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War and Conflict • Where’s all the money gone?
May 16, ’13
DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Where’s all the money gone?
By David Vine
Outside the United States, the Pentagon controls a collection of military bases unprecedented in history. With US troops gone from Iraq and the withdrawal from Afghanistan underway, it’s easy to forget that we probably still have about 1,000 military bases in other peoples’ lands. This giant collection of bases receives remarkably little media attention, costs a fortune, and even when cost cutting is the subject du jour, it still seems to get a free ride.
With so much money pouring into the Pentagon’s base world, the question is: Who’s benefiting?
Some of the money clearly pays for things like salaries, health care, and other benefits for around one million military and Defense Department personnel and their families overseas. But
after an extensive examination of government spending data and contracts, I estimate that the Pentagon has dispersed around US$385 billion to private companies for work done outside the US since late 2001, mainly in that baseworld. That’s nearly double the entire State Department budget over the same period, and because Pentagon and government accounting practices are so poor, the true total may be significantly higher.
Not surprisingly, when it comes to such contracts and given our recent wars, the top two countries into which taxpayer dollars flowed were Afghanistan and Iraq (around US$160 billion). Next comes Kuwait ($37.2 billion), where the military has had a significant presence since the first Gulf War of 1990-1991, followed by Germany ($27.8 billion), South Korea ($18.2 billion), Japan ($15.2 billion), and Britain ($14.7 billion).
While some of these costs are for weapons procurement, rather than for bases and troop support, the hundreds of thousands of contracts believed to be omitted from these tallies thanks to government accounting errors make the numbers a reasonable reflection of the everyday moneys flowing to private contractors for the world of bases the United States has maintained since World War II.
Beyond the sheer volume of dollars heading overseas, an analysis of Pentagon spending reveals a troubling pattern: the majority of benefits have gone to a relatively small group of private contractors. In total, almost a third of the $385 billion has flowed into the coffers of just 10 top contractors, including scandal-prone companies like KBR, the former subsidiary of Halliburton, and oil giant BP.
In addition, Pentagon spending on its baseworld has been marked by spiraling expenditures, the growing use of uncompetitive contracts and contracts lacking incentives to control costs, outright fraud, and the repeated awarding of non-competitive sweetheart contracts to companies with histories of fraud and abuse.
There’s been so much cost gouging that any attempt to catalog it across bases globally would be a mammoth effort. The $31-$60 billion in contracting fraud in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars alone, as calculated by the Commission on Wartime Contracting, which the United States Congress established to investigate waste and abuse, suggests the global total could be astronomical.
Since 2001, US taxpayers have effectively shipped hundreds of billions of dollars out of the country to build and maintain an enormous military presence abroad, while major Pentagon contractors and a select group of politicians, lobbyists, and other friends have benefited mightily.
Peeling potatoes, bringing home the bacon
While a handful of overseas bases, like Guantanamo Bay, date to the turn of the twentieth century, most have existed since the construction of thousands of bases during World War II. Although the number of installations and troops ebbed and flowed in the Cold War years and shrank by about 60% once it was over, a significant infrastructure of bases remains.
Scattered from Aruba and Belgium to the United Arab Emirates and Singapore, the Pentagon’s global landholdings are bigger than all of North Korea and represent by far the largest collection of foreign bases in history.
Once upon a time, however, the military, not contractors, built the barracks, cleaned the clothes, and peeled the potatoes at these bases. This started to change during the Vietnam War, when Brown & Root, better known to critics as "Burn & Loot" (later KBR), began building major military installations in South Vietnam as part of a contractor consortium.
The use of contractors accelerated following the Cold War’s end, part of a larger trend toward the privatization of formerly public services. By the first Gulf War, one in 100 deployed personnel was a contractor. Later in the 1990s, during US military operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Italy, and especially the Balkans, Brown & Root received more than $2 billion in base-support and logistics contracts for base construction and maintenance, food services, waste removal, water production, transportation services, and much more.
By the second Gulf War, contractors represented roughly one in two deployed personnel in Iraq, with the company now known as KBR employing more than 50,000 people, or enough to staff 100 army battalions. Burger Kings, Starbucks, and car dealerships, as well as air conditioning, steak, and ice cream became regular features of often city-sized bases. However, this wasn’t a phenomenon restricted to war zones. US bases worldwide look much the same, which helps explain the staggering taxpayer dollars they consume.
Calculating costs in a ‘dysfunctional’ system
The problem is, it’s remarkably difficult to figure out who’s been benefiting from all the taxpayer money. The government doesn’t bother to compile such information. This meant I had to pick through hundreds of thousands of contracts and research scores of companies in countries worldwide.
I began with publicly available government contract data and followed a methodology for tracking funds used by the Commission on Wartime Contracting. This allowed me to compile a list of every Pentagon contract with a "place of performance" – that is, the country where most of a contract’s work is performed – outside the United States since the start of the Afghan war (fiscal year 2002).
There were 1.7 million of them.
Scrolling through 1.7 million spreadsheet rows, one for each contract, offered a dizzying feel for the immensity of the Pentagon’s activities and the money spent globally. Generally, the companies winning the largest contracts have been doing one (or more) of four things: building bases, running bases, providing security for bases, and delivering fuel to bases. Among those 1.7 million contracts, there was one for $43 for sand in South Korea and another for a $1.7 million fitness center in Honduras. There was the $23,000 for sports drinks in Kuwait, $53 million in base support services in Afghanistan, and everything from $73 in pens to $301 million for US Army industrial supplies in Iraq.
Cheek by jowl, I found the most basic services, the most banal purchases, and the most ominous acquisitions, including concrete sidewalks, a traffic light system, diesel fuel, insect fogger, shower heads, black toner, a 59" desk, unskilled laborers, chaplain supplies, linen for "distinguished visitor" rooms, easy chairs, gym equipment, flamenco dancers, the rental of six sedans, phone cards, a 50-inch plasma screen, billiards cues, X-Box 360 games and accessories, Slushie machine parts, a hot dog roller, scallops, shrimp, strawberries, asparagus, and toaster pastries, as well as hazardous waste services, a burn pit, ammo and clips, bomb disposal services, blackout goggles for detainees, and confinement buildings.
The $385 billion total is at best a rough estimate; the real totals are surely higher. The Federal Procurement Data System that’s supposed to keep track of government contracts "often contains inaccurate data", according to the Government Accountability Office. Harvard University economist Linda Bilmes calls the system "dysfunctional". For example, hundreds of thousands of contracts have no "place of performance" listed at all. There are 116,527 contracts that list the place of performance as Switzerland, even though the vast majority are for delivering food to troops in Afghanistan and at bases worldwide.
The unreliable and opaque nature of the data becomes clearer when you consider that the top recipient of Pentagon contracts isn’t a company at all, but a category labeled "miscellaneous foreign contractors"; that is, almost 250,000 contracts totaling nearly $50 billion, or 12% of the total, have gone to recipients we can’t identify. As the Commission on Wartime Contracting explains, "miscellaneous foreign contractors" is a catch-all "often used for the purpose of obscuring the identification of the actual contractor[s]".
The reliability of the data only worsens when we consider the Pentagon’s inability to track its own money or pass an audit. Identifying the value of contracts given to specific companies is made more difficult by a general lack of corporate transparency, as well as complicated subcontracting arrangements, the use of foreign subsidiaries, and frequent corporate name changes.
Still, examining the top contractors is illuminating. Let’s start with the top three whose names we know:
1. KBR: Among the companies bringing home billions, the name Kellogg, Brown & Root dominates. It has almost five times the contracts of the next company on the list and is emblematic of broader problems in the contracting system.
KBR is the latest incarnation of Brown & Root, the company that started paving roads in Texas in 1919 and grew into the largest engineering and construction firm in the United States. In 1962, Halliburton, an international oil services company, bought Brown & Root. In 1995, Dick Cheney became Halliburton’s president and CEO after helping jump-start the Pentagon’s ever-greater reliance on private contractors when he was President George H W Bush’s secretary of defense.
