Israeli military build up along borders with Lebanon

Israeli military build up along borders with Lebanon

Posted: 2009/06/26
From: MNN

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The NNA described the Israeli military setup as `unusual military activities,` while the Israeli air force carried out several flights over Al-Arqoub village, Hasbaya, Marjeyoun, West Bekaa and Ialim al-Toufah in southern Lebanon.

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BEIRUT, June 25 (Xinhua) — The Israeli army has set new military buildup along its border with Lebanon Thursday, amid intensified air force flights over Lebanese territories, the official national News agency (NNA) reported.

Merkava tanks and armored vehicles were deployed along the wired fence separating occupied Shebaa Farms from Lebanese territories, the report said.

The NNA described the Israeli military setup as “unusual military activities,” while the Israeli air force carried out several flights over Al-Arqoub village, Hasbaya, Marjeyoun, West Bekaa and Ialim al-Toufah in southern Lebanon.

Israel fought a 34-day devastating war with the Lebanese Shiite armed group Hezbollah in July 2006.

Lebanon is still in a state of war with Israel. However, an Israeli army delegation has proposed to a Lebanese military delegation Wednesday during a meeting sponsored by UN interim forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL), direct political bilateral talks between the government of Lebanon and Israel, according to a report by local As-Safir daily Thursday.

The Lebanese side replied that the Lebanese government instructions were limited to discuss the implementation of UN Resolution 1701.

Resolution 1701 ended the Israeli-Hezbollah war in 2006, and set restrictions on both sides to cease all acts of hostility.

Beware Of The ADL’s Cyberbullying Law

Beware Of The ADL’s Cyberbullying Law

ADL’S Anti-Christian Agenda Articles

BEWARE OF THE ADL’S CYBERBULLYING LAW
By Brother Nathanael Kapner, Copyright 2009


THE BATTLE TO SAVE AMERICA FROM BECOMING A ZIONIST POLICE STATE must be waged against the powerful Jewish organization known as the Anti-Defamation League Of B’nai B’rith (ADL).

In addition to the Federal Hate Crimes Bill, drafted by the ADL and now going through rigged Senate committee hearings, the ADL is also pushing its stealthy so-called ‘anti-bullying’ bill, the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act, introduced to the House Judiciary Subcommittee On Crime on May 26, 2009.

This Cyberbullying Prevention Act is another integral part of the ADL’s agenda of domination and subjugation of what remains of free America. Shepherded by its legal counsel, Michael Lieberman, (a Zionist Jew, of course) the bill, among other things, would permit the FBI to acquire & collect permanent data on ‘bias motivated’ so-called ‘criminal’ activity on the Internet.

It is important to know who we are fighting against. The ADL is the ‘civil rights’ (for whom?) arm of the B’nai B’rith – a powerful Jewish religious, educational, fraternal, and charitable organization. The B’nai B’rith has persuaded 55 nations (in which it has 2100 lodges and 200,000 Jewish members) to unite under the authority of a central Hate Crimes Command Center.

The ADL is now engaged in intensive efforts to organize city governments, schools, civic organizations, and Zionist-oriented churches to combat ‘hate and homophobia’ towards homosexuals and blacks. In REALITY, any ‘hate crime’ legislation can be immediately used by the ADL to attempt to silence ANYONE who seeks to differ with its social agendas and self-aggrandizing concept of history.

HAVING BEEN RAISED IN JUDAISM, I can attest that Jews really don’t care about homosexuals, whom they call “fagellas,” or blacks, whom they call “schwartzas.” Jews consider it a horror not to perpetuate their own through procreation and consider it a disgrace to live in a black neighborhood. And now, the ADL is at the doors of the Internet to eradicate the last bastion of free speech in America with their mission of ostensibly protecting homosexuals & blacks.

Right now, the ADL is infiltrating American public schools with various ‘training and educational’ programs aimed at imposing Internet censorship against so-called ‘bullying’ tactics on E-mails and Web Sites directed towards targeted students.

This is the ADL’s first step through gradualism, (Jews don’t care about Gentile students whom they call “goys”), in preventing all criticism ON THE INTERNET of Jewry’s criminal activities in the various nations that host these ingrates. Yes, those who criticize the activities of Zionist Jews will be next on the ADL’s cyberbullying hit list.

THE REAL ‘CYBER BULLIES’

THE ZIONIST JEWS OF THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE are truly the real ‘cyber bullies.’ On May 29, 2009, the Gestapo Jews of the ADL posted their first Cyberbullying Prevention Model Statute defining their upcoming Internet censorship.

This ADL censorship of the Internet will commence with their Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act if passed by the Zionist-bought Congress. (A record number of Jews are now in office).

Targeting the Internet, the freedom-hating Jews of the ADL are quite specific in their Model Statute to destroy the last bastion of free speech under the pretense of protecting students:

“Electronic communications must be included in any definition of bullying. With increasing access to online technology, the Internet has become a vehicle to harass and bully. Cyberbullying is more harmful than traditional bullying because of the invasive and pervasive nature of Internet communication.

Cyberbullying means any electronic communication including, but not limited to, intimidation shown to be motivated by a student’s race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression (trans-sexuals).

Electronic communication means any communication including but not limited to, E-Mails, instant messaging, text messages, Blogs and Web Sites.” View Entire Story Here.

Indeed, a national Thought Police Gestapo is being created right before our eyes led by the ADL. Wicked Zionist Jews will soon censor and indict the politically incorrect ON THE INTERNET here in Zionist-occupied America….

___________________________________
For More See: How The New US Hate Laws Will Change Our Lives Click Here

And: The ADL Hates Our Freedoms Click Here

Bankster “Holiday” Planned for September?

Bankster “Holiday” Planned for September?

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
June 22, 2009

Bob Chapman’s influential International Forecaster is reporting on the possibility of a so-called “bank holiday” planned for late August or early September. According to Chapman’s sources, U.S. embassies around the world are selling dollars and stockpiling money from respective countries where they operate.

featured stories   Bankster Holiday Planned for September?
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FDR imposed a “bank holiday” soon after taking office. It resulted in the government stealing gold from the American people and giving them useless fiat paper money in return.

“Some US embassies worldwide are being advised to purchase massive amounts of local currencies,” writes Harry Schultz, “enough to last them a year.” Schultz publishes the Harry Schultz Letter, an international investment, financial, economic, and geopolitical newsletter named as “Newsletter of the Year” by Peter Brimelow of Market Watch in 2005 and 2008.

Schultz believes the global elite are in the process of engineering an FDR-style “bank holiday” of undetermined length in order to “sort-out the bank mess” and impose new bank rules.

On March 5, 1933, in the depths of the banker engineered “Great Depression,” newly elected Franklin Roosevelt declared a “bank holiday” that forced banks closed for four days. Roosevelt then rammed the Emergency Banking Act through the legislature. Passed by Congress on March 9, the act granted FDR near dictatorial control over the dealings of banks. It also allowed the Secretary of the Treasury the power to compel every person and business in the country to relinquish their gold and accept paper currency in exchange.

On March 10, Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 6073, forbidding people from sending gold overseas and forbidding banks from paying out gold. A few weeks later, on April 5, Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 6102 ordering Americans to deliver their gold and gold certificates to the Federal Reserve bank in exchange for paper fiat money.

In other words, FDR engaged in one of history’s greatest rip-offs — that is until now.

FDR not only ripped-off the American people, but foreigners holding dollars as well, thus ensuring the “Great Depression” would spread around the world like a bankster engineered contagion.

As Schultz notes, another forced “bank holiday” will likely lead to a formal devaluation of the already broadsided U.S. dollar. “But devalue against what? The euro? Doubtful. Gold? Maybe. Or vs. the IMF basket of currencies,” which he feels is more likely.

In fact, this is precisely what the globalist have in mind. In March, the media reported the IMF was poised print billions of “global quantitative easing” dollars to be dubbed global “super-currency” to address the (bankster engineered) economic crisis. “The principle behind it is that everyone would get bonus dollars and instead of the Federal Reserve having to print them, everyone gets them,” declared Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF.

Can you say inflation?

  • A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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It is no secret the elite have envisioned a global currency for some time now. In 2007, the director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations stated that the dollar and the euro are but temporary currencies. “It is the market that made the dollar into global money – and what the market giveth, the market can taketh away. If the tailors balk and the dollar falls, the market may privatize money on its own,” Benn Steil pontificated.

More like the banksters taketh away — and not only money but national sovereignty as well because a global currency will demand an end to “monetary nationalism.”

Or as Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has said, “states must be prepared to cede some sovereignty to world bodies if the international system is to function.”

Mr. Schultz believes a “bank holiday” would suit the burning desires of the international bankster elite. It will lead to “nationalization,” which is a polite word for brazen thievery. It will allow the government — owned lock, stock and barrel by the global elite and run by their corrupt whores and cronies — to rape secured creditors and bondholders. Nationalization is the unfettered process of grabbing up of insurance companies, mortgage companies, banks, medical care, and car companies and handing them over to the monopoly men.

During the FDR “bank holiday,” Schulz notes, “thousands of banks never reopened; it was a face-saving way of shutting them down. I would guess the same would occur today; thousands have little or no net value, loaded with debt, bad mortgages.”

In order soften the nation up for the coming pillage, the Obama administration has proposed a plan to give the privately-owned and unaccountable Federal Reserve complete regulatory oversight across the entire U.S. economy. The new rules would see the Fed given the authority to “regulate” any company whose activity it believes could threaten the economy and the markets — that is to say if it “threatens” the monopolistic interests of the bankers.

“Obama’s regulatory ‘reform’ plan is nothing less than a green light for the complete and total takeover of the United States by a private banking cartel that will usurp the power of existing regulatory bodies, who are now being blamed for the financial crisis in order that their status can be abolished and their roles handed over to the all-powerful Fed,” write Paul Joseph and Steve Watson. “The government is ready to hand over everything to a monolithic private corporation and a gaggle of bastard banker offspring, that have gobbled up an amount close to the entire GDP of the country in taxpayers’ money and figuratively stuck the middle finger up regarding questions over where that money has gone.”

A “bank holiday” would work wonders for any “regulation” the Fed and the bankers have in mind. It would compliment the criminal consolidation now underway. It would allow them to finally and formally devalue the dollar and usher in a global “super currency” of control and enslavement.

A Bob Chapman subscriber added a little dinger to the prospect of the banks going dark. The subscriber claims to have overheard two men in FEMA jackets talking with a police chief in California, all who agreed that the federalization of police around the country — a process largely complete — will be required if the banks are shuttered in late August or early September because it will get “ugly” out there.

No doubt. Because the sort of enduring and polite American who weathered the “Great Depression” is now in seriously short supply.

If Mr. Schultz’s prediction is correct, we can expect riots in bank foyers and ultimately martial law to be imposed.

