Afghanistan

Bad time for Asian plots! Iran busts Jundullah ringleader Rigi; Turkish Ergenekon arrested; Greek bonds; Judge: Welcome to the Fishbowl & MOAR

Submitted by HongPong on Fri, 2010-02-26 01:18

Quick hits for the fans of stuff & things. Welcome to the Fishbowl says a sad federal judge upon the abandonment of the 4th Amendment. Alex Kozinski in the 9th Circuit has some integrity... via Reason:

This is an extraordinary case: Our court approves, without blinking, a police sweep of a person’s home without a warrant, without probable cause, without reasonable suspicion and without exigency—in other words, with nothing at all to support the entry except the curiosity police always have about what they might find if they go rummaging around a suspect’s home. Once inside, the police managed to turn up a gun “in plain view”—stuck between two cushions of the living room couch—and we reward them by upholding the search.

Did I mention that this was an entry into somebody’s home, the place where the protections of the Fourth Amendment are supposedly at their zenith?…

The opinion misapplies Supreme Court precedent, conflicts with our own case law and is contrary to the great weight of authority in the other circuits. It is also the only case I know of, in any jurisdiction covered by the Fourth Amendment, where invasion of the home has been approved based on no showing whatsoever. Nada. Gar nichts. Rien du tout. Bupkes.

Whatever may have been left of the Fourth Amendment after [United States v. Black] is now gone. The evisceration of this crucial constitutional protector of the sanctity and privacy of what Americans consider their castles is pretty much complete. Welcome to the fish bowl.

Meahwhile.... The dumb ban on short selling should increase fake puffing up of the market nicely.

First off Iran and Pakistan cooperated to grab Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of the shady terrorist/militant ring Jundullah, which seems to have been an American (and possibly Indian &/or Israeli) supported Baluchi militant ring, the cats-paw for Chalabi-like gooning around. Wayne Madsen (waynemadsenreport.com) claimed Rigi was around on shady American bases and got snagged in a clever ISI-Iran op, forcing his plane to land in Dubai. Nice!

REUTERS: ANALYSIS - Rigi arrest may show easing Afghan regional tensions

On the flip side is Ergenekon, which is a humorous Turkish establishment conspiracy of secular ultranationalists perpetually plotting against the Islamists in that unique post-Byzantine way. A ton of people just got arrested and it's all really quite awesome.

NEWBORN DNA SCHEMEZ: I am glad to see the Newborn DNA scheme is getting more attention. AP story. NewScientist. Popsci.

MTV exec says Jersey Shore is civic minded for GenY.

Joe Stack and likely coming attractions. People need to stay peaceful and chill out in these dire times. However as usual with 'lone wolves' like poor Mr Stack, strange links to the military-industrial complex were close at hand. Stack shared a hangar with some guy all up in the L3 shady ops biz. What else is new?

Financial Chaos Beckons (dunnn dunnn dunnnn, sez my roommate) : California edging closer to BondFail. Europe hit by waves of strikes and tumult. A summer of discontent in the works eh? ZeroHedge is just great, read it! Everyday Greece insurrection. Eurostat debt adjustment. Downgrades. Moar downgrades.

FDIC reports NEGATIVE balance. The FDIC is reporting bad things to come and is opening a satellite office in Illinois. Moar on FDIC. Speaking of Illinois they had an interesting secret meeting of their legislators and the National Conference of State Legislatures,  and we can only fear the collapse/martial law style content, or whatever doomladen scenario you care to assume. {they said it was just so people felt comfortable to talk, however it did sound exciting in a way :-P }

GOP wants statutory limit to include GSEs, a risky bizniss. GSE whacks the dollar. Ron Paul and the amusing Watergate/Saddam Hussein/Federal Reserve nexus. SPY bumps from key algo. Record US debt vs Keynesianism from Bloomberg. Gold Market irregularities? Nifty story of Yamashita's epic lost gold. Maestro sez its tha worst evar. Gunning the mkt in afterhours bumps!

RBS is on the hook for all this Greekness and the UK govt is on the hook for RBS! Tobin Tax in EU??

HUD REO sales seems to be some kind of racket via this page including in Minnesota. BestAssets of Sugarland TX.

BOMBSTATE: Garry Wills and the Bomb State, national security coldwar bloat & more. The nukes really launched the secret state.

TERRORSTATE: Glenn Greenwald blew my mind with this bizarre Newsweek editorial roundtable about how the writers & editors define terrorism. w0w!

SAVVY PRESS: An intriguing philosophy of the Kool Kats in the press.

Quick tour of South America narconews stuff. Uribe has messe dup recelection in some unexpected petition mess.

Coca Cola is going into Mezcal in Oaxaca, Mexico and corruption and taking the community water are the usual items on the neo-capitalist entree.

For Haiti travesties see mediahacker.org.

Natural Health crackdown is coming for your vitamins and McCains trying to make it happen. So that we can be all forcefed cornsyrup or something. Aloe Vera FDA Crackdown:: let's learn!

There are over 300 aloe vera species on earth. But the Aloe Barbadensis Miller species has been the favorite for study in scientific literature today. The main focus in ongoing research is a group of polysaccharides that contain the healing agents known as aloe polymannans. They all have different healing potentials.

The polymannan sizes range from small to medium to large and very large. Each one has a level of healing that corresponds in magnitude with its size. It's the very large molecular weight and long chain polymannans that Dr. Danhof extracted for use on cancer patients. Injecting the large molecule extract was necessary because it is very difficult to absorb through the digestive system.

Another aspect of these polymannans, especially the larger ones, is their capacity for organizing the immune system. These polymannans provide a detection capacity for cells to determine exactly what is needed for various pathogenic invaders. Without them, the cells are shooting wildly in the dark, and that can lead to damaging cytotoxic autoimmune responses.

From researcher Dr. Ivan Danhof: "The very large molecules are immune modulating, which have a powerful healing effect on AIDS, cancer and many different immune system disorders. It is also this large molecule that causes the body to produce a natural chemical, tumor necrosis factors, which functions to shut off the blood supply to tumors."

Anywhooo... Chronic health problems in children soar! Start with Bisphenol-A.

Lawyer goons peddling authoritarian concepts of 'intellectual property' come out against Open Source via the RIAA/MPAA Intellectual Property Alliance.