Later, while Cheney was vice president, Halliburton and its KBR subsidiary (formed after acquiring Kellogg Industries) won by far the largest wartime contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s difficult to overstate KBR’s role in the two conflicts. Without its work, there might have been no wars. In a 2005 interview, Paul Cerjan, a former Halliburton vice president, explained that KBR was supporting more than 200,000 coalition forces in Iraq, providing "anything they need to conduct the war". That meant "base support services, which includes all the billeting, the feeding, water supplies, sewage – anything it would take to run a city". It also meant Army "logistics functions, which include transportation, movement of POL [petroleum, oil, and lubricants] supplies, gas… spare parts, ammunition".
Most of KBR’s contracts to support bases and troops overseas have come under the multi-billion dollar Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (LOGCAP). In 2001, KBR won a one-year LOGCAP contract to provide an undefined quantity and an undefined value of "selected services in wartime". The company subsequently enjoyed nearly eight years of work without facing a competitor’s bid, thanks to a series of one-year contract extensions.
By July 2011, KBR had received more than $37 billion in LOGCAP funds. Its experience reflected the near tripling of Pentagon contracts issued without competitive bidding between 2001 and 2010. "It’s like a gigantic monopoly", a representative from Taxpayers for Common Sense said of LOGCAP.
The work KBR performed under LOGCAP also reflected the Pentagon’s frequent use of "cost-plus" contracts. These reimburse a company for its expenses and then add a fee that’s usually fixed contractually or determined by a performance evaluation board. The Congressional Research Service explained that because "increased costs mean increased fees to the contractor," there is "no incentive for the contractor to limit the government’s costs". As one Halliburton official told a congressional committee bluntly, the company’s unofficial mantra in Iraq became "Don’t worry about price. It’s ‘cost-plus.’"
Not surprisingly, in 2009, the Pentagon’s top auditor testified that KBR accounted for "the vast majority" of wartime fraud. The company has also faced accusations of overcharging for everything from delivering food and fuel and supplying housing for troops to providing base security services.
After years of bad publicity, in 2007, Halliburton spun KBR off as an independent company and moved its headquarters from Houston to Dubai. Despite KBR’s track record and a 2009 guilty plea for bribing Nigerian government officials to win gas contracts (for which its former CEO received prison time), the company has continued to receive massive government contracts. Its latest LOGCAP contract, awarded in 2008, could be worth up to $50 billion through 2018.
2. Supreme Group: Next on the list is the company that’s been described as the KBR for the Afghan War. Supreme Group has won more than $9 billion in contracts for transporting and serving meals to troops in Afghanistan and at other bases worldwide. Its growth perfectly symbolizes the soldiers-to-contractors shift in who peels the potatoes.
Supreme was founded in 1957 by an Army veteran who saw an opportunity to provide food for the hundreds of US bases in Germany. After expanding over several decades into the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans, the company won multi-billion-dollar "sole source contracts" that gave it a virtual monopoly over wartime food services in Afghanistan.
Today, in a prime example of the revolving door between the Pentagon and its contractors, Supreme’s chief commercial officer is former Lieutenant General Robert Dail. From August 2006 to November 2008, Dail headed the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), which awards food contracts. In 2007, Dail presented Supreme with DLA’s "New Contractor of the Year Award". Four months after leaving the Pentagon, he became the president of Supreme Group USA.
Recently, Supreme has faced growing scrutiny over the way it has won competition-free contracts, with service fees as high as 75% of costs and reportedly for more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in over-billing. Last month, Supreme had the chutzpah to sue the Pentagon for awarding a new $10 billion Afghanistan food contract to a competitor that underbid Supreme’s offer by $1.4 billion.
3. Agility Logistics: Next on the list is Agility Logistics, a Kuwaiti company. It won multi-billion-dollar contracts to transport food to troops in Iraq. When the Pentagon decided against awarding similar contracts in Afghanistan to a single firm, Agility partnered with Supreme in exchange for a 3.5% fee on revenues. In 2009 and 2010, grand juries indicted Agility for massive contracting fraud, and the Pentagon suspended the company and 125 related companies from receiving new contracts. In 2012, a judge issued a default judgment against Agility in a whistleblower suit seeking more than $1 billion for overcharging the government.
And the rest …
Things don’t get much better farther down the list. Next come DynCorp International and Fluor Intercontinental, which along with KBR won the latest LOGCAP contracts. Awarding that contract to three companies rather than one was intended to increase competition. In practice, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting, each corporation has enjoyed a "mini-monopoly" over logistics services in Afghanistan and other locations. DynCorp, which has also won large wartime private security contracts, has a history littered with charges of over-billing, shoddy construction, smuggling laborers onto bases, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking.
Although a Fluor employee pled guilty in 2012 to conspiring to steal and sell military equipment in Iraq, it’s the only defense firm in the world to receive an "A" on Transparency International’s anti-corruption index that rates companies’ efforts to fight corruption. On the other hand, number seven on the list, ITT (now Exelis), received a "C" (along with KBR and DynCorp).
The last three in the top 10 are BP (which tops the Project on Government Oversight’s federal contractor misconduct list) and the petroleum companies of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. After all, the US military runs on oil. It consumed five billion gallons in fiscal year 2011 alone, or more than all of Sweden. In total, 10 of the top 25 firms are oil companies, with contracts for delivering oil overseas totaling around $40 billion.
Spreading the love
Contractors are hardly alone in raking in the dollars from the Pentagon’s baseworld. Pentagon officials, military personnel, members of congress, and lobbyists, among others, have all benefited – financially, politically, and professionally – from the giant overseas presence. In particular, contractors have spread the love by making millions in campaign contributions to members of congress. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, military contractors and their employees gave more than $27 million in election donations in 2012 alone, and have donated almost $200 million since 1990.
Most of these have gone to members of the armed services and appropriations committees in the Senate and House of Representatives. These, of course, have primary authority over awarding military dollars. For the 2012 elections, for example, DynCorp International’s political action committee donated $10,000 to both the chair and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, and made additional donations to 33 other members of the House and Senate armed services committees and 16 members of the two appropriations committees.
Most contractors also pay lobbyists hundreds of thousands of dollars to sway military budgeteers and policymakers their way. KBR and Halliburton spent nearly $5.5 million on lobbying between 2002 and 2012, including $420,000 in 2008 when KBR won the latest LOGCAP contract and $620,000 the following year when it protested being barred from bidding on contracts in Kuwait. Supreme spent $660,000 on lobbying in 2012 alone. Agility spent $200,000 in 2011, after its second indictment on fraud charges, and Fluor racked up nearly $9.5 million in lobbying fees from 2002 to 2012.
Shrinking the baseworld
Today, there are some signs of baseworld shrinkage. The hundreds of bases built in Iraq are long gone, and many of the hundreds built in Afghanistan are now being shut down as US combat troops prepare to withdraw. The military is downsizing an old base in the Portuguese Azores and studying further base and troop reductions in Europe.
While many in congress are resisting an Obama administration request to reduce "excess capacity" among thousands of domestic bases through two new rounds of the Base Realignment and Closure process, at least some current and former members of congress are calling for a parallel effort to close bases abroad.
At the same time, however, the military is building (or exploring the possibility of building) new bases from Asia and Africa to the Persian Gulf and Latin America. Small drone bases are on the rise from Niger to Saudi Arabia. Even in Europe, the Pentagon is still building bases while closing others.
Much work remains to be done to figure out who’s been benefiting from the Pentagon’s baseworld. The billions in contracts that sustain our bases, however, are a good reminder that there are immediate savings available by reducing troop deployments and Cold War bases abroad. They are also a reminder of where we should look when we’re told there isn’t enough money for Head Start or hospitals or housing.