H. R. 45, They Want Our Handguns

H. R. 45CommentsClose CommentsPermalink

To provide for the implementation of a system of licensing for purchasers of certain firearms and for a record of sale system for those firearms, and for other purposes. (read it here)

Twilight of the Psychopaths

Twilight of the Psychopaths

by Dr. Kevin Barrett

Twilight of the Psychopaths

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” – John Lennon, before his murder by CIA mind-control subject Mark David Chapman

When Gandhi was asked his opinion of Western civilization he said it would be a good idea. But that oft-cited quote, is misleading, assuming as it does that civilization is an unmitigated blessing.

Civilized people, we are told, live peacefully and cooperatively with their fellows, sharing the necessary labour in order to obtain the leisure to develop arts and sciences. And while that would be a good idea, it is not a good description of what has been going on in the so-called advanced cultures during the past 8,000 years.

Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been based on slavery and “warfare.” Incidentally, the latter term is a euphemism for mass murder.

The prevailing recipe for civilization is simple:

1) Use lies and brainwashing to create an army of controlled, systematic mass murderers;

2) Use that army to enslave large numbers of people (i.e. seize control of their labour power and its fruits);

3) Use that slave labour power to improve the brainwashing process (by using the economic surplus to employ scribes, priests, and PR men). Then go back to step one and repeat the process.

Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, injure, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse. The inventor of civilization — the first tribal chieftain who successfully brainwashed an army of controlled mass murderers—was almost certainly a genetic psychopath. Since that momentous discovery, psychopaths have enjoyed a significant advantage over non-psychopaths in the struggle for power in civilizational hierarchies — especially military hierarchies.

Political Satire

Military institutions are tailor-made for psychopathic killers. The 5% or so of human males who feel no remorse about killing their fellow human beings make the best soldiers. And the 95% who are extremely reluctant to kill make terrible soldiers — unless they are brainwashed with highly sophisticated modern techniques that turn them (temporarily it is hoped) into functional psychopaths.

In On Killing, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman has re-written military history, to highlight what other histories hide: The fact that military science is less about strategy and technology, than about overcoming the instinctive human reluctance to kill members of our own species. The true “Revolution in Military Affairs” was not Donald Rumsfeld’s move to high-tech in 2001, but Brigadier Gen. S.L.A. Marshall’s discovery in the 1940s that only 15-20% of World War II soldiers along the line of fire would use their weapons: “Those (80-85%) who did not fire did not run or hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges” (Grossman, p. 4).

Marshall’s discovery and subsequent research, proved that in all previous wars, a tiny minority of soldiers — the 5% who are natural-born psychopaths, and perhaps a few temporarily-insane imitators—did almost all the killing. Normal men just went through the motions and, if at all possible, refused to take the life of an enemy soldier, even if that meant giving up their own. The implication: Wars are ritualized mass murders by psychopaths of non-psychopaths. (This cannot be good for humanity’s genetic endowment!)

Marshall’s work, brought a Copernican revolution to military science. In the past, everyone believed that the soldier willing to kill for his country was the (heroic) norm, while one who refused to fight was a (cowardly) aberration. The truth, as it turned out, was that the normative soldier hailed from the psychopathic five percent. The sane majority, would rather die than fight.

Political Satire

The implication, too frightening for even the likes of Marshall and Grossman to fully digest, was that the norms for soldiers’ behaviour in battle had been set by psychopaths. That meant that psychopaths were in control of the military as an institution. Worse, it meant that psychopaths were in control of society’s perception of military affairs. Evidently, psychopaths exercised an enormous amount of power in seemingly sane, normal society.

How could that be? In Political Ponerology, Andrzej Lobaczewski explains that clinical psychopaths enjoy advantages even in non-violent competitions to climb the ranks of social hierarchies. Because they can lie without remorse (and without the telltale physiological stress that is measured by lie detector tests) psychopaths can always say whatever is necessary to get what they want. In court, for example, psychopaths can tell extreme bald-faced lies in a plausible manner, while their sane opponents are handicapped by an emotional predisposition to remain within hailing distance of the truth. Too often, the judge or jury imagines that the truth must be somewhere in the middle, and then issues decisions that benefit the psychopath. As with judges and juries, so too with those charged with decisions concerning who to promote and who not to promote in corporate, military and governmental hierarchies. The result is that all hierarchies inevitably become top-heavy with psychopaths.

So-called conspiracy theorists, some of whom deserve the pejorative connotation of that much-abused term, often imagine that secret societies of Jews, Jesuits, bankers, communists, Bilderbergers, Muslim extremists, papists, and so on, are secretly controlling history, doing dastardly deeds, and/or threatening to take over the world. As a leading “conspiracy theorist” according to Wikipedia, I feel eminently qualified to offer an alternative conspiracy theory which, like the alternative conspiracy theory of 9/11, is both simpler and more accurate than the prevailing wisdom: The only conspiracy that matters is the conspiracy of the psychopaths against the rest of us.

Political Satire

Behind the apparent insanity of contemporary history, is the actual insanity of psychopaths fighting to preserve their disproportionate power. And as that power grows ever-more-threatened, the psychopaths grow ever-more-desperate. We are witnessing the apotheosis of the overworld—the criminal syndicate or overlapping set of syndicates that lurks above ordinary society and law just as the underworld lurks below it. In 9/11 and the 9/11 wars, we are seeing the final desperate power-grab or “endgame” (Alex Jones) of brutal, cunning gangs of CIA drug-runners and President-killers; money-laundering international bankers and their hit-men, economic and otherwise; corrupt military contractors and gung-ho generals; corporate predators and their political enablers; brainwashers and mind-rapists euphemistically known as psy-ops experts and PR specialists—in short, the whole sick crew of certifiable psychopaths running our so-called civilization. And they are running scared. It was their terror of losing control that they projected onto the rest of us by blowing up the Twin Towers and inciting temporary psychopathic terror-rage in the American public.

Why does the pathocracy fear it is losing control? Because it is threatened by the spread of knowledge. The greatest fear of any psychopath is of being found out. As George H. W. Bush said to journalist Sarah McClendon, December 1992, “If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.” Given that Bush is reported to have participated in parties where child prostitutes were sodomized and otherwise abused, among his many other crimes, his statement to McClendon should be taken seriously.

Psychopaths go through life knowing that they are completely different from other people. They quickly learn to hide their lack of empathy, while carefully studying others’ emotions so as to mimic normalcy while cold-bloodedly manipulating the normals.

Today, thanks to new information technologies, we are on the brink of unmasking the psychopaths and building a civilization of, by and for the normal human being — a civilization without war, a civilization based on truth, a civilization in which the saintly few rather than the diabolical few would gravitate to positions of power. We already have the knowledge necessary to diagnose psychopathic personalities and keep them out of power. We have the knowledge necessary to dismantle the institutions in which psychopaths especially flourish — militaries, intelligence agencies, large corporations, and secret societies. We simply need to disseminate this knowledge, and the will to use it, as widely as possible.

Above all, we need to inform the public about how psychopaths co-opt and corrupt normal human beings. One way they do this, is by manipulating shame and denial — emotions foreign to psychopaths but common and easily-induced among normals.

Consider how gangs and secret societies (psychopaths’ guilds in disguise) recruit new members. Some criminal gangs and satanist covens demand that candidates for admission commit a murder to “earn their stripes.” Skull and Bones, the Yale-based secret society that supplies the CIA with drug-runners, mind-rapists, child abusers and professional killers, requires neophytes to lie naked in a coffin and masturbate in front of older members while reciting the candidate’s entire sexual history. By forcing the neophyte to engage in ritualized behaviour that would be horrendously shameful in normal society, the psychopaths’ guild destroys the candidate’s normal personality, assuming he had one in the first place, and turns the individual into a co-opted, corrupt, degraded shadow of his former self — a manufactured psychopath or psychopath’s apprentice.

This manipulation of shame has the added benefit of making psychopathic organizations effectively invisible to normal society. Despite easily available media reports, American voters in 2004 simply refused to see that the two major-party presidential candidates had lain naked in a coffin masturbating in front of older Bonesmen in order to gain admission to Skull and Bones and thus become members of the criminal overworld. Likewise, many Americans have long refused to see that hawkish elements of the overworld, operating through the CIA, had obviously been the murderers of JFK, MLK, RFK, JFK Jr., Malcolm X, ChÈ, AllendÈ, Wellstone, Lumumba, Aguilera, Diem, and countless other relatively non-psychopathic leaders. They refuse to see the continuing murders of millions of people around the world in what amounts to an American holocaust. They refuse to see the evidence that the psychopaths’ guilds running America’s most powerful institutions use the most horrific forms of sexualized abuse imaginable to induce multiple-personality-disorder in child victims, then use the resulting mind-control slaves as disposable drug-runners, prostitutes, Manchurian candidates, and even diplomatic envoys. And of course they refuse to see that 9/11 was a transparently obvious inside job, and that their own psychopath-dominated military-intelligence apparatus is behind almost every major terrorist outrage of recent decades.

All of this psychopathic behaviour at the top of the social hierarchy is simply too shameful for ordinary people to see, so they avert their gaze, just as wives of husbands who are sexually abusing their children sometimes refuse to see what is happening in plain view. If deep, deep denial were a river in Egypt, American citizens’ wilful blindness would be more like the Marianas Trench.

But thanks to the power of the internet, people everywhere are waking up. The only obvious non-psychopath among Republican presidential candidates, Ron Paul, also happens to be the only candidate in either party with significant grassroots support.

If “love” is embedded in the Revolution Ron Paul heralds, that is because Dr. Paul — a kindly, soft-spoken physician who has delivered more than 4,000 babies — implicitly recognizes that government is the invention and tool of psychopaths, and therefore must be strictly limited in scope and subjected to a rigorous system of checks and balances, lest the psychopath’s tools, fear and hatred, replace love as the glue that binds society together.

The decline in militarism since World War II in advanced countries, the spread of literacy and communications technology, and the people’s growing demands for a better life, together represent a gathering force that terrifies the pathocracy, (those alternately competing-then-cooperating gangs of psychopaths who have ruled through lies, fear and intimidation since the dawn of so-called civilization).

Since nuclear weapons have made war obsolete, the pathocracy is terrified that its favourite social control mechanism — ritualized mass slaughter — is increasingly unavailable. And if war was the great human tragedy, the pathocrats’ pathetic attempt at a war-substitute — the transparently phoney “war on terror” — is repeating it as sheerest farce.

Truly, we are witnessing the twilight of the psychopaths. Whether in their death throes they succeed in pulling down the curtain of eternal night on all of us, or whether we resist them and survive to see the dawn of a civilization worthy of the name, is the great decision in which all of us others, however humbly, are now participating.