Tech tip for Final Cut Pro captioning, try Caption In Yourself or Jubler. Also the OSX Fluid App makes embeddable apps.

Reviews of Collapse movie with Michael Ruppert. Great review from Roger Ebert (4/4) HipHop Republican, Metro students, WhatWouldtowatch, some jackass, Enviralment, good review @ dangerousintersection, Montreal Gazette. I will have a kewl Ruppert Q&A video up pretty soon here.

UN crime chief Costa says it again: banks bailed out by now "laundered" drug money

Submitted by HongPong on Mon, 2009-12-14 00:39

There was a quip about this a while ago, now it is more established. Posted in full cause it's a big deal.... via Agonist .

These people are criminals!

Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor

Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions

Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations' drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. "In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

"Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way." Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.

"That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was," he said.

The IMF estimated that large US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009 and more than 200 mortgage lenders went bankrupt. Many major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover.

Gangs are now believed to make most of their profits from the drugs trade and are estimated to be worth £352bn, the UN says. They have traditionally kept proceeds in cash or moved it offshore to hide it from the authorities. It is understood that evidence that drug money has flowed into banks came from officials in Britain, Switzerland, Italy and the US.

British bankers would want to see any evidence that Costa has to back his claims. A British Bankers' Association spokesman said: "We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind. There was clearly a lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks."

*****

Thanks Costa!!

A time for truth: New York Times reports Brother Karzai is taking CIA money & movin teh drugz as DEA agents die senselessly

Submitted by HongPong on Wed, 2009-10-28 01:37
I was a bit surprised to see the New York Times report this evening that embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother has been taking mad CIA cash for some time. [Or rather, the three journalists who did the story are oddly emphasized, 'compartmentalized' on this risky exposure.]

Earlier William Engdahl described the need for opium money to keep Wall Street liquidity flowing:
One of the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.
Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured.
Even during the 2008 Presidential campaign candidate Obama argued that Afghanistan not Iraq was where the US must wage war. His reason? Because he claimed, that was where the Al Qaeda organization was holed up and that was the “real” threat to US national security. The reasons behind US involvement in Afghanistan is quite another one.
The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.
Sadly a bunch of DEA agents also got killed in some helicopter incident/accident, having arrived to perform some sort of political control upon the local opiate-oriented economy. Their deaths are yet another travesty from this terrible situation -- and we can only hope it will soon draw to a close.
DEA Identifies Special Agent Casualties OCT 27-- WASHINGTON, DC– It is with great sadness that the Drug Enforcement Administration announces the deaths of three Special Agents who were supporting counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan.
The following Special Agents died on Oct. 26:
Special Agent Chad L. Michael, 30, of Quantico, VA.
Special Agent Forrest N. Leamon, 37, of Woodbridge, VA.
Special Agent Michael E. Weston, 37, of Washington, D.C.

Special Agents Leamon and Michael were members of DEA’s FAST (Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Teams); and Special Agent Weston was assigned to DEA’s Kabul Country Office.
People with integrity are bailing out of the bullshit fest going down in Afghanistan.
Wikileaks did everyone a favor by exposing the official "strategic communications" NATO agenda in Afghanistan -- this being the 'Powerpoint centric' root of the whole spinstorm:

The encrypted document, which is dated October 6, and believed to be current, can be found on the Pentagon Central Command (CENTCOM) website oneteam.centcom.mil. [UPDATE: Fri Feb 27 15:18:38 GMT 2009, the entire Pentagon site is now down--probably in response to this editorial, parts of the site can still be seen in Google's cache ]

The encryption password is progress, which perhaps reflects the Pentagon's desire to stay on-message, even to itself.

Among the revelations, which we encourage the press to review in detail, is Jordan's presence as secret member of the US lead occupation force, the ISAF.

Jordan is a middle eastern monarchy, backed by the US, and historically the CIA's closest partner in its extraordinary rendition program. "the practice of torture is routine" in the country, according to a January 2007 report by UN special investigator for torture, Manfred Nowak.[1]

The document states NATO spokespersons are to keep Jordan's involvement secret. Publicly, Jordan withdrew in 2001 and the country does not appear on this month's public list of ISAF member states.[2]

Some other notes on matters to treat delicately are:

  • Any decision on the end date/end state will be taken by the respective national and/or Alliance political committee. Under no circumstances should the mission end-date be a topic for speculation in public by any NATO/ISAF spokespeople.
  • The term "compensation" is inappropriate and should not be used because it brings with it legal implications that do not apply.
  • Any talk of stationing or deploying Russian military assets in Afghanistan is out of the question and has never been the subject of any considerations.
  • Only if pressed: ISAF forces are frequently fired at from inside Pakistan, very close to the border. In some cases defensive fire is required, against specific threats. Wherever possible, such fire is pre-coordinated with the Pakistani military.

Altogether four classified or restricted NATO documents on the Pentagon Central Command (CENTCOM) site were discovered to share the 'progress' password. Wikileaks has decrypted the documents and released them in full:

[There was a DOD one too.] Glenn Greenwald reflects on the resignation of Matthew Hoh, who seems basically like a tough sumbitch who's had enough of bullshitting politicians and these pot smoking hippies too, as he told WaPo.
Digby is all over this stuff:
It seems that our two abstract, endless Orwellian wars --- the War on Drugs and the War on Terror --- have officially merged. And the complications stemming from that decision are going to be immense. What are we fighting for again?
McClatchy posted the abuse of DEA agents made pawns in this lethal criminal farce:
As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement Administration's presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent pilots contend that they're being illegally forced to go to a combat zone, while others who've volunteered say they're not being properly equipped.
In interviews with McClatchy, more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking their superiors.
Such complaints, so far mostly arising from the DEA's Aviation Division, could complicate the Obama administration's efforts to send dozens of additional DEA agents to Afghanistan as part of a civilian and military personnel "surge" that aims to stabilize the country.
And now the big obscenity! NYTimes: Brother of Afghan Leader Is Said to Be on C.I.A. Payroll
This article is by Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.
The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.
[........]A C.I.A. spokesman declined to comment for this article.
“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman. [Adding LOLOLOL]
Now, with more American lives on the line, the relationship with Mr. Karzai is setting off anger and frustration among American military officers and other officials in the Obama administration. They say that Mr. Karzai’s suspected role in the drug trade, as well as what they describe as the mafialike way that he lords over southern Afghanistan, makes him a malevolent force.
These military and political officials say the evidence, though largely circumstantial, suggests strongly that Mr. Karzai has enriched himself by helping the illegal trade in poppy and opium to flourish. The assessment of these military and senior officials in the Obama administration dovetails with that of senior officials in the Bush administration.
“Hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are flowing through the southern region, and nothing happens in southern Afghanistan without the regional leadership knowing about it,” a senior American military officer in Kabul said. Like most of the officials in this article, he spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the information.
....A former C.I.A. officer with experience in Afghanistan said the agency relied heavily on Ahmed Wali Karzai, and often based covert operatives at compounds he owned. Any connections Mr. Karzai might have had to the drug trade mattered little to C.I.A. officers focused on counterterrorism missions, the officer said.
“Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes with the drug trade,” he said. “If you are looking for Mother Teresa, she doesn’t live in Afghanistan.”
The debate over Ahmed Wali Karzai, which began when President Obama took office in January, intensified in June, when the C.I.A.’s local paramilitary group, the Kandahar Strike Force, shot and killed Kandahar’s provincial police chief, Matiullah Qati, in a still-unexplained shootout at the office of a local prosecutor.
Senior Afghan investigators say they know plenty about Mr. Karzai’s involvement in the drug business. In an interview in Kabul this year, a top former Afghan Interior Ministry official familiar with Afghan counternarcotics operations said that a major source of Mr. Karzai’s influence over the drug trade was his control over key bridges crossing the Helmand River on the route between the opium growing regions of Helmand Province and Kandahar.
The former Interior Ministry official said that Mr. Karzai was able to charge huge fees to drug traffickers to allow their drug-laden trucks to cross the bridges.
But the former officials said it was impossible for Afghan counternarcotics officials to investigate Mr. Karzai. “This government has become a factory for the production of Talibs because of corruption and injustice,” the former official said.
Some American counternarcotics officials have said they believe that Mr. Karzai has expanded his influence over the drug trade, thanks in part to American efforts to single out other drug lords.
In debriefing notes from Drug Enforcement Administration interviews in 2006 of Afghan informants obtained by The New York Times, one key informant said that Ahmed Wali Karzai had benefited from the American operation that lured Hajji Bashir Noorzai, a major Afghan drug lord during the time that the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, to New York in 2005. Mr. Noorzai was convicted on drug and conspiracy charges in New York in 2008, and was sentenced to life in prison this year.
Habibullah Jan, a local military commander and later a member of Parliament from Kandahar, told the D.E.A. in 2006 that Mr. Karzai had teamed with Haji Juma Khan to take over a portion of the Noorzai drug business after Mr. Noorzai’s arrest.
[How many hundreds of millions of dollars in drug money are moving through the southern region of Manhattan?!]
It certainly appears on the surface that the death of these three DEA agents flushed the CIA hypocrisy on the "war on rival drug traffickers" to the surface!
My condolences to everyone involved in this tragedy. Best of luck to all of you....

Afghanistan UN elections approval unit breaks up under fraud pressure; Gold explodes as foreign banks start pacing back from the dollar!

Submitted by HongPong on Tue, 2009-10-06 19:12

Gold busted up and out of the old confines as good ol' snarly British antiwar journalist Robert Fisk broke the big news: the Petrodollar cycling system is finally going off the rails as the world's central bankers start digging for a new solution. [This Petrodollar system was the big achievement of the Bush-Kissinger-era big players, they just can't cook stuff up that good anymore. Sorry guys...]

These people are in no mood for all their oil dollars to get devalued by the inflation disaster cooking in the Federal Reserve System, so why not make a new basket currency?! I kind of thought that the "COMEX paper gold" racket would unravel before Petrodollars. Shows what I know :-P

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

......The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. "The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies," a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. "The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won't be able to use the US dollar."

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years' time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.

"These plans will change the face of international financial transactions," one Chinese banker said. "America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate."

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

Reuters covers the shockwave of fallout over this report, which left gold prices spiking up and out of previous containers.

Meanwhile in Afghanistan the UN Mission is breaking up & having mass epic fail resignations over the failure of a massive election fraud coverup, which was necessary to continue the fiction of Hamid Karzai's 'widespread popularity.' So sad! No, really, though, a lot of people have died to bring things to where they are today -- now the 'State,' such as it was, is further hobbled & ready to be displaced by the Islamic Sharia structure & local ethnic warlords that has only gotten stronger in the region since 1979.

[If the U.S. banking system loses its grip on the opium money, another nail in the coffin there as well.]

UK Times:

The head of the UN mission in Afghanistan has been accused by his former deputy of ordering a

In an attack on the role of the UN in the elections on August 20, Peter Galbraith, who was sacked as Deputy Special Representative to the UN mission in Kabul last week, says that Kai Eide ordered him not to reveal evidence of fraud or to pass it to the authorities.

As a result, he said, the elections had handed the Taleban “its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners”.

He says that the UN collected evidence that a third of Mr Karzai’s votes were fraudulent. If the claim was found to be true it would push Mr Karzai below the 54 per cent that the preliminary election results give him, necessitating a second round of voting.

Another note -- the radically fuzzy nature of Federal law, which can let people get prosecuted for truly nasty and open-ended reasons. US Attorneys have so many options, their whole layer of the law enforcement system needs further examination...

All credits on these links to Cryptogon.com, which is terrific for all matters along these lines.

New Frontiers of Social Control incl. killa robots, ECHELON, new FBI 9/11 timeline, USAID for Bolivian separatists & more!

Submitted by HongPong on Wed, 2009-05-27 09:45

New Frontiers of Social Control incl. killa robots, ECHELON, new FBI 9/11 timeline, USAID for Bolivian separatists, drugging students for the Cube & more!

It just never gets old... Smedley Butler War is a Racket. (online in full here)

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

First up: Defender O Freedom Nathan Hansen finds the secret DNA stash run by the state of Minnesota. Globalism and Pandemics: The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, WHO, et al vs. Individuals and the Sovereignty of Nations.