For decades, tens of billions of dollars in overseas spending have ended up in the coffers of a select few, with many billions leaking out of the US economy entirely. Stemming those leaks by cutting overseas spending and redirecting precious resources toward long-neglected non-military needs is an important way to help revive an economy that has long benefited the few rather than the many.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-160513.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun May 19, 2013 1:44 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
War and Conflict • Dangerous Times: The genocidal logic of anti-Zionism
May 18, 2013
Dangerous Times: The genocidal logic of anti-Zionism
By James Lewis
Physicist Stephen Hawking is a famous media scientist, with all the pristine morality of a Hollywood starlet starving for publicity. By calling for an academic boycott of Israel, Hawking just joined the long, long list of bloody-minded professors, as Winston Churchill called his Hawking’s species.
Paul Johnson’s excellent book Intellectuals shows that most of the famous professors of the 20th century actively promoted mass murder — far away from home, of course. Most of the bloody-minded gang favored leftist mass murderers like Stalin and Mao, but others supported Hitler before he started to lose. Famous philosopher Martin Heidegger even joined the German Nazi Party, and he never renounced his support. French intellectual star Jean-Paul Sartre managed to serially support Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, for a record high murder count of 80-90 million human beings. Sartre never renounced his support, either.
Whaddaguy.
Even today, bloody-minded professors are a dime a dozen on the campuses. They are obscene, but they still thrive like poison mushrooms.
Yet even a Professor Hawking should be able to follow this logic.
1. Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. It has about 7 million Jews, almost all descended from refugees from deadly persecutions in Europe and the Middle East.
After Mr. Obama called for Hosni Mubarak to resign as president of Egypt in 2011, the "Arab Spring" started mass killings in all the Muslim countries around Israel. Some 100,000 Syrian Arabs have died, and unknown thousands of Libyans, Tunisians, and Egyptians. When refugees from the jihad war in the Sudan run for safety, they often find refuge in Israel. Not in the surrounding Islamist countries, because they are the wrong religion.
2. Israel is the only country left standing after the "Arab Spring." Egypt is starving. Libya is in chaos. Syria is in terminal civil war. Israel is stable and well-defended.
3. It is therefore clear to the shining genius of Professor Hawking that Israel must be an illegitimate foreign substance in the rich native soil of the Middle East and must disappear as soon as possible.
That is the goal of the academic boycott.
4. Israel has always been surrounded by crazy calls for genocide of the Jews (and also for killing Arab Christians, Bahá’ís, and atheists).
Since Jimmy Carter handed Iran to theocrat Ayatollah Khomeini three decades ago, all the schoolchildren in that peaceful country have been forced to chant every single day, "Death to Israel! Death to America!"
Only liberals are idiotic enough to convince themselves that the daily hate indoctrination in Iran means nothing.
Professor Hawking is, of course, a delusional liberal.
5. On top of Iran’s hate industry, the Saudis and Gulf tribes are busy paying for international hate campaigns, as shown every day by the excellent MEMRI.org website. European fascist parties are indoctrinating their own followers into the Muslim hate campaign, resurrecting the Dark Ages of Europe’s ethnic genocides of the 1930s and ’40s. Muslim oil dollars are going to neo-neo-fascist parties that have now gained real power in Hungary, Italy, and Albania.
6. Israel is therefore the obsessive target of a genocide campaign. Iran is predicted to have nukes in a couple of months. Egypt will follow.
Israel declared its independence in 1948, the same year as India and Pakistan did. The 1948 Partition between those countries killed an estimated 3-4 million human beings in Muslim-Hindu riots. The Partition was demanded by the Indian Congress Party, led by…Mahatma Gandhi…who was instantly deified by the Western media for his love of peace.
Remember that year, 1948, the year of independence for Israel, Pakistan, and India.
Pakistan is Muslim and dangerously unstable. It has nukes and missiles.
India is mostly Hindu today. It also has nukes and missiles.
You might call India and Pakistan "apartheid nations" if you were a liberal, and therefore delusional.
But there is no liberal campaign to boycott India or Pakistan.
Same year of independence, same big ethnic divisions, but no liberal boycott.
Professor Hawking has apparently never heard of Pakistan and India and their "apartheid."
It’s just one of those things, I guess.
India is still targeted by Muslim jihadis directed by Pakistan.
Professor Hawking is not calling for an academic boycott of India.
Or Pakistan.
Or any other ethnically divided country in the world.
Oddly enough, Hawking is just focused like a laser on Israel.
Bloody-minded professors.
Winston Churchill had it right, as usual.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/ … onism.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat May 18, 2013 2:17 am
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War and Conflict • Checkmate: From global makeover to takeover
The plate spinning of the Obama-Saudi-globalist cabal
Checkmate: From global makeover to takeover
By Doug Hagmann
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
We’re rapidly approaching a potential checkmate moment in the Mideast. There are 41 nations plus the U.S., for a total of 42 nations currently participating in military maneuvers off the coast of Iran. Despite all of the saber rattling about Iran, we are being deceived about the coming global battle, which will almost certainly begin in Syria, not Iran.
What we are seeing is both deadly serious and under-appreciated by most Westerners, who have grown weary of wars and rumors of wars in the Mideast long ago. Exhaustion aside, the events continue to march forward, the consolidation of forces and interests are forming until that final moment when we will have a single group of tyrannical global controllers left standing. A checkmate moment, where the aspirations of the globalists will have succeeded in a plan of global domination, consolidation of power, energy and wealth, all obtained from the blood and bodies of our family members fighting a war without our consent.
It was during the darkest hours of last Sunday morning, during the time that exists when sunrise seems so distant and the stillness of the night that keeps most of humanity in the Western hemisphere in a deep slumber. It was then I began to contemplate the best way to report the complexities behind the recent bombings near Damascus of missile storage facilities and the missiles themselves by Israel. Even at this early hour, the media already had their talking points well refined, preparing to hold captive their audience by asserting that the strikes took place in the readily accepted historical context of a limited Israeli action against their regional Arab enemy protagonists. A short, sharp, precise operation with a beginning and an end all in a tidy time period. Except it’s not. Not this time. We are seeing something much different… a step in the path to global war.
I was troubled by this inaccurate description of events, like many of you who are reading this, as we know that what we are seeing is part of something much larger and much more ominous take place. It was here, on this very site that I wrote about the beginning of World War III… and that it would not start with Iran, but with Syria. The death race to Damascus by an agenda so nefarious that it could only be ascribed to an unseen evil. Yet, my treatise was called hyperbole by some, and described as the writings of an alarmist by others. While I discount the former, I happily embrace characterizations of the latter knowing that we are witnessing events that cannot be “walked back.” We are watching the end stages of a larger agenda play out before us, while those in power and the media want us to believe otherwise.
It was during this darkness that I decided to turn on my television for updates from the media with which most Americans are so enamored, and by which they are so controlled. At this early hour, I stumbled across an infomercial selling DVDs of old television variety shows from a seemingly much simpler time, momentarily taking me away from my task.
Perhaps caught up by the motion of a man spinning several plates atop wooden sticks, my German Shepherd suddenly awoke from his light slumber and looked at the on-screen motion that seemed to be a staple of variety shows of the 1960’s. His gaze was captivated by the spinning motion of the plates and the man frantically moving from one side of the table to the other, trying to keep all of the plates spinning and airborne while adding even more. I watched my dog as he seemed mesmerized, staring at the television without even blinking for at least a full minute.
When the man finally lost control of the spinning plates and they all crashed to the floor amid the guffaws of the audience, my eyes met those of my Shepherd, who was now looking at me as if to ask what that was all about. It was actually an out-take of an act that was never broadcast, replaced instead by the successful act that concluded with all plates intact.
I suppose that seeing the reality of the events that never aired was the major selling point of the DVD. The things that are not broadcast during normal programming; the messes, the mistakes, breakage and what really takes place behind the scenes, but is carefully screened from the audience. I noticed that this man had two or three assistants who stood just outside of visual range, hidden from view, who quickly came to his aid after the broadcast feed was cut and once the curtain that separated the actor from the audience was closed. For my dog, however, the visual spell was broken once the plates stopped spinning and crashed to the floor.
There it is, I thought, in the dark of night and outside of the normal viewing times of network television, is the broader explanation of the events currently unfolding on the world stage.
