toilet. Everyone is so focused on the financial
disaster in Greece right now, but Michael Pento, a senior market strategist
with Delta Global Advisors, says that the financial situation in the United
States is "worse than Greece".
The Chinese don't want to be the ones left standing when this
bizarre game of musical chairs is over. In fact, it is just not U.S.
Treasuries that the Chinese are getting rid of. There are reports that
the Chinese government has ordered its reserve managers to dump
all "riskier securities" and to hold on to only
U.S. Treasuries and U.S. agency debt that comes with an implicit or an explicit
U.S. government guarantee.
But as we have seen, the Chinese government is also reducing
the size of their U.S. Treasury holdings.
Well, China is starting to dump Treasuries and the U.S.
government is borrowing more money than ever, but interest rates are staying
somewhat stable.
So what is happening?
Well, as we have covered previously, the truth is that the
Federal Reserve is soaking up the excess borrowing. Some analysts refer
to this as "printing money", but it is more like "printing
debt". In fact, the Fed "bought" the vast majority of new U.S.
Treasuries issued in 2009.
So that is how the U.S. government can continue to borrow
obscene amounts of money when the rest of the world won't lend it to us.
But this can't continue forever and it is obviously a recipe for hyperinflation
in the long-term.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are trying to make a smooth move
towards the "exit" sign. Whether they will be able to
successfully pull it off is another matter.
Economic inequality and the myth of Reaganomics'
"trickle down" logic are shown by new data:
“What has been missing from the public
debate over the labor market crisis is an honest and detailed analysis
of which American workers have been most adversely affected by the
deep deterioration in labor markets.”
The researchers from the Center for Labor Market
Studies at Northeastern University in Boston found a
correlation between household income and unemployment rate in the last quarter
of 2009.
Look carefully at these numbers and see how unemployment
rises as income drops:
$150,000 or more, 3.2 percent
$100,000 to 149,999, 8.0 percent
$75,000 to $99,999, 5.0 percent
$60,000 to $75,000, 6.4 percent
$50,000 to $59,000, 7.8 percent
$40,000 to $49,000, 9.0 percent
$30,000 to $39,999, 12.2 percent
$20,000 to $29,999, 19.7 percent
$12,500 to $20,000, 19.1 percent
$12,499 or less, 30.8 percent
Ten
times worse unemployment in the lowest class than in the highest class! Truly
amazing and disheartening, don’t you think?
And you can also infer that in some hard hit
geographical areas the poorest people and people of color are being even more
adversely impacted. And don’t think for a minute that things have
really improved in 2010.
The report summed up the situation: “A true
labor market depression faced those in the bottom…of the income distribution; a
deep labor market recession prevailed among those in the middle of the
distribution, and close to a full employment environment prevailed at the
top.”
People at the top remain winners no matter how bad the whole
economy. Why? The wealthy Upper Class controls so much of
the political system and benefit from countless government
policies. They may lose something in an economic meltdown but not
enough to suffer significantly.
Conversely, those at the bottom of the economic
system with no political power are experiencing something as bad as the Great
Depression, with no end in sight.
What pundits don’t emphasize is that government
policies that do not target lower income groups are a failure and
disgrace. Worse than destroying the middle class, we are creating a
Lower Class like that found in third world countries. Indeed,
compared to places like China and European nations, America ’s poor are
suffering about as badly as anyone on the planet, except for a few dismal
places like Haiti . Needing food handouts, losing homes, missing
health insurance, and lacking jobs mock the American Dream.
Wait; there is even more bad
news. When underemployment is factored in — part time workers that
want to work full time, and those who have stopped looking but want a job — the
picture gets even worse. In the lowest group, the underemployment
rate was 20.6 percent, compared with just 1.6 percent in the highest
group. So the total in the lowest class is 51.4 percent (3.7 million
people) compared to 4.8 percent in the wealthy class (530,000
people). Also consider that last November nearly 20 percent of all
men between 25 and 54 did not have jobs, the highest figure since the labor
bureau began counting in 1948.
Now you know why the constantly noted official
jobless rate for the nation of 10 percent and 17 percent when underemployment
is counted are a joke, or is it a purposeful deception, like a truth bubble?
How can jobs be created for the lower economic
classes? You hear very, very few new ideas from
politicians. It comes down to federal spending that better targets
job creation to the lower income groups, and waiting for more general consumer
spending, especially by the more affluent, to create more low level jobs,
mostly in service areas. But we need specifics and better
legislation.
Consider this green energy fiasco. A
huge amount of federal stimulus money provided for building wind
farms. It is creating jobs in Chine to build wind turbines, not in
America . In fact, 80 percent of such federal funding is going
overseas. All because Congress and the White House did not ensure a
made-in-America requirement. Was a backroom deal made to keep China
happy so that they would keep loaning us money?