The mechanics of the UK-USA/ECHELON international eavesdropping apparatus got laid out here in the Nicky Hager book Secret Power, now available as PDF. YUMZ! (h/t as always Cryptogon.com)

WIN - another great moment for hierarchies, and authority as well! UN wants 'flood of drugs' in Afghanistan to devalue opium | guardian.co.uk Splendid! Bravo nascent global government & information warriors... meanwhile Tpaw kills MJ.

New Bolivian synthetic Contra-style movement underway. USAID Win!! Bolivia Rising: Newly declassified documents reveal More than $97 million from USAID to separatist projects in Bolivia. We can has Evidence Filez PDF NOMS Index /2008-USAID! Anyone who can guess how they'll pay for this can roll up the $20 and put it up the schnoz :-D [...these pawn separatists have been popular in the Andean / Condor region & its transnational rightwing paramilitary apparatus, or whatever you want to call it. See also earlier Venezuela Declares Solidarity with Bolivia's Government in Face of Separatist Effort.

Killa Robots as promised: PW Singer spooky in precise outlines of prerequisite for Rise of the Machines scenario.Gizmodo - Why the Terminator Uprising (Probably) Won't Ever Happen - terminator. Meanwhile also Google's Creepy New Algorithm Knows If You're Going to Quit Your Job Before You Do.

The Police State Gravy Train Continues! Tom Burghardt does it again! Democracy Going Dark: The Electronic Police State:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's budget request for Fiscal Year 2010 reveals that America's political police intend to greatly expand their high-tech surveillance capabilities.

According to ABC News, the FBI is seeking additional funds for the development of "a new 'Advanced Electronic Surveillance' program which is being funded at $233.9 million for 2010. The program has 133 employees, 15 of whom are agents."

Known as "Going Dark," the program is designed to beef up the Bureau's already formidable electronic surveillance, intelligence collection and evidence gathering capabilities "as well as those of the greater Intelligence Community," ABC reports....

[ See also America's growing surveillance state | guardian.co.uk ]

art.hassan.nasrallah.afp.gi.jpg

Boring Yet Serpentine PR Stunts in Lebanese Election: Meanwhile in Lebanon, the perpetually dumb propaganda battle over "who blew up Rafik Hariri?!©" took a funny turn as the German magazine Der Speigel announced a bunch of draft papers floating around the almighty UN truthfinding committee, the Mehlis Commission, proved that Hezbollah blew up Hariri.

More Israeli spies surface in Lebanon - UPI. Hezbollah accused Der Spiegel of being dumb & conspiring with a cheesy Mossad PR stunt, which it does appear to be. Sheikh Nasrallah, who has been playing things pretty carefully lately, said " Hezbollah accuses German magazine of conspiring with Israel - CNN::

"It is all about the timing; the Israelis and Americans are talking about their worries of these elections. So what can they do? Here, they have Der Spiegel ready," he said. ... later: "The danger here is not in the timing but in the strategy. When Hariri was assassinated, they wanted to first accuse the Shiites of the crimes. Now they are accusing Hezbollah. They are telling the Sunnis that whether you like Hariri or not, Hezbollah is the one who killed your leader. Your revenge is with them, your war is with them, so go and fight them. They are your new enemies."

Lebanese elections are really interesting - there is some convoluted ethnic/religious power sharing deal in their Parliament. And furthermore I don't know if anyone gets why the Hariri blame is such a big deal - people get blown up all the time, it's obvious the only prize is some propaganda mileage. BORING! [More interesting is the secret US Lebanese airbase construction agenda...]

Suspicious false flag incident scheduled for May 31 border operation etc. More AFP May 18:"If Israel plans on pulling anything during the manoeuvres (May 31 to June 4), we're sending it a message that we stand ready and they will fail," he added. "We will not bury our heads in the sand."

Shady Business in FBI-sponsored NYC fake synagogue bomber thing: Informant offered liver transplant for Bronx terror suspect's brother, sez mom. One sad layer after another in this FBI sham. Weak sauce. This lets Dick Morris claim that domestic terror is real!! What a shame. FBI Lured “Jihadis” with Piles of Cash, Gifts, Weed. Ah yes, the vaunted FBI False Flag Stoner Bomber gig -- how the fuck do you put that on your resume?

Really Uber Awesome FBI 9/11 timeline gets out via FOIA, proving hijackers kicked it with a Saudi "aviation support contractor". This was really good stuff. The FBI put together some big 9/11 Timeline that the 9/11 Commission thought was just fantastic (their report has dozens of footnotes to it) yet until now, the timeline hadn't been released.

ATS Forum: FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report. It's a solid 300 pages and includes the nifty bits about how two of the 9/11 hijackers met up right away with some weird Saudi dude (rather than 2 weeks later as the Commission claimed). This of course proves yet again the obvious angle that foriegn intelligence ties were all over 9/11. SHhh!

Full story here. The FBI Report! Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 . 9/11 Commission Panel member John Lehman said Karl Rove was filtering all the presidential documentation. Good times.

Social control and drugs for the boys: Ritalin and the Cubicle-directed education system: NYT WIN! The Case for Working With Your Hands - NYTimes.com

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

What a great graf. Way to go Matthew Crawford.

Misc Jumble & Techs: Red Bull is full of cocaine traces. I didn't like some of this crazy article (icky Zionist paranoia etc) but it is about FBI informants & their widespread use by Chris Bollyn. Meanwhile mysterious: Occult Symbols in Corporate Logos « Dprogram.net. Funny roundup from Big Dan's Big Blog. haha!

Mashable: Top 10 Social Media Stories You Missed this Weekend More techtips: Hashtags 101: How-To Use hashtags. I never saw Lunch.com before. It is some collaborative thing.

How digging up expense reports led a journalist to clobber British govt - Boing Boing. Also this was interesting b/c I haven't yet looked @ the WetPaint collaborative service: Twittering in the trenches - Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

Can't knock it: UNDERNEWS: A SHORT HISTORY OF CIA LIES TO CONGRESS // Chucklz from my friendly associate Mr Deeran: Dealing with Conspiracy Theorists | BNET which led to these laff hit pieces straight from the Feds: Rumors, Myths, and Fabrications | A Guide to What Isn’t True » Structure of Conspiracy Theories - Engaging the World - America.gov

Localz: MN Stories: Stencil mural thing. More art: Finger Painting: New Yorker Blog. How Technicolor and Color spaces work.