About the writer:

Dr. Kevin Barrett, co-founder of the Muslim-Christian-Jewish Alliance for 9/11 Truth, LINK, has taught English, French, Arabic, American Civilization, Humanities, African Literature, Folklore, and Islam at colleges and universities in the San Francisco Bay area, Paris, and Madison, Wisconsin. Barrett became a 9/11 truth activist in 2004 after reading David Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor and conducting follow-up research that convinced him Griffin had accurately summarized evidence indicating 9/11 was an inside job.

In the summer of 2006, Republican state legislators and Fox newscasters demanded that Barrett be fired from his job teaching an introductory Islam class at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but the University refused to buckle, and Barrett got high marks from his students. He has appeared in several documentary films, lectures widely on 9/11 and hosts three radio programs on three different patriot networks.

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What are our soldiers dying for?

What are our soldiers dying for?

Islamabad diary

Friday, June 26, 2009
Ayaz Amir

If the present fight against the Taliban leads to a new Pakistan, it is worth fighting and winning. But if our ways don’t change, if our ruling elites remain as corrupt and self-centred as they have always been, then doubts will arise whether the blood being shed was worth anything. The Taliban are a threat to our way of life. But the Taliban, it bears remembering, were the product of our folly, the general staff and our military intelligence agencies (ISI and MI) chasing shadows and fantasies at the altar of muddled strategic theories.

American folly and narrow self-interest was also an ingredient in this witches’ brew. But there was no divine command that we had to follow American orders. That we did ourselves, our ruling generals — from Zia to Musharraf — all too willing instruments of American policy. No one forced Zia to become an American surrogate. No one compelled Musharraf to become an American puppet. They followed this path out of pure self-interest.

Blaming the US for all our ills has become a national industry. We must look more closely at our own doings. Yes, the Americans will do what they perceive to be in their self-interest. But what stops us from looking out for ourselves? So unless the nation goes through a process of re-education, unless the military mind purges itself of the follies embraced in the name of ‘jihad’, Pakistan’s soul will remain troubled and the fight against the Taliban will remain unfinished business.

The intelligence services need over-hauling. The ISI and the Military Intelligence (MI) must revert to being spy agencies, not exercises in self-aggrandisement. The quality of their analysis doesn’t seem to be very high. If it were we wouldn’t be in the mess that we are in.

The ISI depends heavily on the regular rotation of army officers moving in and out of its ranks. It should be able to attract the best university minds, which will not happen unless it becomes an agency like the CIA, the erstwhile KGB or even India’s RAW, instead of being an extension of GHQ and the army. The Intelligence Bureau too can do with a bit of reform. At present it is no better than a dumping ground for discarded ideas and sidelined officers.

Parts of the army have begun to look too much like commercial enterprises. What business has the army to run bakeries and food outlets? Lahore’s army-owned Fortress Stadium has nothing of any fortress about it. It is now an ugly shopping mall. What business do army doctors have to conduct private practice in military hospitals? Shouldn’t army doctors have their hands full treating the wounded and maimed of Swat and Waziristan? This is commercialism run wild.

If the army–and also the air force and navy for that matter–are so convinced of their commercial skills they should become self-supporting enterprises instead of being a drain on the national budget. The nation pays–through its nose, it may be added–for a professional fighting force. It has never been inclined to the idea of supporting a commercial circus, which is what parts of the military now look like.

If fighting the Taliban is to have any meaning, the military must return to its comparatively frugal and austere roots, reforming if not completely eschewing the real estate culture which is now the bane of senior ranks, generals, admirals and air marshals less symbols of martial valour than icons of the real estate trade.

If the real estate mania is really beyond cure it may be an idea worth pursuing to make Malik Riaz of Bahria Town–Pakistan’s leading real estate enterprise with a bevy of retired senior ranks on its payroll–an honorary field marshal. That should serve everyone right.

To be fair to the military, it has only followed where the civil services have led. The original freebooters of Pakistan were members of the higher civil service. The one good thing Musharraf did was destroy their power, if not their privileges. The demise of the deputy commissioner was an event un-mourned throughout the country. The bad thing which Musharraf did was that the cure he found for the deputy commissioner, in the form of the district nazim, was worse than the disease. The deputy commissioner was a nuisance. The district nazim became a raging menace.

Mian Shahbaz Sharif’s idea of administrative reform is to try to revert to the nuisance. He hasn’t succeeded but he remains possessed with the idea, somehow convinced that if the deputy commissioner returns peace and nirvana will automatically follow.

It is a funny thing hearing chief secretaries and other civil servants speak. They will talk of setting aright the problems of the universe but one thing they will never mention is corruption in the revenue department which is their primary responsibility.

The police are corrupt and inefficient. Wapda is corrupt. Other line departments are beehives of corruption. The money-making of the highway department is legendary. But if anything beats all of these it is the revenue department–the kingdom of the patwari, the girdawar, the tehsildar, the DDOR, DOR, EDOR, etc, etc. You will never catch a higher civil servant overly agitated about their loot and plunder.

If the people of Pakistan were ever to be empowered in the Bolshevik sense, the first person to be lynched or soundly thrashed would be the patwari and the local tehsildar, followed by the leading lights of the local police station (followed, I have no doubt in my mind, by the local politician–MNA, MPA).

The inspector general of the Punjab Police sits atop a force which comes to more than five or six divisions of the army. But to see this force in action is to give up on any concept of law and order. The higher ranks of this force constitute a privilegentsia more concerned about promotions and postings than the investigation and prevention of crime. Armchair or sofa warriors is a description which fits them perfectly. The terror threat of the Taliban demands a new approach to policing but police stations are still mired in the old culture of lining their pockets to the exclusion of almost every thing else.

The army at least has been woken out of its dream-sleep by the Taliban and for this we owe the Taliban leadership our thanks. But the civil and police services haven’t changed at all. They are still prisoners of their old ways. Yet, and this is the funny thing, my friend Mian Shahbaz Sharif thinks that the DMG (civil service) and PSP (police service) are descended directly from the angels. He trusts their advice while tending to look with suspicion at politicos, virtually convinced that scratch a politician and out comes a confirmed criminal.

He may have a point but it doesn’t capture the whole truth. The corruption of politicians–unless they are in the very highest of leagues–is often crude and stupid. Local politicos are great ones, say, for land-grabbing which immediately puts them in the public eye. But civil servants and police officials do things in more clever and sophisticated ways.

On a slightly different subject, why is the desecration and despoiling of GOR-1 (originally a residential estate for the paladins of the higher services) continuing at such an alarming rate? This is no one’s private land but almost a national heritage. For the sake of those who are to come after us we have a duty to preserve what’s left of our green spaces. Pervaiz Elahi, no one’s idea of a culture czar, went to great lengths to destroy the natural beauty of GOR-1 but if the same process is to continue now, then what’s the difference between him and the new order?

I am mentioning these things only to point out that if nothing is to change in the way we conduct our national affairs then there is very little point in fighting the Taliban. This war will make sense only if it becomes an opportunity to change some of our ingrained habits and restructure Pakistan, change our priorities and orient national policies towards the welfare of the vast mass of our people rather than a privileged elite.

Two things must happen at once if Pakistan is to even approximate to the republic of our dreams: the first steps towards a common education policy–one syllabus, one set of books, one medium of instruction, one examination for all Pakistani boys and girls, from the highest mountains to the shores of the Arabian Sea; and a heavy emphasis on public transport–a revitalisation of our railways, the discouragement of the automobile industry and more and better buses for the general public.

And if Pakistan is to become a modern republic we will have to revisit the morality tales of that prince of hypocrites, General Ziaul Haq, whose preaching and enforced piety, added to his Afghan follies, gave us first the ‘mujahideen’ and then the Taliban. America tried prohibition and what did it get? Secret drinking and organised crime centred on the alcohol trade. It is common knowledge that many of our leading doctors of the faith are closet imbibers. Whom do we deceive?

All power to the people and an end to all unconscionable privileges for an already pampered elite: this is the only way to make sense of the war against the Taliban.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com

Obama’s Afghan War, the US Media, and the UN: the New Metric of Civilian Casualties

Obama’s Afghan War, the US Media, and the UN: the New Metric of Civilian Casualties

During 2009, seven out of ten civilians killed by the Obama and NATO military machines have been women and children. Clearly, the Obama regime has failed on the metric of civilian casualties.

By Prof. Marc W. Herold

Cartoon By Eneko
By Eneko in Diagonal Periódico.

A tacit agreement operates between the Obama administration, the U.S corporate media, most progressive U.S. liberals, and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan (UNAMA). All dream to a lesser or greater degree of a future social democratic paradise in Afghanistan where girls’ schools would be flourishing and small farmers exporting pomegranates. (1) Some debate exists over the means to achieve this end. Much ado has been made during the past five months as to whether the Obama approach to Afghanistan differs or not with that of its predecessor.

What is certain is that Afghanistan has become Obama’s war. (2) Words matter: this is Obama’s war and it is a military surge. Obama has put in motion a surge of U.S occupation troops raising them by 50% to a level of 55,000 by mid-summer 2009 (including a 1,000-strong contingent of Special Forces). He is continuing and expanding Bush’s use of mercenaries. Pentagon data indicates that private security contractors working for the Pentagon have risen by 29% during the first quarter of 2009. (3)

A debate centers upon to what degree the Obama approach is one of counter-terrorism (CT) or counter-insurgency (COIN). Central to the latter is the metric of civilian casualties and this is where the U.S media by commission and the UNAMA by omission enter the evolving Afghan tragedy. Much of the U.S left by having earlier proclaimed that the Afghanistan was the “good war” and being inebriated by the nation-building of humanitarian imperialism is now suffering from a bi-polar disorder, rendering it irrelevant.