The plate spinning of the Obama-Saudi-globalist cabal
If one looks beyond the two dimensionality of the media and the talking points from Washington, the three dimensional aspect of current events begins to emerge. Like the plate spinner whose first act began with one single plate on a stick, so too did the so-called “Arab Spring,” which would be more appropriately named the “Globalist Spring.” After the audience warm up act in Tunisia, the complete act opened with Egypt, after which more plates from the Obama-Saudi-Globalist agenda were added, further captivating the attention of the world.
Like my just-awakened dog and the on-screen action that captivated his stare, people have been watching the spinner add more and more plates, awestruck at this exhibit of talent. The audience anticipates a successful conclusion to this marvelous feat of balance and dexterity and is ready to cheer when the spinner removes the plates from their thin balancing posts, and the act successfully concludes neat and tidy to the television audience, with nothing broken.
Obama himself could be compared to the visible plate spinner in this act known as the Arab Spring. “Globalist Spring,” that is, where the fate of nations, like plates atop thin sticks, are spun as props entertaining a global audience. Captivating the world by the many plates on sticks, he is the front man entertaining the world audience while the producers, the media and the globalists, quickly edit out any missteps, or broken plates, keeping the reality from the captive audience. Some breakage, however, cannot be edited out by the media and must be explained away in a different manner. Such was the case with Benghazi, and as is the case with the Israeli airstrikes on the missiles in Syria. Their explanation in place of edits transcend the realm of perception to that of deception.
While the globalist controlled media and power elite do their best to divert the public’s attention from Benghazi and attempt to convince their captive audience that the Israeli missile strikes are limited, localized events, the truth is that both occurred during the same stage act. Different plates, but the stage and the show are the same.
Obama, the visible plate spinner, like his TV counterpart, has a revolving cadre of out-of-sight assistants that have included Hillary Rodham Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, and a long list of others. In addition to his assistants, we must also consider the executive producers for the show now underway. Some refer to them as the puppet masters, other, the paymasters. However defined, they are the ultimate producers of this and all of the stage acts we are seeing. They are the individuals who control the money and wealth, and now want to not only control, but own the future.
While the masses continue to watch the balancing act, what is taking place offstage that we’re not supposed to be seeing?
For those not as easily entertained…
Readers might recall my many reports about Benghazi, and that this entire operation was nothing more than a covert weapons-running operation to arm anti-Assad terrorists to destabilize and take down the Syrian government. Whether we refer to it as “Death Race Damascus” or “Obama’s real-world game of Risk,” the operation has placed the world in the beginning stages of World War III. Notice that the Israeli missile strikes took place just outside of Damascus, and Syria is Russia’s “red line” in the sand.
Benghazi and the Israeli strikes near Damascus are not unrelated. The Israeli attacks in Syria are collateral effects of our covert operations throughout the Middle East and North Africa and in that manner, tangentially related to Benghazi. Benghazi was, and is, all about Syria. And Syria is not Iraq or Afghanistan, or even Egypt or Libya. Those countries imploded, while Syria is set to explode, and therefore enjoin other nations into a regional and ultimately, a world war.
For this reason, people need to fully understand the significance and secrets that full disclosure about Benghazi would reveal. You see, opening the curtains to expose the planners and producers of the Benghazi stage act would reveal secrets so closely held that it threatens the agenda of the Obama regime who are working on behalf of the Saudis and their globalist handlers. Such a misstep of full disclosure about Benghazi could cause a critical setback of an agenda advancing across the world stage where timing is critical.
For those not easily entertained or intellectually challenged by spinning plates, the situation playing out before us may also be compared to a game of three dimensional chess. Using this analogy, we are able to view the multi-dimensional board and the movement of chess pieces required to set up World War III. One board consists of players involving North Korea, Japan and China, while the second of three boards represents the entirety of the Middle East, and all of the proxy nations of China, Russia and the United States. But what about the elusive but critically important third board? It is on this level where the real story exists.
The third board: Who benefits?
It is here that one must pay very close attention to everything that is not being reported over the very visible reports we are intended to see. As I have asserted many times, we are in the midst of a proxy war that has created some very unusual alliances, and some very dangerous opposition. Superpower nations are using allied nation-states to fight battles in order to jockey for their ultimate fighting positions. You can read about these alliances and the minutia of the battles elsewhere. Here, I am attempting to draw your attention to the larger picture, the end result, and the end game scenario… because the key to understanding the alliances and actions exists and only make sense in the larger picture of this 3-D global chess game.
The third board represents a field of play that is virtually misunderstood by most and therefore, rarely mentioned in the context of the nation building and reconfiguration we have watched unfold over the last several years. It is a process underway for a reason, but not for any of the noble causes we are being told to believe.
It is at this level where a select group of people are making their moves that prompt those of all others. It is at this level that the international bankers, the globalists, the secret cabal of unseen forces are at work and playing to win. It involves a currency war, and a currency war is as much a war as one with bombs and bullets. We can see it with the international transfer of wealth. the manipulation of the gold reserves, and in other areas—but only if we look.
Quite simply, the motives behind global conflict can be found within the military-industrial complex operated at the highest levels of the internationalists, the bankers and financiers—the same surnames have been present in nearly all conflicts throughout history.
There is a firewall that exists between these global power elite and their objectives. It is a sovereign United States of America, much as it always has been in modern times. Now, however, we have been weakened from within, and our sovereignty is being significantly eroded through multiple and tenacious assaults against our freedoms and liberties. This is the result of a collective acquiescence and our lack of resistance to tyranny disguised as security, and immorality in many forms presented as tolerance. We are thus left in a weakened state, with a collective majority unable to think clearly or fight to regain the Godly values upon which our nation was founded. This has been by design, not default.
As our national moral compass has been compromised, so too has our ability to recognize the other assaults to our sovereignty, or our willingness to speak out against our own destruction. Specifically, we have an occupant of the White House who, by the admission of an unnamed senior member of his own staff, has an agenda to “kill the U.S. dollar,” the most widely held currency in the allocated reserves of many nations. On what planet, on which stage, in what venue does the killing of our national currency make any sense whatsoever? That is a question that has yet to be answered.
The only sense one could possibly make of this treasonous act is the ultimate destruction of the United States as a nation, as the last firewall of freedom. Who better to usher in our demise, then, is a man whose past is shrouded in mystery, and whose future intent is becoming clearer with each passing day. Ultimately, though, who would benefit from our destruction? Who benefits from a third world war, where millions will most certainly perish. The answer is clear, as we see parallel agendas of wars fought with bullets and bombs, and wars fought with food and wealth.
Once the plates stop spinning and nations have fallen, or the chessboard is cleared of the pawns, the only clear winners will be the architects who are behind this global perversity of power realignment. The winners will be the power elite, whose goal has always been to lock in their future by taking away ours. They will usher in a global currency, and ultimately control the wealth of the world not only for this generation, but for future generations.
So, while your focus is being directed to the flash-bangs of bombings designed to leave you stunned, understand the real objective. It’s a fight for the future—your future—and the future of your offspring, who we have permitted to be sold into bondage through perpetual shooting wars and money wars. It is imperative that you see we are in the beginning stages of a global makeover, and prepare accordingly.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55034
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed May 08, 2013 12:29 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
War and Conflict • Checkmate: From global makeover to takeover
The plate spinning of the Obama-Saudi-globalist cabal
Checkmate: From global makeover to takeover
By Doug Hagmann
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
We’re rapidly approaching a potential checkmate moment in the Mideast. There are 41 nations plus the U.S., for a total of 42 nations currently participating in military maneuvers off the coast of Iran. Despite all of the saber rattling about Iran, we are being deceived about the coming global battle, which will almost certainly begin in Syria, not Iran.
What we are seeing is both deadly serious and under-appreciated by most Westerners, who have grown weary of wars and rumors of wars in the Mideast long ago. Exhaustion aside, the events continue to march forward, the consolidation of forces and interests are forming until that final moment when we will have a single group of tyrannical global controllers left standing. A checkmate moment, where the aspirations of the globalists will have succeeded in a plan of global domination, consolidation of power, energy and wealth, all obtained from the blood and bodies of our family members fighting a war without our consent.