Lulz: Right wing guy can't figure out to tame feral cat family. Feed them ALL out the back door dude. Jeesh. I wanted to send him an email for the sake of the poor kittens but the damn site is useless. Patriarchy/authoritarianism nexus is strong with this one.

Some notes from the Abyss; Fusion Centers going to fuse the future & NATO PSYOPS info operations schema exposed

Submitted by HongPong on Mon, 2009-03-02 08:48

We're on the brink of disaster | Salon!

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a "lost decade," the result could be a global landscape filled with economically fueled upheavals.

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations -- none as yet in the United States -- your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you're a gambling man or woman, it's a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

jobsrecessions.jpg

Kuntsler says it's one of those times when the abyss looks back at you. In that, he's right. I mean, it definitely feels like about halfway to the Eschaton right now.

The US Army ordered millions of dollars of riot gear. U.S. Army To Buy $6 Million Of Riot Equipment Fortunately Open Government brings this to us via the Webs:


Picture 54.png

Earlier: NorthCom Denies Troops To Be Used For Crowd Control

Wikileaks cracked a batch of encrypted Public Relations / Strategic Communications / information warfare / PSYOPS items from some dumb chumps' server. The secret password was progress!

Wikileaks cracks NATO's Master Narrative for Afghanistan - Wikileaks
nato-psysops.jpg

Bonus item: "Psy Ops media"!
psyops2.gif

[GIRoA actually means "Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan." Which makes the weird military press releases with people talking about GIRoA most impressive.]

We are going into more debt to gear up the cops. Including here in Minnesota. Militarizing Police Depts. With Your Bailout Money

Meanwhile there are a debt-financed $250 million for fusion centers: Stimulus bill has $250m for fusion centers -- Federal Computer Week:

An economic stimulus package that the Senate is set to consider would provide $250 million for state and locally-run information sharing and coordination centers that are part of anti-terrorism efforts.

The Senate's $888 billion measure would include $250 million to modify existing state and local emergency operations centers and intelligence fusion centers or to build new ones. The $819 billion economic stimulus bill The House passed Jan. 28 did not authorize the same funding.

The fusion centers and emergency operations centers use technology and information technology to improve information sharing, situational awareness and coordination, and the Bush administration made fusion centers central to efforts to share terrorism-related information between federal and non-federal authorities.

The centers are owned and operated by states and local governments, and many of the more than 50 centers rely heavily on Homeland Security Department grants administered by DHS’ Federal Emergency Management Agency.

"Emergency operations centers" are the flip side of the Department of Homeland Security's increasing cash/grant powers around the country - many states have "Homeland Security and Emergency Management" departments. Us Mac students heard directly one time from fomer St. Paul DFL Mayor Randy Kelly that his endorsement of Bush had paved the way to extra emergency gear getting awarded from those corrupt apparachiks in DHS.

Fusion centers are an overlooked element of the emergent nationwide law-and-order Great Leap Forward. And very important. Fusion centers are basically heavily contractor-run headquarters for different law enforcement and increasingly military-supplied outposts of Total Situational Awareness.

American Civil Liberties Union : What's Wrong With Fusion Centers - Executive Summary

A new institution is emerging in American life: Fusion Centers. These state, local and regional institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies. Though they developed independently and remain quite different from one another, for many the scope of their mission has quickly expanded - with the support and encouragement of the federal government - to cover "all crimes and all hazards." The types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector.

These new fusion centers, over 40 of which have been established around the country, raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the "war on terrorism" are combining to threaten Americans' privacy at an unprecedented level.

Of course we are now learning that the North Central Texas Fusion Center (sounds like a lovely place) was ordered to track anti-war groups and lobbying organizations. ACLU: Fusion Center Encourages Improper Investigations Of Lobbying Groups And Anti-War Activists | CommonDreams.org

Bad kids say that Government Prepares the Public for Cradle to Grave Surveillance which references some new Lockheed Martin red light tracking systems & other schemes.

This is because there is not enough serious crime and terrorism to satisfy the great need for these people to find something to do. It is one giant perpetual data mining fishing expedition in the works.

200903012342.jpgMore nascent plans for domestic militarization & the Big Service Programs o' doom!: These have become quite trendy lately. Whether it's Alcee Hastings' new FEMA Camp plan or the nationalization of the whole economy, or the Rahm Emanuel Vaguely Menacing Civilian Quasi-Militarized Training Corps, well it's all a shade weird lately.

Bad kids write: Democrats Introduce Public National Service Bills such as: Dodd, Cochran, DeLauro Announce “Service For All Ages” Initiative and Service for All Ages Press Conference | servicewire.org

Everyone in tinfoil country heard about this one: YouTube - Obama Civilian Security and called it the Stasi. Ok a bit harsh, but the whole thing is weird. Bonus points to prisonplanet for the quasi-Rising Sun style artwork.

More from the bad kids: Lawmaker Warns Of “Forced Servitude” Under Obama and Analysts: New Era Of Chaos Has Taken Hold

And of course: Urban Warfare Drills Linked To Coming Economic Rage

Check out the size of ALL derivatives: Semiannual OTC derivatives statistics at end-June 2008 Download this PDF for the full data. System shocks could cause these multi trillions to fail to roll over. Data from the Bank for International Settlements, which will probably get mutated by the Great Intervention soon enough.

BAD MATH!! VERY BAD MATH!!
200903012331.jpg

Don't miss it: Wired: Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street (more on this) This is the research paper that actually caused all the fake AAA derivatives to become taken as "real." AMAZING!!!

For your somewhat wild UK financial investigator view to the Great Financial Arson of our times, consider Worldreports.org with Christopher Story. News - CATASTROPHIC BANKERS’ RAMP TO CONTINUE UNDER OBAMA and News - GEITHNER TO LAUNCH WORLD’S BIGGEST PONZI SCAM. AKA no one wants to buy the repackaged toxic paper, which led of course to the chortling Trader Floor Conspiracy of Chicago.

FT.com / Markets / Insight - Insight: Time to expose those CDOs. Get ready. Early April will see a lot of economic turbulence I bet, because many banks'll be proven insolvent.