With the sacking of General McKiernan and the entry of General McChrystal (along with the continuing prominence of counter-insurgency aficionado Kilcullen), Obama appears to tilt towards the COIN approach in Afghanistan. Put in other terms, the approach is population-centric rather than military-centric. General McChrystal stated in congressional testimony that “the measure of American and allied effectiveness would the ‘number of Afghans shielded from violence,’ not the number of enemies killed.” (4) He also said, “This is a critical point. It may be the critical point. This is a struggle for the support of the Afghan people. Our willingness to operate in ways that minimize casualties or damage, even when doing so makes our task more difficult, is essential to our credibility. I cannot overstate my commitment to the importance of this concept…Sir, I believe the perception caused by civilian casualties is one of the most dangerous things we face in Afghanistan, particularly with the Afghan people, the Pashtun most likely.” (5)

His approach hence is classic COIN, rather than focusing forcefully upon taking the fight to the Taliban and their associates (military-centric). Naturally, the COIN strategy if successful by providing better actionable intelligence enables better carrying out the military fight against “insurgents.” This strategy finds favor both in Karzai’s Kabul (to which yet more monies will flow) and in European capitals where the military-centric approach is unacceptable. The “new” U.S strategy which it turns out is not new at all, involves building up the Afghan military-police apparatus, pressuring NATO to take a greater role, employing “precision strikes” to avoid civilian casualties, etc. All this was tried under Bush and failed. Why should we expect anything different under Obama? But what is new is the metric of Afghan civilian casualties. This was well expressed in an editorial of the Boston Globe,

McChrystal and the new number two commander in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, must make one tenet in their guerrilla warfare playbook an absolute priority: protection of the civilian population. The Taliban are reaping benefits from a dynamic that should be familiar from other guerrilla wars. When Taliban fighters stage an ambush, US forces frequently feel compelled to call in air strikes or artillery fire. And all too often, as happened last week, innocent Afghan villagers are hurt or killed. The inevitable outcome is widespread anger against the foreign army. This is what Afghan President Hamid Karzai lamented again and again last week during a visit to Washington. He begged Americans to stop killing Afghan civilians. What Karzai knows, and what McChrystal must take to heart, is that nearly all Afghans despise and fear the Taliban. Yet no US strategy can defeat the Taliban unless the foreigners become protectors – not destroyers – of Afghan families. (6)

An editorial in the New York Times of June 8th added

Protecting Afghan civilians and expanding the secure space in which they can go about their lives and livelihoods must now become the central purpose of American military operations in Afghanistan. (7)

As pointed out by Jeff Huber, the McChrystal metric of winning – the number of Afghans shielded from violence – is nonsense. How many shielded Afghans will equate to victory? Who is going to shield them? (8) General McChrystal who was head of secretive Joint Special Operations Command, involved in widespread murder and carnage across Afghanistan? In other words, under the McChrystal metric, it will be impossible to know when we have won. This is an invitation to war without end.  (full report here)

I don’t believe in Facebook, Twitter, VOA, BBC,CNN


The situation in Iran is an equation with more than two sides:
1- Iranian people, fighting for their right.
2- Government, trying to push people back.
3- Reformists, trying to gain power in government. Aligned with people.
Rafsanjani, the representative of the pragmatist faction of the theocracy, trying to overthrow the supreme leader (aligned with people).

4- West, trying to destabilize Iran, to reach its nasty goals (Democracy for Iranians is a filthy trick of the west).

I don’t believe in Facebook, Twitter, VOA, BBC,CNN. They are all trying to make a fuss about the sad side of the events in Iran, FOR THEIR OWN PURPOSES. I can see their evil hand.
It is true that Iranians are fighting for their right. They should fight, and they will. But the West is the filthy side of the equation.
I think that, theoretically, potentially, the Mullah’s regime is capable to do anything to hold back people, to stay in power and they will in time, if the revolt continues. They are capable of killing tens of thousands, but, killing 1000 people in Baharesrtan a couple of days ago, is a big lie. Tehran would turn into a volcano if they did that.
I am not defending the despotic government here. They did enough to disgrace themselves, to show their despotic nature, I am just telling you how I see the different sides of the “equation”.
The bizarre thing is that in this multi-side equation, the real enemies of Iran (Administration of the Western countries) are aligned with people of Iran TEMPORARILY, and that can be confusing.
How funny (and sad) it is to hear from them about democracy and freedom!

So, I say again, all of you administrators of the West who are shedding tears for Iranians, who are with your apparent hypocrisy and double standards talking about democracy, NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. You had better think of  democracy in your own country. Just stop invasions. Stop manipulating weaker countries. Stop wars, stop genocide. Stop manipulating your own people with your big lies.

Where were you when thousands of Gaza people were being killed? Why don’t you talk about dictatorship of your close allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia? Do you really believe that Iranians are more oppressed than Egyptians and Saudi-Arabians?
You make a hero of Roksana Saber, a self-confessed spy. You try to shout loud about Neda Soltan, to use all your evil power in all media, to spread the news and the clip. Now I doubt if she was killed by Iranian militia . Because, regarding your hypocrisy, your real purpose, your other big lies, all the black spots in your foreign and home policy, a rational mind would  think   that probably, (The most probably I dare say) the killing of Neda Soltan was your own act, a false flag to help destabilizing Iran, NOT TO HELP IRANIANS.
Vahab in Tehran

GRANDMOTHER AND RETIRED NURSE LABELED A TERRORIST

GRANDMOTHER AND RETIRED NURSE LABELED A TERRORIST

B Y R O N C A S S I E N E W S – P O S T S TA F F RCASSIE@FREDERICKNEWSPOST.COM

Bette Hoover, a 61-year-old retired nurse and grandmother of two, learned last fall the Maryland State Police had labeled her a terrorist. It was a fact she couldn’t reveal to family members and friends until the following spring.

“Initially I was in disbelief and then I was numb,” said Hoover, of Dayton. “I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it with anyone for months.”

Currently an adjunct instructor at Howard Community College, Hoover’s experience began with what she described as a “chilling” Oct. 3, 2008, letter from Col. Terrence B. Sheridan, state police superintendent.

You are “presently described in the MSP’s Case Explorer database program as ‘suspected of involvement in terrorism,’” wrote Sheridan, while acknowledging they had “no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime.” Sheridan offered Hoover, also a conflict resolution mediator and founder of Just Peace Circles, an opportunity to review her file before the state police purged the information from its files. The Maryland State Police’s surveillance of area activists and infiltration of local peace groups — which the agency said was limited to a 14-month period from March 2005 to May 2006 — received national attention when the story broke last summer. When Hoover went to see her file in November, she was given only five pages to review, which made her suspicious that she wasn’t getting the whole story. “The last one is numbered ‘page 18,’” Hoover said, pointing to the last page of the file she received. “That makes me think I’m missing the rest.” As with the other text document pages she received — pages 2, 6, 8, 16 — page 18 is sparse and highly redacted. Further, the legible information is completely wrong, she said. Her file listed two groups Hoover was said to be a part of: The Ruckus, a social justice organization that trains groups in nonviolent protests, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. “I have never been a member or had anything to do with either organization,” Hoover said. “I have one friend, I’m aware of, who did something with The Ruckus, that’s it, and nothing to do with PETA. I love animals, but to be honest, PETA annoys me. I once raised sheep on a farm here and we used to sell their wool at the Howard County Fair, and PETA always came to protest shearing.” Included in Hoover’s file was an enlarged Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration photo of her taken from an old driver’s license application. Nothing in the document referenced any group she actually belonged to, or demonstration she had joined. She said she is now active only with the Howard County Coalition for Peace and Justice. Hoover said she was not active politically over the 14-month period during which the state police have admitted to spying on her and other civilians. Retired from nursing, she was busy finishing her bachelor’s degree in social science at the University of Maryland University College at the time.

“The only protest that’s in the report they say I attended (and was not redacted), I can prove I wasn’t there,” she said. “I had just graduated and that weekend I was having people over at my house for a party.”

“The one thing I did during that period was fly to England with a ‘Woman to Woman’ Quaker group,” Hoover said.

A Quaker and anti-war activist in the 1980s against U.S. involvement in Central America and more recently against the war in Iraq, Hoover volunteered for 10 years with the American Friends Service Committee’s office in Washington. She worked under the daily terrorism alerts in the nation’s capital, and seeing the label “terrorist” in a letter from the Maryland State Police affected her profoundly, she said.

“Like nothing else before,” she said.

Hoover said, as much as anything, she thought it was the Bush administration’s “hype” of the word terrorist that left her emotionally shaken after she received the letter. “It boiled down to fear,” Hoover said. “I don’t live in fear and I’m fine now, but it took me months even to say the word. And then I got angry.”

One positive thing that has come from all of this, she said, was that her daughter-in-law invited her to speak to her high school social studies class.

“They were discussing the need to balance civil rights and security threats,” Hoover said. “When I told them about my experience, they didn’t know I was related to their teacher, my daughter-in-law.

“When they found out, they were in shock that this could happen to somebody’s grandmother.”

Bette Hoover, of Dayton in western Howard County, is a 61-year-old grandmother, retired nurse and founder of Just Peace Circles, which does conflict mediation. Hoover was a subject of the Maryland State Police spying program. Photo by Ron Cassie
Publication:Frederick News-Post; Date:Jun 21, 2009; Section:Horizon; Page Number:C-1

M S P S P Y I N G F I L E S

O N E Y E A R L A T E R : QUESTIONS REMAIN
ACTIVISTS STILL FRUSTRATED OVER REDACTED STATE POLICE SPYING FILES
B Y R O N C A S S I E N E W S – P O S T S T A F F R C A S S I E @ F R E D E R I C K N E W S P O S T. C O M

KEVIN JOHNSON,” A 30-YEAR-OLD FREDERICK ENGINEER, WAS NOT SURPRISED WHEN THE STORY BROKE LAST JULY THAT THE MARYLAND STATE POLICE SPIED ON PEACE AND ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS. THERE’S A HISTORY OF THIS SORT OF THING IN THE U.S., SAID JOHNSON, WHO ASKED THAT HIS REAL NAME NOT BE USED IN THIS STORY BECAUSE HE RECENTLY STARTED A NEW JOB AND DOESN’T KNOW HOW HIS EMPLOYER WOULD REACT TO NEWS HE WAS ONCE LABELED A TERRORIST BY POLICE.

Later, he wasn’t surprised to learn how badly the state police bungled the operation — lumping groups and individuals without association together, misidentifying activists and leaders of organizations and placing certain people at marches and meetings they never attended.

But what still upsets the Frederick Progressive Action Coalition member is the heavily redacted copy of his file that he received from Maryland State Police, the result of ACLU public information requests. The files received by activists, they say, hardly close the door on the issue.

“There are still a lot of questions,” he said. “Nobody has been getting unredacted files that I know of.” Unredacted files would shed light on how all of this was organized, he added. Flipping through his own two case files, he showed that basic information such as the date the investigation opened was redacted, as were several alleged “secondary crimes.” All but 2 1 /2 sentences of a half-page “narrative” are blacked out. His file, as with others, is accompanied by a grainy Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration photograph.

The second personal file he was given begins on page 2 and ends on page 35. Only pages 2, 12, 18, 29, 32, 34 and 35 are included, and 80 percent of those are redacted.

Explaining the missing pages and redacted material, state police spokesman Greg Shipley said only the information pertinent to each individual was released to them. Johnson said it’s hard to understand why nearly the complete narrative needs to be redacted.

Local activists believe, as does ACLU of Maryland attorney David Rocah, that names of people and organizations formerly under the target of spying by state police remain withheld.

“I’ve heard from two other people who have recently received notice the state police have files on them, and I know of at least one other file where the person hasn’t been notified,” Rocah said earlier this spring. “This is not over,” he repeated in another interview last month.

TRIAL REVEALED SPYING

The spying program came to light after the ACLU received initial replies from state police to Maryland Public Information Act requests based on discovery evidence from a trial of activists, including Baltimore peace advocate Max Obuszewski. Those on trial had participated in a peaceful protest near the National Security Administration headquarters at Fort Meade.