When the poorest people suffer so
disproportionately as compared to the wealthiest, perhaps only violent
revolution will fix America ’s dysfunctional, broken and delusional
democracy. Will President Obama cite the above frightening data in
any public forum to make the case for stronger federal efforts? What
do you think?
The high numbers for the lower income people
mean that no amount of government action, in even five years or more, will
solve jobless problem, because no amount of economic growth can possibly create
enough new jobs. The US would have to produce 10 million new jobs
just to get back to the unemployment levels of 2007 - impossible for many
years. So, politicians will keep making things look better by citing
the national average.
Can you
trust national averages? As bad as the jobless data you hear are, you
have not been told the whole truth. If you think the terrible impact
of America ’s Great Recession is shown by an official unemployment rate of
about 10 percent, think again.
EARL NASH, WTFG L I V E FREE OR D I E Correspondent
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“It’s news to you…”<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
A new law that
would give the President (or the Sec. of Defense) the authority to detain
people without trial--not because they were captured on a military
battlefield, but because they are considered a threat to national
security. But, what would stop a
President from abusing such authority in a moment of national crisis?
During the
Cheney-Bush years, the Patriot Act gave the Sec. of Defense the sole authority
to declare a person an "enemy combatant" and arrest them and hold
them without any guarantee of appearing before a judge (aka habeas corpus), a
"speedy trial," or any trial at all.Initially it had support, since it only applied to non-citizens, but it
was later revised to allow any American citizen to be labeled and "enemy
combatant."
The new law,
proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham would allow for indefinite detention of anyone
deemed an "enemy combatant."This essentially negates "habeas corpus" rights and means any
American citizen could be indefinitely imprisoned without a trial.
Whether you are an
Obama or Bush supporter, are you willing to let anyone take away your legal
rights to a court appearance, a speedy trial, a trial by your peers, or
sentencing determined by a judge and jury?
Any future Sec. of
Defense can arbitrarily determine that you are an "enemy combatant"
and the President can order that you be indefinitely imprisoned.Welcome to the Banana Republic of America and
Gulag Americana.
BEND OVER, MOTHERFUCKERS !!!
Civil liberties advocates and
many who back Obama’s effort to close Guantanamo have opposed a
preventive detention law as a departure from the tradition of
prosecuting and punishing individuals for specific crimes. Some critics
have also expressed worries that such a law would be hard to limit and
could be extended well beyond Al Qaeda operatives.
Asked why the administration had become more open to a detention
statute, Graham cited recent court rulings and comments by several
federal judges who said the legal standards for detaining enemy
prisoners are too vague.
“The judges are just absolutely beside themselves,” Graham said. “I
think that is something new the administration is listening to — the
judiciary. ... I do believe there is a willingness by some in the
administration to sit down and reform our habeas statutes.”
Some human rights advocates said Monday that they didn’t doubt Graham
had discussed a detention statute with the White House but were
skeptical that officials there are actively considering it.
“I’m sure that that’s what Sen. Graham thinks, [but] I don’t have
any reason to think the administration has changed its view on this.
The president was quite clear he does not want to legislate a system of
preventative detention,” said Elisa Massimino of Human Rights First.
“In both private conversations and in public, the attorney general and
other people in the administration said they’re committed to driving
the people detained without charge to zero. I think that would be
inconsistent with a pledge to do that.”
Massimino also said Graham and others appeared to be trying “hold
hostage” the Sept. 11-related cases in order to achieve other
legislative goals.
Graham did not say explicitly whether the law under discussion with the
White House would cover only the men currently detained at Guantanamo
Bay or others who might be captured in the future.
Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch suggested that a law allowing future detentions would be of the greatest concern.
“If they are in fact considering preventive detention legislation
today, I think it would be a mistake both substantively and
politically,” Malinowski said. “Legislating preventive detention for
the future would turn the Guantanamo anomaly into a permanent legal
norm. It would give every future president an authority that hasn’t
existed since the Alien and Sedition Acts — the authority to detain
people without trial not because they were captured on a military
battlefield but because they are considered a threat to national
security. There is no way to write that law (especially in this
Congress) to prevent a less scrupulous president from abusing such
authority in a moment of national crisis.”
At least four federal court judges handling cases in which Guantanamo
inmates challenged their detention have complained recently that the
courts and the prisoners have no clear understanding of the legal
standards to apply.
“It is unfortunate, in my view, that the legislative branch of the
government, and the executive branch, have not moved more strongly to
provide uniform, clear rules and laws for handling these cases,” Judge
Thomas Hogan said at a hearing in December.
"It's an honor to have the responsibility of blazing the trail in
determining how justice should be administered in these cases," Judge
Ricardo Urbina said last month in an interview with ProPublica.