It was during the darkest hours of last Sunday morning, during the time that exists when sunrise seems so distant and the stillness of the night that keeps most of humanity in the Western hemisphere in a deep slumber. It was then I began to contemplate the best way to report the complexities behind the recent bombings near Damascus of missile storage facilities and the missiles themselves by Israel. Even at this early hour, the media already had their talking points well refined, preparing to hold captive their audience by asserting that the strikes took place in the readily accepted historical context of a limited Israeli action against their regional Arab enemy protagonists. A short, sharp, precise operation with a beginning and an end all in a tidy time period. Except it’s not. Not this time. We are seeing something much different… a step in the path to global war.
I was troubled by this inaccurate description of events, like many of you who are reading this, as we know that what we are seeing is part of something much larger and much more ominous take place. It was here, on this very site that I wrote about the beginning of World War III… and that it would not start with Iran, but with Syria. The death race to Damascus by an agenda so nefarious that it could only be ascribed to an unseen evil. Yet, my treatise was called hyperbole by some, and described as the writings of an alarmist by others. While I discount the former, I happily embrace characterizations of the latter knowing that we are witnessing events that cannot be “walked back.” We are watching the end stages of a larger agenda play out before us, while those in power and the media want us to believe otherwise.
It was during this darkness that I decided to turn on my television for updates from the media with which most Americans are so enamored, and by which they are so controlled. At this early hour, I stumbled across an infomercial selling DVDs of old television variety shows from a seemingly much simpler time, momentarily taking me away from my task.
Perhaps caught up by the motion of a man spinning several plates atop wooden sticks, my German Shepherd suddenly awoke from his light slumber and looked at the on-screen motion that seemed to be a staple of variety shows of the 1960’s. His gaze was captivated by the spinning motion of the plates and the man frantically moving from one side of the table to the other, trying to keep all of the plates spinning and airborne while adding even more. I watched my dog as he seemed mesmerized, staring at the television without even blinking for at least a full minute.
When the man finally lost control of the spinning plates and they all crashed to the floor amid the guffaws of the audience, my eyes met those of my Shepherd, who was now looking at me as if to ask what that was all about. It was actually an out-take of an act that was never broadcast, replaced instead by the successful act that concluded with all plates intact.
I suppose that seeing the reality of the events that never aired was the major selling point of the DVD. The things that are not broadcast during normal programming; the messes, the mistakes, breakage and what really takes place behind the scenes, but is carefully screened from the audience. I noticed that this man had two or three assistants who stood just outside of visual range, hidden from view, who quickly came to his aid after the broadcast feed was cut and once the curtain that separated the actor from the audience was closed. For my dog, however, the visual spell was broken once the plates stopped spinning and crashed to the floor.
There it is, I thought, in the dark of night and outside of the normal viewing times of network television, is the broader explanation of the events currently unfolding on the world stage.
The plate spinning of the Obama-Saudi-globalist cabal
If one looks beyond the two dimensionality of the media and the talking points from Washington, the three dimensional aspect of current events begins to emerge. Like the plate spinner whose first act began with one single plate on a stick, so too did the so-called “Arab Spring,” which would be more appropriately named the “Globalist Spring.” After the audience warm up act in Tunisia, the complete act opened with Egypt, after which more plates from the Obama-Saudi-Globalist agenda were added, further captivating the attention of the world.
Like my just-awakened dog and the on-screen action that captivated his stare, people have been watching the spinner add more and more plates, awestruck at this exhibit of talent. The audience anticipates a successful conclusion to this marvelous feat of balance and dexterity and is ready to cheer when the spinner removes the plates from their thin balancing posts, and the act successfully concludes neat and tidy to the television audience, with nothing broken.
Obama himself could be compared to the visible plate spinner in this act known as the Arab Spring. “Globalist Spring,” that is, where the fate of nations, like plates atop thin sticks, are spun as props entertaining a global audience. Captivating the world by the many plates on sticks, he is the front man entertaining the world audience while the producers, the media and the globalists, quickly edit out any missteps, or broken plates, keeping the reality from the captive audience. Some breakage, however, cannot be edited out by the media and must be explained away in a different manner. Such was the case with Benghazi, and as is the case with the Israeli airstrikes on the missiles in Syria. Their explanation in place of edits transcend the realm of perception to that of deception.
While the globalist controlled media and power elite do their best to divert the public’s attention from Benghazi and attempt to convince their captive audience that the Israeli missile strikes are limited, localized events, the truth is that both occurred during the same stage act. Different plates, but the stage and the show are the same.
Obama, the visible plate spinner, like his TV counterpart, has a revolving cadre of out-of-sight assistants that have included Hillary Rodham Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, and a long list of others. In addition to his assistants, we must also consider the executive producers for the show now underway. Some refer to them as the puppet masters, other, the paymasters. However defined, they are the ultimate producers of this and all of the stage acts we are seeing. They are the individuals who control the money and wealth, and now want to not only control, but own the future.
While the masses continue to watch the balancing act, what is taking place offstage that we’re not supposed to be seeing?
For those not as easily entertained…
Readers might recall my many reports about Benghazi, and that this entire operation was nothing more than a covert weapons-running operation to arm anti-Assad terrorists to destabilize and take down the Syrian government. Whether we refer to it as “Death Race Damascus” or “Obama’s real-world game of Risk,” the operation has placed the world in the beginning stages of World War III. Notice that the Israeli missile strikes took place just outside of Damascus, and Syria is Russia’s “red line” in the sand.
Benghazi and the Israeli strikes near Damascus are not unrelated. The Israeli attacks in Syria are collateral effects of our covert operations throughout the Middle East and North Africa and in that manner, tangentially related to Benghazi. Benghazi was, and is, all about Syria. And Syria is not Iraq or Afghanistan, or even Egypt or Libya. Those countries imploded, while Syria is set to explode, and therefore enjoin other nations into a regional and ultimately, a world war.
For this reason, people need to fully understand the significance and secrets that full disclosure about Benghazi would reveal. You see, opening the curtains to expose the planners and producers of the Benghazi stage act would reveal secrets so closely held that it threatens the agenda of the Obama regime who are working on behalf of the Saudis and their globalist handlers. Such a misstep of full disclosure about Benghazi could cause a critical setback of an agenda advancing across the world stage where timing is critical.
For those not easily entertained or intellectually challenged by spinning plates, the situation playing out before us may also be compared to a game of three dimensional chess. Using this analogy, we are able to view the multi-dimensional board and the movement of chess pieces required to set up World War III. One board consists of players involving North Korea, Japan and China, while the second of three boards represents the entirety of the Middle East, and all of the proxy nations of China, Russia and the United States. But what about the elusive but critically important third board? It is on this level where the real story exists.
The third board: Who benefits?
It is here that one must pay very close attention to everything that is not being reported over the very visible reports we are intended to see. As I have asserted many times, we are in the midst of a proxy war that has created some very unusual alliances, and some very dangerous opposition. Superpower nations are using allied nation-states to fight battles in order to jockey for their ultimate fighting positions. You can read about these alliances and the minutia of the battles elsewhere. Here, I am attempting to draw your attention to the larger picture, the end result, and the end game scenario… because the key to understanding the alliances and actions exists and only make sense in the larger picture of this 3-D global chess game.
The third board represents a field of play that is virtually misunderstood by most and therefore, rarely mentioned in the context of the nation building and reconfiguration we have watched unfold over the last several years. It is a process underway for a reason, but not for any of the noble causes we are being told to believe.
It is at this level where a select group of people are making their moves that prompt those of all others. It is at this level that the international bankers, the globalists, the secret cabal of unseen forces are at work and playing to win. It involves a currency war, and a currency war is as much a war as one with bombs and bullets. We can see it with the international transfer of wealth. the manipulation of the gold reserves, and in other areas—but only if we look.
Quite simply, the motives behind global conflict can be found within the military-industrial complex operated at the highest levels of the internationalists, the bankers and financiers—the same surnames have been present in nearly all conflicts throughout history.