The NSA activists were found innocent, and a second round of MPIA requests revealed the spying case was much broader than state police first acknowledged.

“We took an educated guess based on their initial responses, and requested the files on 32 organizations that we thought might been included,” Rocah said. “We got hits on 20.” To date, 53 individuals are known to have been labeled “ terrorists” in an MSP internal database.

Rocah reiterated recently that the ACLU is negotiating to get more withheld information released, which Shipley confirmed. Rocah did not rule out a lawsuit to force their hand. “That’s typically not the fastest way to get information … and we do have other tools,” Rocah said. “But it may prove necessary.”

If forced to take action in court, the case could drag on indefinitely. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on this,” Rocah said.

Just by comparing the structure of files involving four Frederick residents — with the more complete file released on Obuszewski — local activists believe they have evidence demonstrating at least several people and a number of organizations with area ties have had their names withheld by state police.

BIGGER PICTURE

The links to the Department of Homeland Security, federal law enforcement agencies, as well as police surveillance activities in other states, have led Frederick activist Barry Kissin to conclude a national initiative was behind the Maryland spying. Montgomery County activist Pat Elder concurs. He pointed to “the one thing” that wasn’t redacted in his file — a mistake, he thinks — a reference to an e-mail intercepted by the Homeland Security office in Atlanta. “I received 12 to 15 pages total, almost all of it redacted — no information — except it exposed the fact that they infiltrated a FredPac meeting,” Kissin said. “My wife, Margo (also targeted by state police), blew up a sheet that was entirely redacted except for three words without any context.” She made it into a poster that she carried to a press conference. Kissin cited Colorado as an early example of post-9/11 spying on American citizens by its own state law enforcement agencies. In 2002, the ACLU of Colorado disclosed documents revealing the Denver Police Department had been monitoring and recording the peaceful protest activities of Denverarea residents and keeping files on the activities of law-abiding advocacy organizations. In 2003, the ACLU filed state Freedom of Information Act requests in Connecticut, Michigan, New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania about those states’ participation in a new federal database surveillance system. Other examples abound as well, before and after Maryland State Police admitted surveillance of area peace activists. For a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, The New York Times reported, undercover officers from the New York City Police Intelligence Division traveled the country, infiltrating street theater companies, church groups, anti-war organizations, environmental and anti-death penalty groups, among others, that had no apparent intention of breaking the law. During the same time frame of the Maryland police spying, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2006 several incidents involving the Office of Homeland Security’s spying on animal rights, peace activists and women’s groups in California. Maryland U.S. senator Benjamin L. Cardin said after hearings in late April, he was not satisfied that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies had fully answered requests about data shared from Maryland State Police spying operation.

In an interview this week, Cardin spokeswoman Sue Walitsky said the senator, chairman of the Senate Judiciary terrorism and homeland security subcommittee, is still concerned that innocent individuals labeled at terrorists could be in federal databases. Walitsky said that further hearings likely will be scheduled at some point later this year.

GOING FORWARD

Meanwhile, the ACLU in Maryland is waiting for replies to Freedom of Information requests sent to federal law enforcement organizations and national security agencies, Rocah said.

The Maryland General Assembly did pass legislation earlier this year prohibiting police from spying on activists not suspected of criminal activity. But Kissin said he’s afraid it will simply give law enforcement agencies a “line they will walk right up to.”

Gary Staples, a FredPac and Peace Resource Center member, described as a terrorist, environmental and animal rights extremist and anarchist by police, said those labels don’t make sense.

“At no point did they match anything we were doing,” he said. “They pulled these out of a hat.” For some, like Johnson and Staples, wrongly labeled by state police, they worry that although the surveillance has stopped — the repercussions have not. “I am concerned about the future, about credit and job applications,” Staples said. “I just applied for a job, which they said I was a shoo-in for, and I didn’t get it. I don’t know if something like this could have come up or not.” Rocah has received numerous e-mails and phone calls from politically active people worried about potential repercussions. Failed clearances for state and local jobs, and travel restrictions, may be small problems, however, Rocah said, for someone labeled a terrorist by the government.

“Our federal government has labeled people terrorists and enemy combatants, and decided that means they can detain them indefinitely — no charges, no judge, no attorney — not even a military review,” Rocah said. “This has happened to American citizens.”

“The consequences for me are a minor issue,” Staples said. “The bigger consequences are that it restricts individual rights on free speech. That has to stop.”

‘Saudi royals funded 9/11′

‘Saudi royals funded 9/11′

Friday, 26 June 2009 06:26 Editorial

terror_dees

The role of the Saudi royal family in sponsoring Muslim extremism has once again come under the spotlight with the recent claim of lawyers representing the families of the 9/11 victims, to be in possession of evidence proving the Saudi royal family’s financial support for al-Qaeda.

The immediate reaction of many people in the dissident movement was to disqualify the lawyers’ claim as yet another attempt to distract from Israel’s active role in the events of 9/11. Or maybe, they are suggesting, the lawyers are trying to give Arabs a bad name.

Saudi treachery

What those dissidents overlook is the role of the Saudi elite in the big scheme of things. The Saudi royal family and the likes of the Bin Ladens are an integral part of the Anglo-Judean Axis of Greed. Their most important job, apart from controlling the strategic Saudi oil reserves, is to create an image amongst Westerners of Muslims and Islam as backwards, dangerous and cruel. Such an image is in the interest of Western governments and corporations because it makes it easier for them to bully and plunder Muslim countries. It also makes it easier for Israel to get away with its policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide.Initially, the Saudis only sabotaged the Muslim image by maintaining their caricature of a medieval Islamic society. Government and corporate media kept bombarding Western citizens with testimonies of the ridiculous treatment of Saudi women and graphic reports on cruel and disproportionate punishment. Under George Bush and Bill Clinton the Saudi traitors became even more aggressive. They started sponsoring foreign Islamic clerics who want to turn back time by 1200 years and extremist groups willing to use violence to fight against their governments and the West.

The foot soldiers amongst those extremist groups such a Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are obviously unaware that their groups are brankrolled by the Saudis on behalf of Western governments. If they knew, they would be less inclined to go on suicide missions.

Whoever holds the purse strings calls the shots

It would be naïve to believe that the Saudis just hand over coffers of money and then wait and see. It is far more likely that those terrorist organisations are not only infiltrated with spies recruited by Western government agencies such as bored Saudi billionaire’s son and would-be James Bond Osama Bin Laden but – one way or another – take orders from the West. That’s where September 11, Lucky Larry Silverstein and the ‘Dancing Israelis’ come in.

There can’t be any doubt that the Israelis and the American government knew about the imminent attack. It couldn’t have been successful without the American government knowing and allowing it to happen.

Larry Silverstein wouldn’t have bought the WTC buildings just a few months before the attack and made billions of profits. The Israeli run airport security firm wouldn’t have let the terrorists slip through. Hundreds of millions of dollars wouldn’t have been invested in unprecedented numbers of put options for US airline shares, betting on a sudden drop of their share values. Dick Cheney wouldn’t have run an air safety drill on that day to practice exactly for that kind of event. US air control would have taken over control of the hijacked planes by remote control and forced them to land safely, once it became aware what was going on. The building wouldn’t have been stacked with thermite explosives, which must have taken weeks if not months to prepare. Mossad wouldn’t have had a film crew on stand-by in New York to film the events.

Who benefits?

Most likely, the American and the Israeli government not only knew about the imminent attack and allowed it to happen. They actually ordered it, either directly through their moles or via their Saudi patsies. The latter didn’t benefit from the following ‘war of terror’ as much as the Americans and the Israelis. They were just acting on their behalf.

Footnotes:
[1] Saudi royals funded 9/11

Who’s A Low Level Terrorist? Are You?

When threatened, should we conform with lock-step in perverse obedience to the State’s dictates, outlooks  and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s vision: “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

wto2

Who’s A Low Level Terrorist? Are You?

By Emily Spence

Recently, an American Civil Liberties Union report pointed out, “Anti-terrorism training materials currently being used by the Department of Defense (DoD) teach its personnel that free expression in the form of public protests should be regarded as ‘low level terrorism’.” [1]

Despite that DoD officials removed the offensive section from their educational resources at the urging of ACLU members, the DoD stance is still troubling since a longstanding practice to designate peaceful, law abiding activists as dangerous and treasonable still exists in many government departments and agencies. Indeed the participants of the first antiwar protest against the Vietnam incursion, put together in the mid-1960′s by peaceable Quakers and FOR members after having discussed Gandhi’s Salt March as a model for a nonviolent demonstration, faced government operatives filming them face by face from rooftops as they moved en masse down Broadway to the UN Plaza. (My mother, a pacifist married to a World War II Conscientious Objector, and I, a child at the time of the march, both were in attendance. When the film crew focused on us, she stood tall, faced the agents with their telephoto lens, glared in disdainful defiance and, simultaneously, throw the corner of her coat over my face. Afterwards, she muttered, “How dare they try to intimidate us!”)

This sort of happening in mind, the treatment of Nobel Peace Award winner Aung San Sui Kyi in Myanmar is not necessarily all that different than the response that she’d receive in the USA and, while it’s commendable that American spokespersons publicly object to her most recent arrest, they, certainly, might seem to be a bunch of hypocrites. This is due to the fact that a number of Nobel Peace Award recipients, such as American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), have had difficulties of their own on American soil.

For example, “AFSC’s work, always open and resolutely nonviolent, has been under government surveillance for decades. The Service Committee secured nearly 1,700 pages of files from the FBI under a Freedom of Information request in 1976. These files show that the FBI kept files on AFSC that dated back to 1921. Ten other federal agencies kept files on AFSC, including the CIA, Air Force, Navy, Internal Revenue Service, Secret Service, and the State Department. The CIA has intercepted overseas mail and cables in the 1950s, and some AFSC offices (and even its staff’s homes) have been infiltrated and burglarized in the late 1960s into the 1970s.” [2]

In relation, AFSC associate general secretary for justice and human rights, Joyce Miller, asked, “How can we speak of spreading democracy in Iraq while dismantling it here at home?” She further remarked, “Political dissent is fundamental to a free and democratic society. It should not be equated with crime.”

Add to the AFSC problems, those pertaining to Nobel Peace Award recipient Nelson Mandela, who only a year ago had the designation “terrorist” removed from his name, under protest by the State Department, so that he no longer suffered travel restrictions from the US government. Yet his travel curtailment was not nearly as awful as was Ramzy Baroud’s blockage. He, the editor of Palestine Chronicle, had his US passport seized by a consular officer at an overseas American Embassy [3]. Similarly, Senator Edward Kennedy was, also, flagged by the U.S. no-fly list.