"By the same token, it's also at times frustrating when not all the
rules are clear and not all the specifics of how a matter should be
dealt with are before us."
"He has lost my confidence and is the best evidence yet how disconnected this
administration has come from the fact we are at war" with terrorists, Graham
said on "Fox News Sunday."
Graham criticized Brennan for his role in giving Miranda rights to accused
Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and for suggesting a 20 percent
rate of terrorists returning to the battlefield was acceptable.
On other issues, Graham said his colleague Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., was
wrong to place a blanket hold last week on President Obama's nominees. Graham
said he was glad the hold had been lifted and he also criticized Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., for partisan
maneuverings of his own.
"Harry Reid has put more bills into the hopper ... than anybody I know of but
we are all in this together," Graham said.
A great deal of meaningful activity is occurring in the
brain when a person is sitting back and doing nothing at all , according to recent analysis
produced by neuroimaging technologies.
It
turns out that when your mind is at rest—when you are daydreaming
quietly in a chair, say, asleep in a bed or anesthetized for
surgery—dispersed brain areas are chattering away to one another. And
the energy consumed by this ever active messaging, known as the brain’s
default mode, is about 20 times that used by the brain when it
responds consciously to a pesky fly or another outside stimulus.
Indeed, most things we do consciously, be it sitting down to eat dinner
or making a speech, mark a departure from the baseline activity of the
brain default mode.
Key Concepts
Neuroscientists have long thought that the brain’s circuits are turned off when a person is at rest.
Imaging experiments, however, have shown that there is a persistent level of background activity.
This default mode, as it is called, may be critical in planning future actions.
Miswiring of brain regions involved in the default mode may lead to disorders ranging from Alzheimer’s to schizophrenia.
President Obama
has announced some $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new reactors
planned for Georgia, although their Westinghouse AP-1000 designs have been
rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as being unable to
withstand natural cataclysms like hurricanes, tornadoes and
earthquakes.As
Vermont seethes with radioactive contamination and the Democratic Party
crumbles, Barack Obama has plunged into the atomic abyss.
In
the face of fierce green opposition and withering scorn from both
liberal and conservative budget hawks, Obama has done what George W.
Bush could not---pledge billions of taxpayer dollars for a relapse of
the 20th Century's most expensive technological failure.
The Vogtle site was to originally host four reactors at a total cost of $600 million; it wound up with two at $9 billion.
The
Southern Company which wants to build these two new reactors has cut at
least one deal with Japanese financiers set to cash in on American
taxpayer largess. The interest rate on the federal guarantees remains
bitterly contested. The funding is being debated between at least five
government agencies, and may well be tested in the courts. It's not
clear whether union labor will be required and what impact that might
have on construction costs.
The
Congressional Budget Office and other analysts warn the likely failure
rate for government-back reactor construction loans could be in excess
of 50%. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has admitted he was unaware of the
CBO's report when he signed on to the Georgia guarantees.
Over
the past several years the estimated price tag for proposed new
reactors has jumped from $2-3 billion each in some cases to more than
$12 billion today. The Chair of the NRC currently estimates it at $10
billion, well before a single construction license has been issued,
which will take at least a year.
Energy
experts at the Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere estimate that a
dollar invested in increased efficiency could save as much as seven
times as much energy than one invested in nuclear plants can produce,
while producing ten times as many permanent jobs.
Georgia
has been targeted largely because its regulators have demanded
ratepayers put up the cash for the reactors as they're being built.
Florida and Georgia are among a small handful of states taxing electric
consumers for projects that cannot come on line for many years, and
that may never deliver a single electron of electricity.
Two
Florida Public Service Commissioners, recently appointed by Republican
Governor Charlie Crist (now a candidate for the US Senate), helped
reject over a billion dollars in rate hikes demanded by Florida Power
& Light and Progress Energy, both of which want to build
double-reactors at ratepayer expense. The utilities now say they'll
postpone the projects proposed for Turkey Point and Levy County.
In
2005 the Bush Administration set aside some $18.5 billion for reactor
loan guarantees, but the Department of Energy has been unable to
administer them. Obama wants an additional $36 billion to bring the
fund up to $54.5 billion. Proposed projects in South Carolina, Maryland
and Texas appear to be next in line.
But
the NRC has raised serious questions about Toshiba-owned Westinghouse's
AP-1000 slated for Georgia's Vogtle site, as well as for South Carolina
and Turkey Point. The French-made EPR design proposed for Maryland has
been challenged by regulators in Finland, France and Great Britain. In
Texas, a $4 billion price jump has sparked a political upheaval in San
Antonio and elsewhere, throwing the future of that project in doubt.