Krugman's feeling the zombie vibe: All the President’s zombies.

Hard to crash COMEX than we thought! It looks like the great paper gold reservoir is bigger than expected, which means it'll be harder for goldbugs to 'crash' the paper gold system (which currently creates a huge 'virtual supply' to bet on). See Chart: COMEX Gold Inventory « Meltdown 2011.

This guy is bent on something about Shadow Powers. Mwahaha. And Of Layoffs & Riots… And Think Tank’s 2009 predictions. Also why not? WSJ Talks Amero.

and Cartel’s End Game Has a “Nasty Twist”.

Also some people are saying silver is due to go up - it usually hangs around about 55x smaller than gold. See The Silver Catapult Is Loaded.

Don't Miss Global Guerrillas: BREAKING THE BANK and THE QUICK ROAD TO GLOBAL INSURGENCY and RC JOURNAL: US Foreclosures and the Tactics of Delay and JOURNAL: Swarming Attacks

Data flow notes: I have spun up a bit more twitter activity @ twitter.com/hongpong .

As Capitol press corps shrinks, government controls message | OKG Scene.com

Signed up for Jim Sinclair’s MineSet. Old school financial prognosticator. See Officially “Out Of Control”.

Time to throw a fuss: Facebook open-sources its terms of service | The Open Road - CNET News

Local Labor Revolution! Go Wobblies! Twin Cities Starbucks Workers Union

Ron Paul talkin smack: YouTube - Ron Paul's opening statement 2009.02.25 upsets the CNBC anchors!! The usual suspects complement him. CNBC sad.

Well that's all for now. Have fun kids!

Reuters: Afghanistan occupation PSYOPS and press offices to formally merge; what else is new?!

Submitted by HongPong on Sat, 2008-11-29 18:29

Why actually win a hopeless war, when you can run a perception management campaign to trick the American public into thinking you're winning?!?

"Information Operations, Spinstorms & latent contradictions" indeed... Previously noted: "The strategic target remains our population:" Some more tasty links: military industrial complex in America and in yr brains! | HongPong.com

and another example of the program - exposed via FOIA: NYTimes: Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Sometimes these cats make my paranoia obsolete. It's sooo easy :)

For your reference: The official US Army Psychological Operations manual.

The target is your brains!!! Ahh formalized domestic-directed propaganda, so clean & polished. I wonder how many contractors will profit! (huge hat tip to barrisj_redux @agonist)

Press And "Psy Ops" to Merge At NATO Afghan HQ - Sources - NYTimes.com

Press And "Psy Ops" to Merge At NATO Afghan HQ: SourcesBy REUTERS Published: November 29, 2008

Filed at 2:01 a.m. ET

KABUL (Reuters) - The U.S. general commanding NATO forces in Afghanistan has ordered a merger of the office that releases news with "Psy Ops," which deals with propaganda, a move that goes against the alliance's policy, three officials said.

The move has worried Washington's European NATO allies -- Germany has already threatened to pull out of media operations in Afghanistan -- and the officials said it could undermine the credibility of information released to the public.

Seven years into the war against the Taliban, insurgent influence is spreading closer to the capital and Afghans are becoming increasingly disenchanted at the presence of some 65,000 foreign troops and the government of President Hamid Karzai.

Taliban militants, through their website, telephone text messages and frequent calls to reporters, are also gaining ground in the information war, analysts say.

U.S. General David McKiernan, the commander of 50,000 troops from more than 40 nations in NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), ordered the combination of the Public Affairs Office (PAO), Information Operations and Psy Ops (Psychological Operations) from December 1, said a NATO official with detailed knowledge of the move.

"This will totally undermine the credibility of the information released to the press and the public," said the official, who declined to be named.

ISAF spokesman Brigadier General Richard Blanchette said McKiernan had issued a staff order to implement a command restructure from December 1 which was being reviewed by NATO headquarters in Brussels, but he declined to go into details of the reorganization.

"This is very much an internal matter," he said. "This is up with higher headquarters right now and we're waiting to get the basic approval. Once we have the approval we will be going into implementation."

But another ISAF official confirmed that the amalgamation of public affairs with Information Operations and Psy Ops was part of the planned command restructure. This official, who also declined to be named, said the merger had caused considerable concern at higher levels within NATO which had challenged the order by the U.S. general.

"DECEPTION ACTIVITIES"

NATO policy recognizes there is an inherent clash of interests between its public affairs offices, whose job it is to issue press releases and answer media questions, and that of Information Operations and Psy Ops.

Information Operations advises on information designed to affect the will of the enemy, while Psy Ops includes so-called "black operations," or outright deception.

While Public Affairs and Information Operations, PA and Info Ops in military jargon, "are separate, but related functions," according to the official NATO policy document on public affairs, "PA is not an Info Ops discipline."

The new combined ISAF department will come under the command of an American one-star general reporting directly to McKiernan, an arrangement that is also against NATO policy, the NATO official said.

"While coordination is essential, the lines of authority will remain separate, the PA reporting directly to the commander. This is to maintain credibility of PA and to avoid creating a media or public perception that PA activities are coordinated by, or are directed by, Info Ops," the NATO policy document says.

"PA will have no role in planning or executing Info Ops, Psy Ops, or deception activities," it states.

The United States has 35,000 of the 65,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, operating both under ISAF and a separate U.S.-led coalition operation, but both come under McKiernan's command.

Washington is already scheduled to send another 3,000 troops to arrive in the country in January and is now considering sending 20,000 more troops in the next 12 to 18 months, further tipping the numerical balance among ISAF forces.

"What we are seeing is a gradual increase of American influence in all areas of the war," the NATO official said. "Seeking to gain total control of the information flow from the campaign is just part of that."

(Editing by John Chalmers)

FIRST POST: Obama is in Afghanistan!!!

Submitted by HongPong on Sat, 2008-07-19 02:56

I have made the internet's very goddamn first post about Obama arriving in Afghanistan today. AWESOME.

Here it is Breaking: Obama has arrived in Afghanistan! | The Agonist

We were about to call it a night, and had drifted past a CNN rerun of Bill Nye and Larry King rambling about UFOs. Suddenly this secret variant of CNN known as "CNN International" broke in, and unknown anchors announced Barack Obama has arrived in Afghanistan. They said their staff had only learned in the last 30 minutes - it is still not on Google News (although the Wapo called it "coming days").