Then again, Ted Kennedy received much less harassment than did Nobel Peace Award winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire after her flight from Guatemala had been directed to Ireland through Houston:

“She was probably tired and ready to get back to Belfast, where her attempts to bring about an end to The Troubles in 1976 made her at 32 the youngest Nobel Peace Prize-winner ever. Since then, she’s been given the Pacem in Terris Award by Pope John Paul II, and the United Nations selected her (along with the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Jordan’s Queen Noor and a dozen or so other fellow Nobel Laureates) as an honorary board member of the International Coalition for the Decade.

“Unfortunately for Maguire, her flight back home to Northern Ireland was routed through Houston, where none of that meant diddly. Federal Customs officials were far less interested in any of that than they were in a box on the back of the transit form she filled out on her flight.

“‘They questioned me about my nonviolent protests in USA against the Afghanistan invasion and Iraqi war,’ Maguire said later in a statement. ‘They insisted I must tick the box in the Immigration form admitting to criminal activities.’

“Maguire was detained for two hours — grilled once, fingerprinted, photographed, and grilled again. She missed her flight home. She was only released after an organization she helped found — the Nobel Women’s Initiative — started kicking up a fuss.” [4]

On can add to her troubles countless other ones wherein human rights and environmental supporters have been repeatedly hassled for no other reason than that they’re holding views that don’t jive with positions at any number of U.S. government institutions. One needn’t return in time to the McCarthy Era to find many individuals who have been investigated and persecuted for holding vilified opinions. For example, Stephen Lendman, a peace advocate and writer in his seventies with a permanent knee injury that delimits travel, has been repeatedly investigated by the FBI.

At the same time, he is joined by myriad others such as assorted activists in Maryland whose names were put on federal terrorist lists by state police who infiltrated their groups. [5] As such, their perfectly legal activities, freedom of speech and right to unhindered assembly have been criminalized.

Simultaneously, there’s a certain inescapable irony and disingenuous quality presented by the Western government heads who are harshly critical of the Iran crackdown on dissenting citizens while they, themselves, condone similar ironfisted policies in their own lands. Their two-faced position is barely hidden beneath the surface of their mock concern for the well-being of Iranian protesters as they urge their own and allied troops into battle, show little (if any) sincere remorse over the slaughter of masses of civilians that happen in the process and make sure that demonstrators at home are disregarded, denigrated or  preemptively rounded up as happened at the 2008 Republican National Convention.

Then again, one might find himself in pretty good company if he were singled out as unpatriotic and treacherous for holding viewpoints or undertaking actions that go contrary to the perspectives that a certain hawkish and totalitarian segment of society holds. All the same, every method conceivable might be used to hunt down the offenders and, when taken to the extreme, render their seemingly provocative positions ineffectual by any means possible, including imprisonment and murder.

Anyone who doubts this to be the case needs only to remember about what happened to people like Howard Fast; the slain Freedom Riders Andy Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner; the thirteen shot students at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guardsman fired sixty-seven rounds over a thirteen second period, and scores of others who have stood against mainstream policies.

Meanwhile, stigmatizing dissidents is a fairly common practice. As such, “There are 1.1 million people on the [U.S.] Terrorist Watch List and there is a 35 per cent error rate, minimum, for that list,” according to ACLU’s Michael German. [6] Furthermore, the overzealous and aggressive surveillance tactics used by the National Security Agency (NSA) to check the public’s e-mails, telephone calls and other communications are the same ones as were in use during George W. Bush’s administration. Likewise, the amount of spying on personal exchanges is as high as it ever was.

In relation to recent claims by Justice Department and national security officials that the overcollection was unintentional, House representative, Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey and Chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, commented “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental.” Additionally, the act of tracking e-mailed transmissions and other interactions has seemed in violation of federal law according to lawyers at the Justice Department. Regardless, the practice continues.

At the same time, the decision to designate social activists as troublemakers, while singling them out for intimidation, threats and investigations, carries serious legal and political implications in democratic societies.The further measure of subjecting them to the sorts of difficulties that Mairead Corrigan Maguire, Ramzy Baroud, AFSC members and innumerable others have endured is clearly based in xenophobic, paranoid and despotic thinking. It embodies the kind of authoritarian mentality and oppressive activities that one finds in the worst types of tyrannical regimes.

As Harry S. Truman suggested, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” Due to this fear, are we, then, to all conform with lock-step in perverse obedience to the State’s dictates, outlooks and agendas in an increasingly Orwellian milieu? If not, then we must constantly remind ourselves and each other of US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s vision: “Restriction

of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

References

[1] Pentagon Rebrands Protest as “Low-Level Terrorism” (http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/pentagon-rebrands-protest-as-low-level-terrorism/).

[2] American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) (http://www.commondreams.org/news2006/0201-03.htm).

[3] “Punishing activists or pursuing terrorists?” by Maggie Mitchell Salem in Asia Times Online :: Asian News, Business and Economy. (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/GL10Aa01.html).

[4] Nobel Prize Winner Gets Hassled At Bush Intercontinental … (http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/05/29-8).

[5] Police Spied on Activists In Md. – washingtonpost.com (http:// www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2008/07/17/ AR2008071701287.html) and Md. Police Put Activists’ Names On Terror Lists – … (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wpdyn/content/article/2008/10/ 07/AR2008100703245.html).

[6] One third of FBI Terror Watch List are innocent people | Top … (http://www.russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2009-06-17/One_third_of_FBI_Terror_Watch_List_are_innocent_people.html).

Emily Spence is an author living in Massachusetts. She has spent many years involved in human rights, environmental and social services efforts.

Farkhor/ Ayne Air Force Base



31 May, 2009  Dr Khurram Shaukat Yousafzai
Farkhor Ayne Air Base is an Indian Airbase located in Farkhor/Ayni in Tajikistan,130 kilometers (80 miles) south east of its capital Dushanbe. It is the only Indian military base situated in a foreign country and just 2 km from the Tajik-Afghan border.
Historically, After Badly Planned Kargils Battle, which Pakistan initiated under General Musharaf which resulted in Nasty surprise to Indians exposing their fragility in Highly Strategic Area of Jammu and Kashmir and its nearness to Wahkhan Corridor the presence of most of Aksai Chin the area once part of Indian held Kashmir now under China. which the Indians were considering as their Entrance into Afghanistan and CIS countries and Control over OIL and mineral Resources of CIS states.

The Taliban rule in Afghanistan and Pakistan Resistance to open up the Trade Routes to Indian Trade across Pakistan because of Kashmir issue had undermined India,s participation in the “ Great Game “.

As Wahkhan Corridor separates, Pakistan from Tajikistan and Afghanistan and China’s Xingjian Uyghur Muslim Populated Region and Russia which lies further north of Tajikistan. The Durand line starts from Wahkhan region that separates us from Afghanistan. Wahkhan is just a few kms wide corridor that separates us from Tajikistan.

Presence of this Air force base at the Rear of Pakistan just a few Kilometers from Durand Line is a worrying development for both Pakistan and China. Russians too might have some strategic worries attached to it and there are reports of arm twisting of India.

In 2001, the Indian military opened a 25-bed hospital at the base at Farkhor to treat Afghan Northern Alliance members injured in fighting with the Taliban, including military leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was rushed there after the fatal suicide attack against him on 11 Sep 2001.

After the September 11 World trade centre attacks, Tajikistan offered its bases, including Farkhor, to the United States in its war against terror. The Indian military hospital unit was relocated inside Afghanistan with the progress of Northern Alliance forces. The U.S. showed Great interest in this base, It then offered Forkhan base to India, which USA considered as partner in the “New Great Game Strategy”, completely undermining Pakistan which was its front line state partner in War on terrorism.

India Immediately saw it as a Potential gold Mine towards its Forward Strategic Interests and the race for Oil and mineral resources of CIS countries. Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov’s has signed many Pacts and Agreements with India, when Pakistan was busy fighting Taliban and trying to please America on war on Terror. Underming its own National Interests . The ISI has not been able to counter this new threat effectively.

Recently after Successful opening up of a new land route from Kandhar and Heart in Afghanistan to Iranian Free Trade zone of Chubahar in Sistan Iran, bordering the Balauchistan Province as recently as on 8 September 2008 just a day Before Zardari was sworn in as President with Karzai sitting besides him. Pakistan seems to have lost the trump card of blocking the land routes to Afghanistan and CIS countries. As of now Afghanistan(Read USA) can have an alternate trade route all made up by a road constructed by cost of one billion US dollars of Indian Money with its Indian Army Engineers right under the noses of ISI and Taliban.

The agreement between India and Tajikistan for the base was signed in 2003 and ratified in late 2004. It stipulates the presence of the Indian Air Force and Indian Army to be permanently stationed there. Work on the base commenced immediately and the air base is now in full operational readiness since early 2007.

India has constructed three hangars at Ayni, two of which will be used by Indian aircraft. India has stationed about 12-14 MiG-31 bombers with Nuclear capabilities. The third hangar would be used by the Tajik air force. The Indian Air Force (IAF) is also stationing trainer aircrafts, under a 2002 defense-cooperation agreement whereby India has been training the Tajik air force. Technicians from the Aviation Research Center of the Research and Analysis Wing (India’s external intelligence spy agency, RAW) also repaired the Northern Alliance’s aging Soviet-made Mi-17 and Mi-35 attack helicopters there. It was out of Tajikistan that India channeled this help to the Northern Alliance.

Neither New Delhi nor Dushanbe officially admits to an Indian air base at Ayni. Delhi maintains that it is only renovating this base. The first reports of India’s intentions surfaced in 2002, and speculation gathered momentum in 2003, now the base is operational since early 2007.

It is its presence at Ayni that has enabled India, to play a significant role, in Afghanistan’s reconstruction since 2002. Since Pakistan does not allow India overland access to Afghanistan, India has had to channel its economic and relief assistance to Afghanistan through Farkhor. The IAF airlifts supplies to Ayni, which are then transported to Farkhor and onward to Afghanistan by road.

Mr. Phunchok Stobdan, research fellow at the Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses in New Delhi, told Asia Times Online. After the fall of the Taliban regime due to USA, India was determined not to lose the foothold it had gained in Afghanistan thanks to its ties with the Northern Alliance in the late 1990s. Delhi was anxious not to allow Pakistani influence to grow again in Afghanistan.

This was behind India’s decision to remain at Ayni / Farkhor after the fall of the Taliban, say Indian intelligence sources. A military base in Tajikistan is attractive as it also enhances India’s options in the event of war with Pakistan. From Tajikistan, India would be able to strike Pakistan’s rear.

Pakistan has the weakest, Air defense, at Durand line area and might miss Aircraft coming from that Angle, as it not geared for that kind of threat and our forces look towards India Pakistan Border for enemies not Afghanistan.   As for now, the US Predator drones and American Aircraft come and go freely and Indian Mig 29, s will be hard to differentiate from them.