Taxpayers
are also on the hook for potential future accidents from these new
reactors. In 1957, the industry promised Congress and the country that
nuclear technology would quickly advance to the point that private
insurers would take on the liability for any future disaster, which
could by all serious estimates run into the hundreds of billions of
dollars. Only $11 billion has been set aside the cover the cost of such
a catastrophe. But now the industry says it will not build even this
next generation of plants without taxpayers underwriting liability for
future accidents. Thus the "temporary" program could ultimately stretch
out to a full century or more.
In
the interim, Obama has all but killed Nevada's proposed Yucca Mountain
nuclear waste dump. He has appointed a commission of nuclear advocates
to "investigate" the future of high-level reactor waste. But after 53
years, the industry is further from a solution than ever.
Meanwhile,
the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reported that at least 27 of
America's 104 licensed reactors are now leaking radioactive tritium.
The worst case may be Entergy's Vermont Yankee, near the state's
southeastern border with New Hampshire and Massachusetts. High levels
of contamination have been found in test wells around the reactor, and
experts believe the Connecticut River is at serious risk.
A
furious statewide grassroots campaign aims to shut the plant, whose
license expires in 2012. A binding agreement between Entergy and the
state gives the legislature the power to deny an extension. US Senator
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has demanded the plant close. The legislature may
vote on it in a matter of days.
Obama
has now driven a deep wedge between himself and the core of the
environmental movement, which remains fiercely anti-nuclear. While
reactor advocates paint the technology green, the opposition has been
joined by fiscal conservatives like the National Taxpayer Institute,
the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Reactor
backers hailing a "renaissance" in atomic energy studiously ignore
France's catastrophic Olkiluoto project, now $3 billion over budget and
3 years behind schedule. Parallel problems have crippled another
project at Flamanville, France, and are virtually certain to surface in
the US.
The reactor industry
has spent untold millions lobbying for this first round of loan
guarantees. There's no doubt it will seek far more in the coming
months. Having failed to secure private American financing, the
question will be: in a tight economy, how much public money will
Congress throw at this obsolete technology.
The
potential flow of taxpayer guarantees to Georgia means nuclear
opponents now have a tangible target. Also guaranteed is ferocious
grassroots opposition to financing, licensing and construction of this
and all other new reactor proposals, as well as to continued operation
of leaky rustbucket reactors like Vermont Yankee.
The "atomic renaissance" is still a very long way from going tangibly critical.
Harvey Wasserman
is Senior Advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information &
Resource Service. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH is at www.solartopia.org.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“It’s news to YOU...” <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
There is no "W" in AFGHANISTAN, no
"win" for the United States, because winning, as with Vietnam, relies
on winning the "hearts and minds" of the Afghans.The Pentagon's philosophy--"Get them by
the balls and their hearts and minds will follow" is still arrogant bully
bullshit.
No foreign invader and
occupier has ever "won" in Afghanistan, because this is a tribal
culture, older than even American democracy, with a local locus of power and
will never recognize a central government--especially one run by the U S
"trained" puppet "Heroin Hamid" Karzai.
Kriminal Karzai, whom the citizens mockingly "The
Mayor of Kabul," because that is the handful of sand that he has some
modicum of control over.The insurgents,
the Taliban, control 90% of the country and, while many citizens are not
enthusiastic supporters of the Taliban, their only other choice is Korrupt
Karzai, who is propped up by a major military power that they believe will,
like all the others, not remain to protect them.
Happy Hamid is willing to repeat whatever a U
S Senator tells him to say to the press, feign dismay when the invading troops
kill his civilians,
all the while stuffing his pockets full of war and drug
money, until he moves to Langley, Virginia, where he can walk to work at the
CIA.
The people do not believe that CIA-trained
Karzai, or any "President," or central government or Afghan National
Army will ever be competent, respected, or potent and, once their U S
"trainers" leave, it will be business as usual; the endemic tribal
culture will c0ntiue its inexorable sociocentric role of rule, order and stability.
Didn't the well-respected leader of the U S House
of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, say?
"All politics is local."
President Obama recently said that the
definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting a
different outcome.
Yet he is allowing the Pentagon to, once again,
play the Fall Guy role in the slapstick "comedy" routine that goes
like this:
* "Insurgents" threaten a puppet
government supported by the U S.
* The insurgents are linked to al-Qaeda and
9-11.
* The U S asserts its "right" to
send troops into a sovereign nation, because it is "harboring terrorists,"
who might be plotting another 9-11 attack.
* The puppet government "asks" the U
S to send troops to kill the "insurgents" and train the local
citizens to fight the insurgents, until the local forces are ready to take
over, so the U S can leave.
* The U S gets suckered, once again, into
guerilla-style, close-quarters warfare on the enemy's home turf on the enemy's
terms.
* The U S reaches a stalemate, where is it neither
winning nor losing, but many U S soldiers and the civilians of the occupied
country are dying and costs in "blood and treasure" are mounting.