With a little luck our guy from Registan can peer sideways at the spectacle there? First post?!
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This is a good catch in the 24 hour internet news cycle.... Thank you very much. Our sponsors tonight are beer and Aqua Teen reruns....

Iran cools out; Hating on Obama's Chi town days, etc.

Submitted by HongPong on Fri, 2008-07-18 01:54

Fisa vote? America Gets to Know Obama, and Vice Versa

Remarks of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold in Opposition to the FISA Amendments Act

Bob Ostertag: A Powerful, Easy Way to Tell Obama to Get FISA Right. Shorter: Give money to Feingold instead.Bob Ostertag: Update: Sending Your Obama Money to Feingold

Seymour Hersh: US Training Jondollah and MEK for Bombing preparation

Iran war clouds cool?! Now it's definite: No attack on Iran | The Agonist

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Militants breached US Afghan base

Despite Fireworks, War Clouds Recede - by Jim Lobe

The Shift- by Justin Raimondo

Iran and the Photoshop Threat- by Justin Raimondo

but more negatively, Coercive 'Diplomacy' – Prelude to War- by Justin Raimondo

Looking Into the Lobby (i.e. a fun evening with AIPAC!)

******

Olmert says Palestinian peace deal closer than ever | Reuters.com

ANALYSIS / Olmert can't recover from latest police interrogation - Haaretz - Israel News

Palestinian conflict hits cyberspace - The National Newspaper

You can always get some controversial stuff from GlobalResearch.ca - Centre for Research on Globalization:

Israel ’s War with Iran and The Zionist Power Configuration in America- not sure if this is very useful, but some useful data points between the bombast & bla bla bla...

The Terrorist Watch List reaches 1,000,665 Names and is still Growing!

McCain's Nomination - A Possible September Surprise?

The JFK Assassination and 9/11: the Designated Suspects in Both Cases

Breaking Iraq and Blaming Iran

Minot AFB Clandestine Nukes - several pilots DEAD

*******

The FBI's plan to "profile" Muslims | Salon

Bush Nominates Neocon War Apologist to U.S. Propaganda Board | PEEK | AlterNet

A terror! globeandmail.com: Khadr interrogation footage puts spotlight on CSIS

43 nations creating Mediterranean union - Yahoo! News

Suspect Soldiers - Suspect Soldiers: Troubled histories follow some troops to Iraq war - sacbee.com

*******

The people @ Larry Johnson's No Quarter continue to pursue that darn Obama: Barack's Africa problem, Enough Already, linking around approvingly to: Global Labor and Politics: That “Guy Who Lives in My Neighborhood”: Behind the Ayers-Obama Relationship and The Three Blind Men and the Elephant: The New Yorker on Obama : NO QUARTER and Global Labor and Politics: Chicago's "Citizen of the Year"? Obama, Ayers and Daley. I think i need a Chicago guru to decode all this. But certainly it's one big line of criticism/attack, Obama's ascendancy thru the glorious Foundation Sponsored Left, and other choice matters to mutter about.

The 10 Mental Illnesses Batman Indisputably Has . Lulz. I got to see an advance screening on Wednesday night, tres chic.

Yahoo! Search BOSS - YDN Very cool new search engine building system from Yahoo!

******

Sasha Baron Cohen is now using the Bruno character to mess with people's heads! The new Borat is coming: Bruno's Prank: Arkansas Cage Fights Turn Gay, Crowd Goes Crazy - Entertainment on The Huffington Post

******

Cryptogon gets an ominous Business Week story:

The Polar ice cap may be melting, but the U.S. economy is frozen, starting right here in my small town. Gradually rising levels of dismay at the gas pump and in the supermarket gave way to paralytic shock last week when “lock-in” notices from the local fuel company arrived. This year’s advance price for home heating oil is nearly twice what people paid last year. A collective gasp of disbelief from my tough, resourceful Maine neighbors echoed across the meadows and up the rocky coast. Many claimed they would never sign the contract. “What’s your alternative?” I asked a friend.

“I don’t have one,” he muttered.

In the days that followed, a new quality of dread settled over the place like soot, as people weighed their options. Heat or food? Gas or electricity? Medicine or mortgage payments? What to give up? What to cut back? The conversations were everywhere. In the supermarket, I heard one man tell another: “When I was a kid, you woke up, went into the bathroom, and broke up the ice in the toilet. Now my kids will have to do the same. America is moving backward.”

My neighbors are like deer caught in the headlights: frozen in fear as something sinister, implacable, and wholly unanticipated lurches toward them. A reckoning has begun to unfurl like a dark flower, slowly at first, then gathering urgency and force. This is not a short detour after all, but an untraveled road to an unknown place from which there is no return, no escape…and we are not prepared.

Sy Hersh: Covert war in Iran escalates: Baluchis used as pawns in risky scheme, Special Ops out of control

Submitted by HongPong on Mon, 2008-06-30 01:38

I noted all this nonsense a while ago: March 27, 2007: New GeoMap; Kremlin warns of "Operation Bite" American attack on Iran April 6? More rumors etc.

The latest twist is that apparently the Democrats agreed to give Bush as much money as they wanted in order to do the "U.S. Covert - BALUCHIS" attack detailed on this sketch here. At roughly the time of my post, actually!

April 4, 2007: Iran paranoia, covert war escalates; Tensions rise as Persian Gulf fills with carriers, media crews, tribal revolts; US Air Force buzzes infiltrated Iranian Khuzestan

At that time we had the excellent "Approximate Covert Crisis GeoMap: Shitstorm 2007:

April 8, 2007: Jundullah: Baluchi ally of the United States... And Al Qaeda... in covert Iran war.

Since those heady days, I haven't had too much to say about the Baluchi pawn situation. However, the drums of war have continued and my tasty diagrams are as accurate as last year. Both the CIA-sponsored tribal uprisings and the Mujahideen el-Khalq actions are going forth accordingly.

At least, that's what good ol Seymour Hersh has divined from his vast array of establishment sources, who generally seem quite frightened of the alternate chains of command that Dick Cheney has built up from his office.