As for China, steps are afoot to counterbalance India’s rising profile in Tajikistan. A Stobdan point out that Chinese-Tajik cooperation is growing. Visits by senior Chinese leaders to Tajikistan have been followed up with generous military assistance to that country. While growing Chinese engagement with the Tajiks are perhaps motivated more by the increasing US presence in the region, India is no doubt a factor weighing on Chinese minds.

Now the question Arises, should we be looking at the Pak –India border and Kashmir Problem or concentrate on this Monster problem on our Durand line Border and the Wah khan area in the form Nuclear armed Indian war planes breathing on our necks.

If Pakistan does not revise its strategic plans immediately, its relationship with USA should be revised followed its relationship with India and Afghanistan too.

Our relationship with China and importantly with Russia should be strengthened. Now is the time if Pakistan does not form a Strategic Alliance with Russia and China., Pakistan would regret and pay heavily for this Mistake.

The recent briefings of ISPR are quite indicative about the forces behind terrorism. all the fingers point towards India, America, and Afghanistan,. Look at the poppy crops, which CIA had used against Russia during afghan Jihad. Now they are growing in Afghanistan under patronage of USA and NATO, after they were eliminated under Taliban. Maybe they are being used against Pakistan this time in form of funding the Terrorism. Recently the Presence of Explosive materials found in Malakand and Tribal regions were of Indian origin. All this have raised suspicions.

New York times daily , has recently claimed that Ammunition used by Taliban is definitely of American origin as one of the ammunition by Brand name “ Wolf “ ,made in California USA was used by them . The Guns were those, which were issued to Afghan police by USA.  So it possible that Ammunition is being smuggled from Tajikistan to Pakistan which geographically very near. As shown by the Map to destabilize Pakistan.

Pakistan should join the “Shangai Cooperation Organization,” immediately as it contains China, Russia, and most importantly Iran as well. This is the Platform, which can offer what is the Right thing. As it seems we are at same side when strategic interests are concerned of these players instead of towing the USA line of war on terrorism. The more we dance on USA lines the more we are going to suffer. As of now India is more important for USA, the nuclear deal which it offered to India is not for offer to Pakistan. Who has sacrificed its national interest in 1965 under Ayub Khan, in the 1980,s under Zia and in 2001-ongoing Period under Musharaf for USA?

The U2, s spy Missions against Russia from Badaber Peshawar during Ayub Khan which prompted Russia to warn us to strike Peshawar, the Operation Cyclone / Charlie Wilson war (Texas Senator , who wanted Vietnams revenge from Russia ) or Islamic Jihad against Russia under Gen Zia and the war on Terrorism under Musharaf ( New Great Game for CIS OIL ) . We as Pakistanis seem to be a small dispensable pawn in the great game for USA economic and Geo strategic Interests. A wake up call is needed urgently.

Thanking you in Anticipation from ,
Dr. Khurrum Shaukat Yusafzai.
Khurrumuk@gmail.com

Exporter updates: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan

Exporter updates: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan

The Central Asia-Caucasus region is one of the oldest hydrocarbon producing areas in the world. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the region has attracted special attention from oil and gas consuming nations and international companies.

Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan, in particular, enjoy several advantages. They hold oil and gas proved reserves sufficient to represent the main sources of future production increases outside the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Equally important, they are strategically sandwiched between two major energy-consuming regions—China to the east and Europe to the west, both of which depend heavily on foreign supplies of oil and gas. And, unlike most oil and gas producing nations in the Middle East, Latin America, and Russia, the three Caspian states other than Russia and Iran have welcomed foreign investment to consolidate their political independence and to attract capital with which to build and modernize their energy industries.

These advantages aside, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan all lack direct access to the high seas and major shipping routes. As a result, the only way for their hydrocarbon exports to reach major global markets is shipping via other countries, largely by pipelines. Oil and gas pipelines are not merely economic schemes; they also reflect and contribute to changing strategic parameters. For most of the last 2 decades, Central Asia and the Caucasus region’s three close neighbors—China, Europe, and Russia—have proposed and built several pipelines to serve their energy and political interests.

Together, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan hold 3.8% of the world’s proved oil reserves and 3.3% of its gas reserves. In 2008 their combined share of global oil production was 3.2%, and that of gas was 3.5%. Recent discoveries strongly suggest that the region’s oil and gas production will substantially increase.

The scope and timing of oil and gas development in these three Caspian Sea states depend on two dynamics. One is the availability of foreign investment and technology, which in turn depends on the approach authorities in Baku, Astana, and Ashgabat take toward international oil companies. The other is the yet-unclear ability of export capacity to keep pace with expected increases in oil and gas production in the region. The rivalry between regional and global powers will have a great impact on pipeline construction.

Reviews of recent energy developments in these countries follow:

Azerbaijan

Since independence, Azerbaijan has taken a more pro-Western, foreign investment-friendly approach than most other regional powers. This opening to international oil companies has contributed to the vast expansion of the country’s hydrocarbon production. Most of the oil comes from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli structure, developed by Azerbaijan International Operating Co. The bulk of Azeri oil is exported via two major pipelines: Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC), with a terminal at the Turkish port on the Mediterranean, and Baku-Novorossiysk, with a terminal at the Russian port on the Black Sea.

Azerbaijan has a similarly successful story with natural gas. The country’s production almost doubled in the last decade. Most of the gas comes from three fields—Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli, Bakhar, and Shah Deniz. The latest is considered one of the world’s largest gas discoveries in the last few decades. In 2007 Azerbaijan became a net gas exporter. Azeri gas moves mainly to Turkey with small volumes to Georgia and Iran. The major gas pipeline is the South Caucasus, known also as Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum, which runs parallel to the BTC for most of its route with a connection to the Turkish gas network.

Kazakhstan

Given its size and massive hydrocarbon reserves, Kazakhstan has the potential soon to become a major energy exporter. Astana’s oil and gas production has more than tripled over the last decade. Most of the country’s oil comes from Tengiz and Karachaganak fields. Kashagan field, discovered in 2000, is the largest oil field outside the Middle East and the fifth largest in the world in terms of reserves. ENI was the major operator of the international consortium developing Kashagan until early 2008, when the Kazakh government doubled its stake in the scheme and stripped ENI of its leading role. Kashagan is scheduled to come on stream in 2013; however, geological and environmental hurdles might delay production.

Kazakhstan exports most of its oil via three major pipelines. Traditionally, Kazakhstan used to export all its oil via the Atyrau-Samara pipeline, a northbound link to the Russian distribution system. In recent years, pumping and heating stations were added to the pipeline. Astana, however, has decided to diversify its oil shipment routes.

The Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) connects Kazakhstan’s oil fields in the Caspian Sea with Novorossiysk. It is the only export pipeline on Russian territory with partially private ownership. CPC was officially inaugurated in October 2001. Expansion of the CPC, including additional pump stations and storage facilities, is planned.

The Kazakhstan-China Pipeline represents an important diversification step. The pipeline connects oil fields in Atasu in northwest Kazakhstan with Alashankou in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region. China started receiving Kazakh oil in 2006. Kazakhstan also agreed to swap arrangements with Iran. And Astana has endorsed a plan to build a link connecting oil fields to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.

Almost all Kazakh gas is associated with oil production, with Karachaganak and Tengiz the largest sources. Kazakh gas, along with that of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, is shipped via the Central Asia Center connecting western Kazakhstan with Russia’s gas system.

Turkmenistan

Unlike Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan has limited oil reserves but some of the richest gas endowments in Central Asia. Upon independence, Turkmen gas was seen as a competitor to that of Russia. All Turkmenistan gas was exported to Russia via the Central Asia Center pipeline, and the two countries became locked in a price dispute. As a result, Turkmen gas production stagnated for most of the 1990s.

The two nations have signed several agreements since the late 1990s, and Turkmen gas production has since skyrocketed. In addition to gas deals with Moscow, two other developments have boosted production and brightened the outlook: discoveries and a change in political leadership.

Most of Turkmenistan’s gas comes from Dauletabad and Shatlyk fields. In the mid-2000s the supergiant South Yolotan-Osman was discovered in the southeastern part of the country. In October 2008 an independent audit confirmed that the field was among the world’s biggest. In August 2008 another large field, South Gutlyayak, was discovered.

In addition to the Central Asia Center pipeline, a small proportion of Turkmen gas is exported to Iran via the Korpedzhe-Kurt Kai pipeline. Built in 1997, it was the first in Central Asia to bypass Russia.

Following the death of President Saparmurat Niyazov in December 2006, his successor, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, promised a fresh start in domestic and foreign policies. The new president invited international oil companies to develop the country’s hydrocarbon deposits. Though he declared the county “open for business,” authorities say Turkmenistan will develop its vast onshore resources itself. International oil companies will be limited to exploration in the Caspian Sea and offered service contracts rather than production-sharing agreements.

Berdymukhammedov has sought to diversify gas exports. In addition to the links to Russia and Iran, his government is negotiating gas deals with Pakistan and India via the so-called Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) or Trans-Afghanistan pipeline. In July 2007 Ashgabat and Beijing signed an agreement under which the former will supply the latter 30 billion cu m/year of gas for 30 years via the proposed Central Asia Gas pipeline. China will participate in development of Turkmen gas fields.

In April 2008 Berdymukhammedov signed an agreement with Germany’s RWE to explore for and develop gas fields in Turkmenistan and agreed to supply the European Union with 10 billion cu m of natural gas.

‘Uptick’ in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq

DOES OUR CONTINUING U.S. OCCUPATION DECREASE CHANCES OF WAR-CRIMES PROSECUTION? WHY ELSE ARE WE THERE?

It’s All Good, Again: ‘Uptick’ in the American-Made Tides of Violence in Iraq

by Chris Floyd
The recent “uptick” in military fatalities and wounded is just part of the endless ebb and flow of death that the bipartisan American war on Iraq has set in motion. These bloodsoaked tides will continue to “surge” across the conquered land as the years of America’s military implantation drag on and on.

From the very beginning of the abomination that is the American war in Iraq, imperial courtiers have pushed the same line: every act of mass slaughter in the occupied land was actually an encouraging development — a sign that the insurgents were “getting desperate,” that “dead-enders” were launching last-gasp efforts, unable to derail the bounty of liberty and peace that America’s paternal goodness had bestowed upon the Iraqi people.

This has held true from the first suicide attacks following George W. Bush’s declaration of “Mission Accomplished” in the spring of 2003 and all through the mounting violence that has claimed more than a million innocent lives. The only exception was during the height of the genocidal fury of 2006, when the forces unleashed and empowered and assisted by the American occupiers carried out a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against fierce resistance. The American elite suffered a slight wobble at that point, putting together a conclave of worthies in the “Iraq Study Group” to suggest ways to tamp down the raging PR disaster. (And that’s all there was to the ISG plan; they were never going to pull out of Iraq.) The whole episose could be seen as yet another sorry chapter in the saga of the ghoulish, goonish family that somehow came to hold sway in American affairs for almost three decades, with Daddy Bush’s factotums guiding the ISG, while Junior Bush brushed them off and consulted his own little circle of militarist agitators to find a way to continue the war but get it off the front pages.