* The Pentagon tries to create the illusion of
a "conclusive" victory that "breaks the back" of the
insurgency; it is called a "surge."
* The Pentagon, fearing bad press from killing
civilians, announces when the troops will arrive.
*The
insurgents set booby traps, road bombs and, leaving a few token fighters behind
to create uncertainty, they blend back into the population or the cavesand wait for the U S to "take
control" of the area and declare that the "surge" was a great
success.
* Since the locals know that, sooner or later,
the U S will run out of "blood and treasure," or the patience of the
U S citizens will wear out, they play along with the invading army.
* The process continues until the price in
"marrow and money" becomes too much to bear--the invading country is
being bled dry by the war--and they claim that the puppet government is ready
to take over security and pull out.
Didn't a world power once send troops across
the Atlantic to put down an insurgency in its colonies?Didn't they get defeated by insurgents using
guerilla tactics? Didn't those insurgents create a unique democratic
system?Didn't it work because of a
"perfect storm" of anti-monarchy unity, boundless land and resources,
a trusting native population, the greed of capitalism, the unified commonweal
of hearts and minds?Wasn't it a
one-time confluence of fate that allowed a unique seed to grow in a singularly
perfect fecund field?
It is time for Americans to reject the
Cheney/Neocon arrogant claim of "exceptionalism," that says "we
are better than other humans and other cultures and we have the one true God
and He is on our side."
Someone once advised Lyndon Johnson near the
end of the Vietnam War:
"Declare victory and pull out."
That is what President Obama is doing in Iraq and it
will soon do so in Afghanistan and move on to another Middle East
country--likely on the "Arabian Peninsula" that is harboring
terrorists who might produce another "9-11." (Of coures, it will be more difficult to pull that off
again without the complicity of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Mossad.)
And, as with Vietnam, long after the U S has
declared victory and pulled out, after draining its "marrow and
money" to the point of near bankruptcy, the "conquered"
countries will resume its cultural continuity and return to life as it was
before and always will be.
In Afghanistan, the local tribal leaders will
restore order, the people will again live in fear of another invasion by a
"great power" and, once again, a thousand poppies will bloom.
The American and other troops that are coming into
the city of Marjah itself, however, have encountered larger than
expected numbers of roadside bombs and continued sniping and other
harassment from the Taliban there. Pajhwok News says that Taliban subjected US Marines who had entered Marjah and were raising an Afghan flag on a city building to intense fire. The Marines riposted vigorously.
Both the British and Americans report finding large weapons and explosives caches.
This resistance in Marjah impelled the US military to
fire rockets from a truck mount at what they thought was the source of
attacks, but the rockets hit a civilian dwelling and killed 12
civilians, ten of them from the same family. Gen. Stanley McChrystal,
the BBC says, called a halt to the use of these rockets, since blowing
up civlian houses was precisely the sort of thing the US, NATO and
Afghan forces were hoping to avoid. They conceive of Marjah as a
counter-insurgency operation, which begins by clearing out the
insurgents but then depends on the territory being held in the long
term, with locals being guaranteed security and prosperity by the
forces coming in from Kabul. Very many rocket mishaps could make this
outcome (of Pashtuns in Marjah swinging around to liking the foreign
troops or becoming big supporters of the government of President Hamid
Karzai in Kabul) even less likely that it already seems on the surface.
The USG Open Source Center translates the Afghan Islamic Press article:
' "The Taleban also reported fighting in Marja
District and the Taleban spokesman, Qari Mohammad Yusof Ahmadi, told
Afghan Islamic Press this morning, 14 February, that the Taleban blew
up a number of armoured vehicles of foreign forces through mines in
Marja District and its surrounding areas last night and inflicted
casualties on foreign forces.
Like yesterday, the noise of heavy weapons being fired was
heard in Marja District today. A large number of aircraft were flying
over the area and the people were fleeing that area.
It seems that the Taleban have been engaged in fighting until now, but it is not clear for how long the Taleban will resist." '
Both in Marjah and in Nad Ali, the commanders of the invading forces have held gatherings or Shuras with local elders.
Pajhwok News Agency reports that Afghan Gen. her Mohammad Zazai said at a news conference Sunday
that 25 Taliban had been killed in the previous 24 hours. This low
number of enemy dead in the face of a 15,000-man invasion force armed
with helicopter gunships and tanks underlines that most of the Taliban
are using guerrilla tactics rather than standing and fighting. No
Afghan troops were killed in the assault as of Sunday evening.
AP covers the slow approach of the NATO/ Afghan forces, necessitated by the large numbers of roadside bombs set by the Taliban:
Aljazeera English reports on the first phase of the
campaign, interviewing a local resident who expressed severe doubt that
the Taliban could be permanently run out of Marjah:
Juan Cole is President of the Global Americana Institute.