Annals of National Security: Preparing the Battlefield: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership. The covert activities involve support of the minority Ahwazi Arab and Baluchi groups and other dissident organizations. They also include gathering intelligence about Iran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program.


Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials. Many of these activities are not specified in the new Finding, and some congressional leaders have had serious questions about their nature.

Pay very close attention to this part, kiddos, because herein lies the primary potential source of a cataclysmic Iran war: the "small group" at the White House who are developing an alternate chain of command.

Fallon’s early retirement, however, appears to have been provoked not only by his negative comments about bombing Iran but also by his strong belief in the chain of command and his insistence on being informed about Special Operations in his area of responsibility. One of Fallon’s defenders is retired Marine General John J. (Jack) Sheehan, whose last assignment was as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Atlantic Command, where Fallon was a deputy. Last year, Sheehan rejected a White House offer to become the President’s “czar” for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the reasons the White House selected Fallon for CENTCOM was that he’s known to be a strategic thinker and had demonstrated those skills in the Pacific,” Sheehan told me. (Fallon served as commander-in-chief of U.S. forces in the Pacific from 2005 to 2007.) “He was charged with coming up with an over-all coherent strategy for Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and, by law, the combatant commander is responsible for all military operations within his A.O.”—area of operations. “That was not happening,” Sheehan said. “When Fallon tried to make sense of all the overt and covert activity conducted by the military in his area of responsibility, a small group in the White House leadership shut him out.”


The law cited by Sheehan is the 1986 Defense Reorganization Act, known as Goldwater-Nichols, which defined the chain of command: from the President to the Secretary of Defense, through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and on to the various combatant commanders, who were put in charge of all aspects of military operations, including joint training and logistics. That authority, the act stated, was not to be shared with other echelons of command. But the Bush Administration, as part of its global war on terror, instituted new policies that undercut regional commanders-in-chief; for example, it gave Special Operations teams, at military commands around the world, the highest priority in terms of securing support and equipment. The degradation of the traditional chain of command in the past few years has been a point of tension between the White House and the uniformed military.

“The coherence of military strategy is being eroded because of undue civilian influence and direction of nonconventional military operations,” Sheehan said. “If you have small groups planning and conducting military operations outside the knowledge and control of the combatant commander, by default you can’t have a coherent military strategy. You end up with a disaster, like the reconstruction efforts in Iraq.”

Admiral Fallon, who is known as Fox, was aware that he would face special difficulties as the first Navy officer to lead CENTCOM, which had always been headed by a ground commander, one of his military colleagues told me. He was also aware that the Special Operations community would be a concern. “Fox said that there’s a lot of strange stuff going on in Special Ops, and I told him he had to figure out what they were really doing,” Fallon’s colleague said. “The Special Ops guys eventually figured out they needed Fox, and so they began to talk to him. Fox would have won his fight with Special Ops but for Cheney.”

The Pentagon consultant said, “Fallon went down because, in his own way, he was trying to prevent a war with Iran, and you have to admire him for that.”

There you have it. This is huge. Bigger than the usual British-style strategy of renting local warlords like the Baluchis. Also duly noted:

A strategy of using ethnic minorities to undermine Iran is flawed, according to Vali Nasr, who teaches international politics at Tufts University and is also a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Just because Lebanon, Iraq, and Pakistan have ethnic problems, it does not mean that Iran is suffering from the same issue,” Nasr told me. “Iran is an old country—like France and Germany—and its citizens are just as nationalistic. The U.S. is overestimating ethnic tension in Iran.” The minority groups that the U.S. is reaching out to are either well integrated or small and marginal, without much influence on the government or much ability to present a political challenge, Nasr said. “You can always find some activist groups that will go and kill a policeman, but working with the minorities will backfire, and alienate the majority of the population.”

The Administration may have been willing to rely on dissident organizations in Iran even when there was reason to believe that the groups had operated against American interests in the past. The use of Baluchi elements, for example, is problematic, Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. clandestine officer who worked for nearly two decades in South Asia and the Middle East, told me. “The Baluchis are Sunni fundamentalists who hate the regime in Tehran, but you can also describe them as Al Qaeda,” Baer told me. “These are guys who cut off the heads of nonbelievers—in this case, it’s Shiite Iranians. The irony is that we’re once again working with Sunni fundamentalists, just as we did in Afghanistan in the nineteen-eighties.” Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is considered one of the leading planners of the September 11th attacks, are Baluchi Sunni fundamentalists.


One of the most active and violent anti-regime groups in Iran today is the Jundallah, also known as the Iranian People’s Resistance Movement, which describes itself as a resistance force fighting for the rights of Sunnis in Iran. “This is a vicious Salafi organization whose followers attended the same madrassas as the Taliban and Pakistani extremists,” Nasr told me. “They are suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and they are also thought to be tied to the drug culture.” The Jundallah took responsibility for the bombing of a busload of Revolutionary Guard soldiers in February, 2007. At least eleven Guard members were killed. According to Baer and to press reports, the Jundallah is among the groups in Iran that are benefitting from U.S. support.

The C.I.A. and Special Operations communities also have long-standing ties to two other dissident groups in Iran: the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, known in the West as the M.E.K., and a Kurdish separatist group, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, or PJAK.

The M.E.K. has been on the State Department’s terrorist list for more than a decade, yet in recent years the group has received arms and intelligence, directly or indirectly, from the United States. Some of the newly authorized covert funds, the Pentagon consultant told me, may well end up in M.E.K. coffers. “The new task force will work with the M.E.K. The Administration is desperate for results.” He added, “The M.E.K. has no C.P.A. auditing the books, and its leaders are thought to have been lining their pockets for years. If people only knew what the M.E.K. is getting, and how much is going to its bank accounts—and yet it is almost useless for the purposes the Administration intends.”

I have zero faith in any element of America's political class to even understand what is happening, let alone get some degree of control over these covert operations, ever escalating and widening out into the aggressive galaxy of contractors and militant baby boomers, all set in motion on their own, partitioned even from the regional American military commanders.

When even the President's direct regional commander, General Fallon, couldn't find out what the fuck Special Forces are actually doing, then by definition we have a serious and insane war conspiracy unfolding.

And for now, that is basically all I can say.

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