This was, of course, the famous “surge,” which saw a fresh influx of not-so-fresh American troops, blanketing the country and helping consolidate the gains of the ethnic cleansing campaign for the occupier’s favored factions. The ultimate result was the violent demographic shift — including the forced migration of 4 million people — and mass murder that is the foundation of the American-propped Maliki regime. Its sole purpose was to ensure that the war continued, and that the American military presence could be more deeply embedded in the client state.

The levels of violence did drop from the horrific heights of 2006 and 2007 — again, partly because the American-assisted ethnic cleansing had been so successful. (In much the same way, there was a significant drop in Nazi violence against Jews in, say, Poland — after the Nazis had killed most of the Jews in Poland.) But the violence in Iraq never went away; the conquered land remained one of the most dangerous places on earth, and very few of the 4 million refugees felt safe enough to return home. (And in many cases, their “ethnically cleansed” homes were no longer available to them.) And of course, the million dead are still dead — and the millions more maimed, broken, ruined, grieved and traumatized are still suffering.

Now that the Americans and their Iraqi clients have reneged on their payoff deal with the Sunni insurgents they had bribed to keep quiet during the surge, we are seeing the inevitable “uptick” in violence.

And now that the Americans and their Iraqi clients have reneged on their payoff deal with the Sunni insurgents they bribed to keep quiet during the surge, we are seeing the inevitable “uptick” in violence (to borrow Joe Biden’s atrociously dismissive term for the coming slaughter in Obama’s Afghanistan “surge”). More than 150 people have been killed in just two bombings of Shi’ite sites in the past five days.

And right on cue, the Obama Administration trots out the same old platitudes: “Nothing to worry about, nothing to see here, things are just hunky-dorry, don’t sweat the small stuff, it’s all good.” Or as Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell put it:

“Despite the fact that you’ve seen sporadic high-profile attacks still taking place in Iraq, the overall security climate is a good one and we remain at all-time lows.”

“All-time lows” means that, on average, “only” a few dozen or more are murdered in war-spawned violence each and every month of the year. The Obama mouthpiece then tried to blame the “sporadic” mass slaughters on the “Status of Forces Agreement,” which calls for American troops to withdraw from Iraqi cities by the end of June. This is all part of an overall “withdrawal” plan concocted by the Bush Regime and their client Maliki, and adopted, with only the slightest modifications, by Barack Obama as his own. Naturally, both the “withdrawal from cities” this month and the promised “withdrawal of all combat troops” from the country in August 2010 are riddled with “exceptions.” For example, Americans will remain thoroughly ensconced in strategic points inside the city of Baghdad (not least in the massive Crusader fortress they are building in the Green Zone), while continuing to “assist” Iraqi military operations in all Iraqi cities. And of course, the long-range “withdrawal” plan will leave tens of thousands of American troops on the ground in Iraq — again, “assisting” and “training” Iraqi forces.

The recent “uptick” (and yes, Morrell used that very word in his spin session) is just part of the endless ebb and flow of death that the bipartisan American war on Iraq has set in motion. These bloodsoaked tides will continue to “surge” across the conquered land as the years of America’s military implantation drag on and on — and no doubt for long afterward.

“But you know what they say, man: It’s all good.” — Bob Dylan


Chris Floyd at his deskChris Floyd has been a writer and editor for more than 25 years, working in the United States, Great Britain and Russia for various newspapers, magazines, the U.S. government and Oxford University. Floyd co-founded the blog Empire Burlesque, and is also chief editor of Atlantic Free Press. He can be reached at cfloyd72@gmail.com.This column is republished here with the permission of the author.

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This story was published on June 25, 2009.

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Countdown to Total Chaos

This week’s bombings are a demonstration to the world, to provide Obama with a face-saving excuse for back-tracking on his campaign promises on Iraq. If pulling-out would condemn Iraqis to non-stop terror (as if they are not now), then continuing the occupation would be portrayed as a humanitarian measure. An Iraqi pull-out was never in the cards, merely another sadistic hypocritical election ploy.

more about "Countdown to Total Chaos", posted with vodpod

Revelations made by Peter Chamberlin should awaken us

Revelations made by Peter Chamberlin should awaken us

Published by editor Features, News Jun 24, 2009

By Asif Haroon Raja

The army enters the scene to tackle a serious law and order or security problem when all other options fail to deliver. By that time patience of the government and that of general public has worn out, tempers are high, law breakers have gone berserk in shredding writ of state, civil law enforcing agencies are on the run and civil administration is absent because of life threats and casualties sustained. Local population stand intimidated due to terror tactics of militants laced with sophisticated weapons and IEDs. Any person defying their orders is made a horrible example to put fear into others. Under such inhospitable environments, it is not an easy task for the military to put everything right in a jiffy since it doesn’t carry a magic wand. Soldiers are as thin skinned as their civilian counter parts and equally vulnerable to bullets, suicide bombers and IEDs.

Whatever advantages they have get diluted when they have to operate in home terrain of rebels, confront faceless enemy resorting to guerrilla hit and run tactics. Not only it has to differentiate between friend and foe, it has to remain mindful of collateral damage to the local population among which many support the militants quietly.

Factor of collateral damage kept the army restrained when operating in Waziristan, causing immense irritation to USA. Policy of selective and minimal force to avoid civilian casualties was objected to. From 2005 onwards, the US continuously lectured Pakistan to do more. Our measured actions displeased USA so immensely that it accused the army of either being incompetent or in league with militants. All sorts of libelous stories were circulated to malign image of the army. Ultra liberal writers hummed Indian and western themes that army and ISI consider Taliban as its strategic assets. Failing to evoke desired response and irked by peace deals, western media joined by own writers started to overplay militant threat and converted it into an existential threat to Pakistan. Fata was declared most dangerous place on earth and a danger to USA and rest of the world.

Our nuclear program came under sustained vilification attack feeding an impression to the world that Pakistan was not in a position to protect its nuclear weapons from Taliban. The US military began to flex its muscles and pressure was built up that US Special Forces had chalked out contingency plans to step in and takeaway the nuclear assets before they were stolen. As part of psy war, one Mustafa Abu Yazid in Afghanistan claiming to be top Al-Qaeda leader stated that Pakistani nuclear weapons instead of falling into US hands will be taken over by Mujahideen and used against Americans. He also hoped that Pak army would be defeated in Swat and that would turn the tables. US State Department and CIA pioneered the malicious campaign against Pak army, ISI and nuclear program through US media duly reinforced by western and India media. Once military was launched in Malakand Division in late April resulting in massive exodus, Manmohan Singh couldn’t contain his glee; he chuckled that Pakistan has collapsed. His merriment proved short-lived for he and his colleagues are now distressed over successes made by Pak troops, Swat front collapsing too soon, Hindu-Afghan agents getting killed or caught in large numbers and noose around Baitullah tightening and whole Pakistani nation supporting the army.

Swat valley, Buner and Lower Dir have been fully secured and few pockets are being cleared. Close to 1600 militants including Shah Duran have been killed and 800 families of IDPs have returned to Buner. The military has decided to tackle all sanctuaries of militants and to that end used air strikes and artillery selectively in Bajaur, Bannu, Orakzai, South Waziristan based on accurate intelligence and destroyed strongholds, training sites, weapons and ammunition dumps of militants. Idea is to give no quarter and breathing time to the militants and keep them dislocated and on the run. Baitullah’s former companion Zainuddin Mehsud, who had become his rival, has been killed in DIK most probably by Baitullah men. Zain’s brother Misbah has taken over. Drones have targeted Baitullah’s stronghold killing 50 people. Pro-government and anti-American Maulvi Nazir who had been at war with Baitullah has come close to him after latter’s area was hit by a drone on 14 February. Maulvi Nazir, Malang and Turkistan Bittani are important figures who would make the task of army easy or difficult.

India is now looking forward to exploit IDPs and is banking upon cornered Baitullah to turn the tide. It may be recalled how unreasonable and uncompromising stance Indian leaders had maintained from 26 November onwards in the aftermath of Mumbai attacks. They refused to investigate the case jointly or to have talks unless Pakistan agreed to do their biddings. For a change, Pakistan stood its ground since the so-called evidence provided was eyewash. All indications pointed towards Indian homegrown terrorists linked with Indian army, Hindu extremist parties/groups and RAW. Mahrashtra Chief Karkare who was assassinated on the first night of occurrence had made startling revelations and investigations had reached advanced stage. Real culprits had been exposed who had committed several incidents of terror for which Pakistan was blamed. Reputation of Indian army was at stake since large number of its senior serving and retired officers were found involved in terrorism. So was BJP which was looking forward to win May elections and recapture power.

Since stakes were very high, hence the drama was enacted by RAW in which Pakistan was roped in to kill several birds with one stone. By throwing the entire blame on the doorsteps of Pakistan, India has cleverly closed the case of Col Purohit and several other military officers directly involved in terrorism. Prejudiced western leaders and scandalous media are tightlipped about it. India has expressed willingness to resume talks but made it conditional to destruction of anti-India terrorist network in Pakistan. It has now issued arrest warrants of recently released Hafiz Saeed and 22 others blamed to be involved in Mumbai carnage.

Like tens of American and western writers, US journalist Peter Chamberlin has made startling revelations about designs of USA in our region. He says that since Pakistan is the keystone in US stratagem for materialization of its commercial interests in southern Central Asia and Middle East, it is a compulsion for it to take Pakistan under its total control. He says that Al-Qaeda and local Taliban in Pakistan are creations of CIA since Al-Qaeda was not in existence before 9/11. Involvement of Al-Qaeda was manufactured solely on the basis of single Israeli source and Osama who is long dead is purposely kept alive. War on terror against imaginary Al-Qaeda was conceived and mounted by neo-cons for fulfillment of US global ambitions and Af-Pak strategy is another deception. Chamberlin aptly says that CIA has managed to pull-off a world-class propaganda coup by making Pakistan scapegoat for the mess it has created in Afghanistan. The most disquieting part of his exposure is that CIA had used Northern Alliance most ruthless men to destabilize Fata and NWFP. He says that mostly Uzbeks from Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan had been launched from Afghanistan to indulge in kidnappings, bombings and beheading of over 400 tribal notables. Peace deals were disrupted through drone attacks or opening new fronts. In his view Nazir holds key to war and peace in South Waziristan.

Is it not another wake up call? Time for softness and vagueness has run out since half of the country is in flames. Unless our leaders gather courage and expose the real face of our so-called friends and bring to notice of the world and UN the perverse role played by RAW and CIA and extensive damage incurred under the garb of friendship, the whole country would get engulfed in foreign sponsored militancy.

-         Asian Tribune -