What a joke. Every
breathing Afghan will be a Taliban volunteer after we get done chasing
them from their homes or outright killing the neighbors. The whole
thing is insane.
I'm sickened by Gen. McCaffrey, who makes six
figures plus every year we are there. He gets on MSNBC and says we will
have to be there for many years. What a scumbag.
The place is a
hole, all they have are poppies and a route for pipelines from the
Caspian Sea. There was supposed to be billions of cubic feet of Nat.
Gas under the Sea, but the test drills are all dry.
So now we are there so the Taliban won't kill the poppies? Wouldn't surprise me.
One piece of the
great enigma puzzle of the Sept. 11
attacks demands explanation: Who owns Hangar 17 at JFK airport, where the only
known 9/11 evidence still in existence is locked away from public scrutiny?
When
viewed from a certain angle, Hangar 17 has a prominent, unfaded billboard that
says "Tower Air.. Tower Airlines was
anIsraeliairline that went bankrupt in 2000 .
None other than Hangar 17 housed Tower Air’s then brand-new corporate
headquarters.
Why does 9/11 evidentiary material
that would provide cluessit for “safekeeping”
in the former Executive Headquarters of a ten-year-defunct Israeli front
organization that contracted heavily for the U.S. Defense Department and still
has an unfaded sign hanging on the building?
*Evidence
such as the absence or presence of Super Thermite or other explosive material
in the dust from the blasts.
Mike Ruppert reported that the Israeli container and
freight-shipping corporation Zim , who occupied several floors in the Twin
Towers and is widely known to do extensive operational support work for the Mossad, vacated all their offices days
before the attacks – and they vacated in violation of their lease.
While posing as a dinky,
small-time Israeli airline that played second-fiddle to El-Al by catering
mainly to Israel-New York Orthodox Jewish air traffic (dubbed affectionately by
their clientele ” ChassidicAir ” – Tower even printed and distributed booklets
on the arcane Halachic aspects of how to face Jerusalem during the
uninterruptible Standing Prayer on New York-bound flights should the “Fasten
Seat Belts” sign start flashing during turbulence), Tower Air won several
exclusive major contracts from the United States Department of Defense to
transport U.S. armed forces personnel to overseas locations. Tower was the
second largest troop carrier during the first Persian Gulf War, flying U.S.
troops and cargo in 300 sorties.
In 1993, Tower kept busy flying
U.S. military personnel and cargo to support operations in Somalia. It was the
first airline to fly troops into Mogadishu and also transported refugees for
the United Nations during the conflict.
The pattern in my mind that caused
the Tower Air sign in Conspiracy Theory to jump out at me like a red flag upon
seeing it was established in the late ’80’s and early ’90’s, when, in my capacity as the Diplomatic Project
Director for the Federation for American Afghan Action, I identified one of the
many facets of Israeli involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair, and exposed a
U.S./Israeli front organization that was operationally similar to Tower Air in
many respects. It was (and is, as far as I’m aware) called the Intergraph
Corporation , which served as the diversion pipeline mechanism to Iran for
SuperHawk spare parts from allied military installations in Western Europe
through Israel to Iran, rendering entire U.S.and NATO ground-to-air missile
defense umbrellas inoperative and vulnerable. I personally saw Intergraph
shipments in Ben Gurion Airport’s Mamman Hangar building while investigating
the matter in collaboration with a former Westinghouse employee who was fired
and subsequently victimized in a campaign to destroy his livelihood and several
murder attempts, similar to the campaigns that have been and are currently
being waged against me.
Eleven years ago, during
Netanyahu’s first tenure as Israel’s Prime Minister, my Report on the
Acquiescence of the Israeli Government in Palestinian Authority First Strike in
Judea and Samaria (published as Policy Paper #107 by the Ariel Center for
Policy Research) made it to the desk of the Israeli Minister of Defense (one
may Google the report), whose office contacted me for an “interview”, and since
then I have learned a double lesson: how brittle are the evil policies of
betrayal and abandonment when smashed by the light of public exposure and
indignation, and how no brutality will be considered too low to commit for a
government functionary who has been faced with a choice between loyalty to a
principle of human values, ethics, or morals on the one hand, and loyalty to a
source of power on the other – and has chosen the latter.
Every action he will subsequently
make will be dedicated to suppression and cover-up of his convoluted covert
agendas, even if it means condemning inconvenient innocents to suffering or
death.