There is a firewall that exists between these global power elite and their objectives. It is a sovereign United States of America, much as it always has been in modern times. Now, however, we have been weakened from within, and our sovereignty is being significantly eroded through multiple and tenacious assaults against our freedoms and liberties. This is the result of a collective acquiescence and our lack of resistance to tyranny disguised as security, and immorality in many forms presented as tolerance. We are thus left in a weakened state, with a collective majority unable to think clearly or fight to regain the Godly values upon which our nation was founded. This has been by design, not default.
As our national moral compass has been compromised, so too has our ability to recognize the other assaults to our sovereignty, or our willingness to speak out against our own destruction. Specifically, we have an occupant of the White House who, by the admission of an unnamed senior member of his own staff, has an agenda to “kill the U.S. dollar,” the most widely held currency in the allocated reserves of many nations. On what planet, on which stage, in what venue does the killing of our national currency make any sense whatsoever? That is a question that has yet to be answered.
The only sense one could possibly make of this treasonous act is the ultimate destruction of the United States as a nation, as the last firewall of freedom. Who better to usher in our demise, then, is a man whose past is shrouded in mystery, and whose future intent is becoming clearer with each passing day. Ultimately, though, who would benefit from our destruction? Who benefits from a third world war, where millions will most certainly perish. The answer is clear, as we see parallel agendas of wars fought with bullets and bombs, and wars fought with food and wealth.
Once the plates stop spinning and nations have fallen, or the chessboard is cleared of the pawns, the only clear winners will be the architects who are behind this global perversity of power realignment. The winners will be the power elite, whose goal has always been to lock in their future by taking away ours. They will usher in a global currency, and ultimately control the wealth of the world not only for this generation, but for future generations.
So, while your focus is being directed to the flash-bangs of bombings designed to leave you stunned, understand the real objective. It’s a fight for the future—your future—and the future of your offspring, who we have permitted to be sold into bondage through perpetual shooting wars and money wars. It is imperative that you see we are in the beginning stages of a global makeover, and prepare accordingly.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/55034
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Wed May 08, 2013 12:29 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
War and Conflict • Like It or Not, War Is Interested in You
April 25, 2013
Like It or Not, War Is Interested in You
By Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison
One of the most famous sayings of the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky was this: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." It’s one of the few correct things that violent Communist ever said.
President Obama is clearly not interested in war. And he has stacked his administration with people who are similarly not interested. This is especially true when it comes to Islamist terrorists. They may make war on us, but to Mr. Obama and his minions, these are "man-caused disasters" or, preferably, domestic crimes to be dealt with in the normal course of the administration of justice.
Catch them mass-murdering here, then read them their Miranda rights and let them be "lawyered up" with free counsel. Members of what former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy calls "the al-Qaeda bar" can always be found to represent those accused of mass murderers pro bono.
It is hardly possible for Americans to defend ourselves if the Obama administration refuses even to name what it is we are fighting against. War — even "holy war" — is interested in us, whether Mr. Obama’s appointees recognize it or not.
In the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, the left-wing media was hoping for a white, right-wing perpetrator — another Tim McVeigh. They openly dreaded the thought that this heinous terrorist attack might have come from a jihadist. When the Tsarnaev brothers were caught, some conservative jabbed that the left had gotten its wish: they are Caucasians, but they are Muslims from the Russian province of Chechnya.
President Obama’s man at CIA, Director John Brennan, notoriously denounced even the use of the terms jihad, jihadist, jihadi. In 2010, he said that jihad is a "legitimate tenet of Islam."
It staggers the mind to think that Mr. Brennan is now in charge of central intelligence. He deliberately looks away from obvious answers to international terrorism.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was under no such misapprehension. On a Sunday news talk show recently, Sen. Feinstein, who chairs the Intelligence Committee, correctly pointed out the jihadist motives of the Tsarnaev brothers. She said:
However, we do know that there was very likely a call from Russia before he went back to Dagestan and Chechnya, asking about it. I think just conjecture would lead one to believe that this may have come from his running jihadist sites on his Web site.
Anyway, he went home for six months. That’s a lapse. We will find out what happened during those six months. I think there is likely going to be an assessment that this was somebody who did want to participate in a jihadist event.
We cannot possibly counter the murderous aims of jihadists if we refuse to admit that jihad has taken on the form of terrorist attacks. We will then, in Andy McCarthy’s telling phrase, have willfully blinded ourselves.
If you cannot even name the threat, you will never see it. What Sen. Feinstein’s statement proves is that there are still liberals who are willing to name the threat — however much we may disagree about how to counter it.
The Boston Marathon bombing should at least expose the unseriousness of CIA Director John Brennan. Will he guard us against jihadists intent on mass murder?
Compare President Obama’s trivializing of the terror threat with the idealistic but unflinching realism of President Reagan. In his 1989 Farewell Address to the Nation, Mr. Reagan welcomed the new thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations and recognized that Communist leader Mikhail Gorbachev was different from all his predecessors in the Kremlin.
I think he knows some of the things wrong with his society and is trying to fix them. We wish him well. And we’ll continue to work to make sure that the Soviet Union that eventually emerges from this process is a less threatening one. What it all boils down to is this: I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don’t, at first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It’s still trust but verify. It’s still play, but cut the cards. It’s still watch closely. And don’t be afraid to see what you see.
"Don’t be afraid to see what you see." That is exactly what we cannot do with the self-blinded CIA headed by John Brennan. The hunt for the Boston Marathon killers was widely described as "searching for a needle in a haystack." With John Brennan’s blinkered view, we cannot not find even the haystack.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/ … n_you.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Thu Apr 25, 2013 12:27 am
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
War and Conflict • Boston Bomber’s Mosque Linked to Muslim Brotherhood
Boston Bomber’s Mosque Linked to Muslim Brotherhood
Posted by Jim Hoft on Saturday, April 20, 2013, 6:47 PM
Islamic Society of Boston
Boston Marathon Bomber Dzhokar Tsarnaev attended The Islamic Society of Boston which has links to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Clarion Project reported, via Free Republic:
Dzhokar Tsarnaev, who has been arrested for the terrorist bombings in Boston, attended the Islamic Society of Boston.
Dzhokar Tsarnaev, who has been arrested for the terrorist bombings in Boston, attended the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) in Cambridge, a mosque with strong Muslim Brotherhood links. The ISB Cultural Center, which is at a separate location, is even run by a group that federal prosecutors said in 2008 “was founded as the overt arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in America.”
An ISB attendee reports last seeing Tsarnaev there during Ramadan last year. It is unclear if his brother, the other bomber, also attended the mosque. The ISB has links to the Muslim Brotherhood, has had radical leadership and promotes anti-Western themes.
For instance, the Islamic Society of Boston recently invited journalist Victoria Brittain to speak at the mosque, who in an article she wrote on MichaelMoore.com wrote that the War on Terror is a “war on Islam” and that Muslims in the West face widespread persecution. In her article, Brittain also criticized British security services who “returned to a post-9/11 stance on overdrive” in the aftermath of the 2005 London subway bombings, referred to as the “7/7? attacks.
ISB teaching is largely based on Islamists like Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yousef al-Qaradawi and Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood cleric who influenced Osama Bin Laden.
Meanwhile, the Boston Globe is warning readers against concluding that the Tsarnaevs’ motives were purely religious.
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/04 … otherhood/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat Apr 20, 2013 8:11 pm
View full post on opinions.caduceusx.com
War and Conflict • A secret deal on drones, sealed in blood
A secret deal on drones, sealed in blood
The CIA has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike.
KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH / AP
In this Jan. 31, 2010 file photo, an unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan.
By: Mark Mazzetti The New York Times, Published on Sun Apr 07 2013
Nek Muhammad knew he was being followed.
On a hot day in June 2004, the Pashtun tribesman was lounging inside a mud compound in South Waziristan, speaking by satellite phone to one of the many reporters who regularly interviewed him on how he had fought and humbled Pakistan’s army in the country’s western mountains. He asked one of his followers about the strange, metallic bird hovering above him.