I was targeted in a murder attempt
by the Israeli government (a police car rammed me as I was waiting at a red
light; no less than six ambulances were pre-positioned at the scene and
evacuated bystanders who suffered minor injuries while leaving me in my totaled
car at the scene); while thank God the attempt at my life was unsuccessful, I
did sustain among other things spinal damage and a fractured pelvis that has
rendered me crippled until this day, and for the past six years witnessed a
craftily orchestrated campaign to destroy my twenty-year-marriage and once
beautiful family with six children whom I am currently in the midst of battling
for with Israel’s own version of Child Protective Services. And woe to the man
who does not have the money to either heal or defend himself against the
vengeance of the wicked ones of this world.
There are several more parallels
and similarities to Hangar 17 that demonstrate just how far, and with what
determined desperation the power-hungry Hollow People In Power are willing to
go to topple the walls of civilization. In a global society that has become
careless of justice, a materialist civilization that daily grows more and more
insecure and panicky as awareness begins to seep through that they are standing
over an abyss, the bourgeois barbarians and morally castrated scumbags will
never acknowledge defeat or concede the only imperative that holds for them any
relevance: their appetite to concentrate and maintain power. Our obligation –
those of us who have fought to retain enough of our souls to sense the
impending tragedy – is to continue our struggle against the extinction of the
idea of mission. Our mission – recalling that simplest of truths for which the
Founding Fathers battled tyranny to establish our nation, that there are things
more precious than life, and more horrible than death – is to establish a
formal political mechanism to achieve and express a consensus based upon that
“simple truth” of life and death so that those who seek to trample that line
may no longer be remotely comfortable in the ease with which they swindle us
into accepting their tyrannical objectives.
Photos taken of the Twin Towers on 9-11 by a police helicopter reinforce claims that the buildings were "collapsed" by the detonation of demolition charges.
The images were the only photographs
allowed in the air space near the towers on September 11, 2001.
Underwriters Laboratory had certified the steel up to 2,000°F for three
to four hours. When NIST sampled 236 pieces of steel, it found 233 had
not even been exposed to temperatures above 500°F--and the other three
not above 1,200°F.
A string of recent exposes has shown that
Obama is in fact maintaining a battery of secret prisons where people
are held without charge indefinitely - and he is even expanding them.
The Kabul-based journalist Anand Gopal has written a remarkable expose
for The Nation magazine. His story begins in the Afghan village of
Zaiwalat at 3.15am on the night of November 19th 2009. A platoon of US
soldiers blasted their way into a house in search of Habib ur-Rahman, a
young computer programmer and government employee who they had been
told by someone, somewhere was a secret Talibanist. His two cousins
came out to see what the noise was - and they were shot to death. As
the children of the house screamed, Habib was bundled into a helicopter
and whisked away. He has never been seen since. His family do not know
if he is alive or dead.
This is not an
unusual event in Afghanistan today. In this small village of 300
people, some 16 men have been "disappeared" by the US and 10 killed in
night raids in the past two years. The locals believe people are simply
settling old clan feuds by telling the Americans their rivals are
jihadists. Habib's cousin Qarar, who works for the Afghan government,
says: "I used to go on TV and argue that people should support the
government and the foreigners. But I was wrong. Why should anyone do
so?"
Where are all these men vanishing to? Obama ordered the closing of the
CIA's secret prisons, but not those run by Joint Special Operations.
They maintain a Bermuda Triangle of jails with the notorious Bagram Air
Base at its centre. One of the few outsiders has been into this
ex-Soviet air-hangar is the military prosecutor Stuart Couch. He says:
"In my view, having visited Guantanamo several times, the Bagram
facility made Guantanamo look like a nice hotel. The men did not appear
to be able to move around at will, they mostly sat in rows on the
floor. It smelled like the monkey house at the zoo."
We know that at least two innocent young men were tortured to death in
Bagram. Der Spiegel has documented how some "inmates were raped with
sticks or threatened with anal sex". The accounts of released prisoners
suggest the very worst abuses stopped in the last few years of the Bush
administration, and Obama is supposed to have forbidden torture, but
it's hard to tell. We do know Obama has permitted the use of solitary
confinement lasting for years - a process that often drives people
insane. The International Red Cross has been allowed to visit some of
them, but in highly restricted circumstances, and their reports remain
confidential. In this darkness, abuse becomes far more likely.
The Obama administration is appealing against US court rulings
insisting the detainees have the right to make a legal case against
their arbitrary imprisonment. And the White House is insisting they can
forcibly snatch anyone they suspect from anywhere in the world - with
no legal process - and take them there. Yes: Obama is fighting for the
principles behind Guantanamo Bay. The frenzied debate about whether the
actual camp in Cuba is closed is a distraction, since he is proposing
to simply relocate it to less sunny climes.
Once you vanish into this system, you have no way to get yourself out.