Less than 24 hours later, a missile tore through the compound, severing Muhammad’s left leg and killing him and several others, including two boys, ages 10 and 16. A Pakistani military spokesman was quick to claim responsibility for the attack, saying that Pakistani forces had fired at the compound.
That was a lie.
Muhammad and his followers had been killed by the CIA, the first time it had deployed a Predator drone in Pakistan to carry out a “targeted killing.” The target was not a top operative of Al Qaeda, but a Pakistani ally of the Taliban who led a tribal rebellion and was marked by Pakistan as an enemy of the state.
In a secret deal, the CIA had agreed to kill him in exchange for access to airspace it had long sought so it could use drones to hunt down its own enemies.
RELATED:Memo spells out when it’s OK to kill Al Qaeda-linked Americans without trial
That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Barack Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate.
The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the CIA’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the CIA to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.
The CIA has since conducted hundreds of drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed thousands of people, Pakistanis and Arabs, militants and civilians alike. While it was not the first country where the United States used drones, it became the laboratory for the targeted killing operations that have come to define a new American way of fighting, blurring the line between soldiers and spies and short-circuiting the normal mechanisms by which the United States as a nation goes to war.
Neither American nor Pakistani officials have ever publicly acknowledged what really happened to Muhammad – details of the strike that killed him, along with those of other secret strikes, are still hidden in classified government databases. But in recent months, calls for transparency from members of Congress and critics on both the right and left have put pressure on Obama and his new CIA director, John O. Brennan, to offer a fuller explanation of the goals and operation of the drone program, and of the agency’s role.
Brennan, who began his career at the CIA and over the past four years oversaw an escalation of drone strikes from his office at the White House, has signalled that he hopes to return the agency to its traditional role of intelligence collection and analysis. But with a generation of CIA officers now fully engaged in a new mission, it is an effort that could take years.
Today, even some of the people who were present at the creation of the drone program think the agency should have long given up targeted killings.
Ross Newland, who was a senior official at the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., when the agency was given the authority to kill Al Qaeda operatives, says he thinks that the agency had grown too comfortable with remote-control killing, and that drones have turned the CIA into the villain in countries like Pakistan, where it should be nurturing relationships in order to gather intelligence.
As he puts it, “This is just not an intelligence mission.”
FROM CAR THIEF TO MILITANT
By 2004, Muhammad had become the undisputed star of the tribal areas, the fierce mountain lands populated by the Wazirs, Mehsuds and other Pashtun tribes who for decades had lived independent of the writ of the central government in Islamabad. A brash member of the Wazir tribe, Muhammad had raised an army to fight government troops and had forced the government into negotiations. He saw no cause for loyalty to the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani military spy service that had given an earlier generation of Pashtuns support during the war against the Soviets.
Many Pakistanis in the tribal areas viewed with disdain the alliance that President Pervez Musharraf had forged with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They regarded the Pakistani military that had entered the tribal areas as no different from the Americans – who they believed had begun a war of aggression in Afghanistan, just as the Soviets had years earlier.
Born near Wana, the bustling market hub of South Waziristan, Muhammad spent his adolescent years as a petty car thief and shopkeeper in the city’s bazaar. He found his calling in 1993, around the age of 18, when he was recruited to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan, and rose quickly through the group’s military hierarchy. He cut a striking figure on the battlefield with his long face and flowing jet black hair.
When the Americans invaded Afghanistan in 2001, he seized an opportunity to host the Arab and Chechen fighters from Al Qaeda who crossed into Pakistan to escape the American bombing.
For Muhammad, it was partly a way to make money, but he also saw another use for the arriving fighters. With their help, over the next two years he launched a string of attacks on Pakistani military installations and on American firebases in Afghanistan.
CIA officers in Islamabad urged Pakistani spies to lean on the Waziri tribesman to hand over the foreign fighters, but under Pashtun tribal customs that would be treachery. Reluctantly, Musharraf ordered his troops into the forbidding mountains to deliver rough justice to Muhammad and his fighters, hoping the operation might put a stop to the attacks on Pakistani soil, including two attempts on his life in December 2003.
But it was only the beginning. In March 2004, Pakistani helicopter gunships and artillery pounded Wana and its surrounding villages. Government troops shelled pickup trucks that were carrying civilians away from the fighting and destroyed the compounds of tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The Pakistani commander declared the operation an unqualified success, but for Islamabad, it had not been worth the cost in casualties.
A ceasefire was negotiated in April during a hastily arranged meeting in South Waziristan, during which a senior Pakistani commander hung a garland of bright flowers around Muhammad’s neck. The two men sat together and sipped tea as photographers and television cameras recorded the event.
Both sides spoke of peace, but there was little doubt who was negotiating from strength. Muhammad would later brag that the government had agreed to meet inside a religious madrasa rather than in a public location where tribal meetings are traditionally held. “I did not go to them; they came to my place,” he said. “That should make it clear who surrendered to whom.”
The peace arrangement propelled Muhammad to new fame, and the truce was soon exposed as a sham. He resumed attacks against Pakistani troops, and Musharraf ordered his army back on the offensive in South Waziristan.
Pakistani officials had, for several years, balked at the idea of allowing armed CIA Predators to roam their skies. They considered drone flights a violation of sovereignty, and worried that they would invite further criticism of Musharraf as being Washington’s lackey. But Muhammad’s rise to power forced them to reconsider.
The CIA had been monitoring the rise of Muhammad but officials considered him to be more Pakistan’s problem than America’s. In Washington, officials were watching with growing alarm the gathering of Al Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas, and George J. Tenet, the CIA director, authorized officers in the agency’s Islamabad station to push Pakistani officials to allow armed drones. Negotiations were handled primarily by the Islamabad station.
As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the CIA killed Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas?
In secret negotiations, the terms of the bargain were set. Pakistani intelligence officials insisted that they be allowed to approve each drone strike, giving them tight control over the list of targets. And, they insisted that drones fly only in narrow parts of the tribal areas – ensuring that they would not venture where Islamabad did not want the Americans going: Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, and the mountain camps where Kashmiri militants were trained for attacks in India.
The ISI and the CIA agreed that all drone flights in Pakistan would operate under the CIA’s covert action authority – meaning that the United States would never acknowledge the missile strikes and that Pakistan would either take credit for the individual killings or remain silent.
Musharraf did not think that it would be difficult to keep up the ruse. As he told one CIA officer: “In Pakistan, things fall out of the sky all the time.”
A NEW DIRECTION
As the negotiations were taking place, the CIA’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees in the CIA’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the CIA detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the CIA’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.
The greatest impact of Helgerson’s report was felt at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The centre had focused on capturing Al Qaeda operatives; questioning them in CIA jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.
Helgerson raised questions about whether CIA officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners – like confining them in a small box with live bugs – violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
“The agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded, given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the terrorists detained by the agency.”
The report was the beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior CIA officers began looking for an endgame to the prison program. One CIA operative told Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a “wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.
The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.
Before long the CIA would go from being the long-term jailer of America’s enemies to a military organization that erased them.
Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare.
The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the CIA were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Muhammad’s death, and one year before the CIA carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone – in Yemen in 2002 – a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.
A new generation of CIA officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 congressional committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, which revealed extensive CIA plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the CIA chose to conduct.
The debate pitted a group of senior officers at the Counterterrorism Center against James L. Pavitt, the head of the CIA’s clandestine service, and others who worried about the repercussions of the agency’s getting back into assassinations. Tenet told the 9/11 commission that he was not sure that a spy agency should be flying armed drones.
John E. McLaughlin, then the CIA’s deputy director, who the 9/11 commission reported had raised concerns about the CIA’s being in charge of the Predator, said: ‘‘You can’t underestimate the cultural change that comes with gaining lethal authority.
“When people say to me, ‘It’s not a big deal,”’ he said, ‘‘I say to them, ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’
“It is a big deal. You start thinking about things differently,” he added. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, these concerns about the use of the CIA to kill were quickly swept aside.
THE ACCOUNT AT THE TIME
After Muhammad was killed, his dirt grave in South Waziristan became a site of pilgrimage. A Pakistani journalist, Zahid Hussain, visited it days after the drone strike and saw a makeshift sign displayed on the grave: “He lived and died like a true Pashtun.”