The New York lawyer Tina Foster represents three men who were kidnapped
by US forces in Thailand, Pakistan and Dubai and bundled to Bagram,
where they have been held without charge for seven years now. She tells
me there have been "shockingly few improvements" under Obama. "The Bush
administration rubbed our faces in it, while Obama's much smoother. But
the reality is still indefinite detention without charge for people who
are judged guilty simply by association. It's contrary to everything we
stand for as a country... I know there are children [in there] from
personal experience. I have interviewed dozens of children who were
detained in Bagram, some as young as 10."
Today, Bagram is being given a $60m expansion, allowing it to hold five
times as many prisoners as Guantanamo Bay currently does. Gopal reports
that the abuse is leaking out to other, more secretive sites across
Afghanistan. They are so underground they are known only by the names
given to them by released inmates - the Salt Pit, the Prison of
Darkness. Obama also asserts his right to hand over the prisoners to
countries that commit torture, provided they give a written "assurance"
they won't be "abused" - assurances that have proved worthless in the
past. The British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith estimates there are
18,000 people trapped in these "legal black holes" by the US.
As Obama warned in the distant days of the election campaign, these
policies place us all in greater danger. Matthew Alexander, the senior
interrogator in Iraq who tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says: "I
listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite Abu
Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to
fight... We have lost hundreds if not thousands of American lives
because of our policy." The increased risk bleeds out onto the London
Underground and the nightclubs of Bali. I oppose these policies
precisely because I want to be safe, and I loathe jihadism.
President Obama has been tossing aside the calm jihad-draining insights
of candidate Obama for a year now. Whenever Obama acts like Bush,
listen carefully - you will hear the distant, delighted chuckle of
Osama bin Laden, and the needless stomp of fresh recruits heading his
way.
Bagram Airbase is located in the Parvan Province approximately 11
kilometers (7 miles) southeast of the city of Charikar and 47
Kilometers (27 miles) north of Kabul. It is served by a 10,000 foot
runway built in 1976 capable of landing large cargo and bomber
aircraft.
Bagram Airbase has three large hangars, a control tower, and
numerous support buildings. There are over 32 acres of ramp space.
There are five aircraft dispersal areas with a total of over 110
revettments. Many support buildings and base housing built by the
Soviets, have been destroyed by years of fighting between the various
warring Afghan factions.
Bagram Airbase played a key role during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
* * * * *
Osama bin Laden's favourite son,
Omar, recently abandoned his father's cave in favour of spending his
time dancing and drooling in the nightclubs of Damascus. The tang of
freedom almost always trumps Islamist fanaticism in the end: three
million people abandoned the Puritan hell of Taliban Afghanistan for
freer countries, while only a few thousand faith-addled fanatics ever
travelled the other way. Osama's vision can't even inspire his own
kids. But Omar bin Laden says his father is banking on one thing to
shore up his flailing, failing cause - and we are giving it to him.
The day George W Bush was elected, Omar says, "my father was so happy.
This is the kind of president he needs - one who will attack and spend
money and break [his own] country". Osama wanted the US and Europe to
make his story about the world ring true in every mosque and every
mountain-top and every souq. He said our countries were bent on looting
Muslim countries of their resources, and any talk of civil liberties or
democracy was a hypocritical facade. The jihadis I have interviewed -
from London to Gaza to Syria - said their ranks swelled with each new
whiff of Bushism as more and more were persuaded. It was like trying to
extinguish fire with a blowtorch.
The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities
handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at
first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was
elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap - but in practice he is
dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and
has taken the war to another Muslim country.
The CIA and hired
mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where
they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents
to snatch suspects. The casualties are overwhelmingly civilians. We may
not have noticed, but the Muslim world has: check out Al Jazeera any
night.
Obama ran on an inspiring promise to shut down Bush's network of
kidnappings and secret prisons. He said bluntly: "I do not want to hear
this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy. I know that... but
as a parent I can also imagine the terror I would feel if one of my
family members were rounded up in the middle of the night and sent to
Guantanamo without even getting one chance to ask why they were being
held and being able to prove their innocence." He said it made the US
"less safe" because any gain in safety by Gitmo-ing one suspected
jihadi - along with dozens of innocents - is wiped out by the huge
number of young men tipped over into the vile madness of jihadism by
seeing their brothers disappear into a vast military machine where they
may never be heard from again. Indeed, following the failed attack in
Detroit, Obama pointed out the wannabe-murderer named Guantanamo as the
reason he signed up for the jihad.
n the pincer move of British, US/NATO and Afghan forces on Marjah in poppy-rich Helmand Province, the Taliban 
I'm sickened by Gen. McCaffrey, who makes six figures plus every year we are there. He gets on MSNBC and says we will have to be there for many years. What a scumbag.
The place is a hole, all they have are poppies and a route for pipelines from the Caspian Sea. There was supposed to be billions of cubic feet of Nat. Gas under the Sea, but the test drills are all dry.
So now we are there so the Taliban won't kill the poppies? Wouldn't surprise me.