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan’s top military spokesman, told reporters at the time that “Al Qaeda facilitator” Nek Muhammad and four other “militants” had been killed in a rocket attack by Pakistani troops.
Any suggestion that Muhammad was killed by the Americans, or with American assistance, he said, was “absolutely absurd.”
This article is adapted from “The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth,” to be published by Penguin Press on Tuesday.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/ … blood.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Apr 07, 2013 10:45 am
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War and Conflict • Hitler’s Food Taster: One Bite Away from Death
http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger … 92097.html
Statistics: Posted by Tonibug — Fri Apr 05, 2013 3:32 pm
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War and Conflict • The dangerous drift towards world war in Asia
The dangerous drift towards world war in Asia
At ground zero in Hiroshima the inscription for victims of the world’s first Atomic bomb is a pledge. We will never again repeat the evil of war.
The six-storey "A-Dome", the old Industrial Promotion Hall, was directly below the blast, 600 meters above, and for that reason survived as a gaunt half-wrecked structure when almost everything else was flattened instantly for a radius of two kilometres.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Hiroshima, Japan12:55PM GMT 24 Mar 2013159 Comments
The Japanese original is vague on who "we" is, but the English translation tactfully refers to mankind as a whole.
Families come from all over Japan in a pilgrimage to visit the peace shrine. They look through the Cenotaph to the "A-Dome", the old Industrial Promotion Hall. This six-story building that was directly below the blast, 600 meters above, and for that reason survived as a gaunt half-wrecked structure when almost everything else was flattened instantly for a radius of two kilometres.
They walk through the museum in total silence learning the details of what happened on August 1945, and the gruesome aftermath. The learn about the 2000 degree heat shock that lasted three seconds and incinerated anybody in the epicentre instantly, but left those in the suburbs to die more slowly with burnt skin hanging from their bodies.
They read the day-by-day diaries of the survivors, and the second shock of radiation a week or so later as they came out in a rash of purple spots, and started to vomit their inner organs. Some 140,000 were dead within five months, mostly civilians, including Korean and Chinese forced labourers.
This is what the Japanese are brought up on, so different from the "Patriotic Education" campaign in China for the last twenty years. Beijing’s policy has whipped up revanchist hatred against the Japanese for the sins of the 1930s and 1940s, no doubt to divert popular wrath away from a Communist Party tarnished by corruption.
Japan’s national ideology is pacifist, and this is written into Article 9 of its constitution, which states that "the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes."
This peace complex adds a strange twist to events. It inhibits Japan as a muscular China presses its claim on the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands — a cluster of uninhabited rocks near Taiwan — and as Chinese warships push deep into Japanese waters.
Map of the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands
Yet there is no doubt that Japan will fight.
"We simply cannot tolerate any challenge now, or in the future. No nation should underestimate the firmness of our resolve," said Shinzo Abe, the hawkish premier bent on national revival.
After talking to Japanese officials in Tokyo over the last few days, I have the strong impression not only that they are ready to fight, but also that they expect to win, and furthermore that conflict may come at any moment.
"They are sending ships and even aircraft into our territory every day. It is intense provocation. We’re making every effort not to be provoked but they are using fire-control radar. This is one step away from conflict and we are very worried," said a top government official.
Uotsuri Island, one of disputed Senkaku islands in the East China Sea
Nothing has changed since outgoing US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said China and Japan were drifting towards war, except for the Japanese defence budget. Spending on warships and aircraft will jump by 23pc this year.
Internal Japanese documents say the situation has become "extremely dangerous" since the Chinese locked their weapons-guiding fire-control radar on a Japanese helicopter and then a destroyer in January, a dramatic escalation. The claim is denied by Beijing.
It was the risk of such incidents spinning out of control during the Cold War that led to the creation of the red-telephone "Hotline" between the US and the Soviet Union. No such hotline exists between Tokyo and Beijing.
Over at the revamped Defence Ministry — no longer the meek Self-Defence Force — a top military planner showed me maps detailing the movement of Chinese DDG warships and Yuan-class submarines through Japanese waters. The pressure point is Okinawa, a fresh source of controversy as Chinese academics start laying claim to that island as well. "If they can build a radar site in the Senkakus, it would be major strategic asset," he said.
"What we don’t know is whether Chinese officers follow any international code of conduct? Do they understand what is banned and not banned?"
"Does the Communist Party control their own military? Two thousand years ago under the Han Dynasty, the emperor put his right hand on the wheel of his chariot and told his general that everything inside the borders was the domain of the emperor, and everything outside was left to the commander. That has plagued China throughout its history, and it is the delicate issue we now face," he said.
I pass these comments on to readers with a health warning since I have not heard the Chinese side of the story, at least not in such intimate detail, but what is clear is that trust between China and Japan has almost completely broken down. The East China Sea has become the most explosive fault-line in the world.
Professor Huang Jing from Singapore University and a former adviser to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) says a rising cadre of officers has slipped the leash and picked up attitudes all too like the Japan’s firebrand officers in the 1930s, when they defied orders from Tokyo. He said these young bloods are on a "collision course" with the US-dominated global system.
The Japanese are keeping their fingers crossed that China’s new team under Xi Jinping will try to repair relations, reassured that the new foreign minister spent seven years in Tokyo. But again, as one diplomat cautioned, that may make him even more hawkish to prove his colours.
As `black swans’ go, an outright war between the two great powers of Asia would surely be dramatic, and it could not easily be contained since America is bound by treaties to defend Japan if it is attacked. This includes an attack on the Senkaku islands.
One shudders to think what would happen if China and the US itself came to blows in any form. It would be an earthquake for the global strategic and economic order. The Chinese and US economies are locked together in a sort of `Chimerica’, a single dollar-based trading system. China owns $2 trillion of US debt. Much of the US manufacturing base is in the Pearl River Delta or the lower Yangtse.
Washington is scrupulously neutral over legal claims of sovereignty — an issue that soon gets bogged down in the minutiae of the Potsdam Declaration — but it stands by Japan on the core principle of the post-War order, that international borders may not be changed by force or coercion.
That is patently what China is doing, both in Japanese waters and the South China Sea, where it now lays sovereign claim to the whole region, much to the chagrin of Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, and Indonesia. Though Russia got away with it in Georgia in 2008.
Almost every land border in the world is disputed by somebody, based on some historic claim or other. The proper venue is the border tribunal in The Hague.
At first sight, the `Asian Pivot’ of the Obama admininstration looks like a containment ring of allies from Korea stretching down through South East Asia all the way to India, a pact to check the rising giant.
You might say this is a replica of the encirclement policy to contan Germany before the First World War, when Kaiser Wilhelm was playing his own Senkaku games. The Agadir crisis comes to mind. The risks of such a strategy is that it feeds a sense of paranoia and becomes self-fulfilling.
Yet there is a hint of ambiguity in US body language. Secretary of State John Kerry waxed eloquent about US-China ties at his confirmation hearing, but hardly mentioned Japan. The White House reception for Mr Abe in February was cool. There is a vocal lobby in Washington warning that Japanese nationalists are drawing the US into a disastrous clash with China against its national interest.
If China’s purpose with these naval forays is to drive a wedge between Washington and Tokyo — and to test the willingness of a war-weary America to stand behind allies — it is hard to know what conclusion Beijing may have drawn from the events of the last six months.
America is sending the same sorts of signals as England at the onset of the First World War. Nuanced diplomacy — reflecting a divided Parliament — allowed the Germans and the French to draw different conclusions in those crucial weeks of July and August 1914.
What frightens me most is talk from certain quarters in Beijing that the US is a busted flush, bled dry by the financial crisis, crippled by military over-stretch in the Middle East, and that now is the moment to test the paper tiger.
This is a fatal misjudgement of course. To adapt an old saying, "America is never as strong as she looks: America is never as weak as she looks", and much the same could be said about Japan.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comm … -Asia.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sun Mar 24, 2013 3:35 pm
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