Anarchists and Patriots, Tomorrow in Ft. Worth, Bush Speaks to Improve his Image

[Surely someone will be there to reapply the blood and shit that Bush tries to wash off.  Won't they?]

George W. Bush to become motivational speaker

Months after leaving office with a dismal 22 per cent approval rating, George W. Bush is embarking on a new career as a motivational speaker.

By Nick Allen

On Monday, the former US president – whose policies inspired millions of Americans to vote Democrat in the 2008 election- will headline at a popular Get Motivated programme, appearing at a seminar about, among other things, “How to master the art of effective leadership”.

Mr Bush will speak at an event in Fort Worth, Texas on Monday and another one in San Antonio in December.

He will give advice on making decisions and how to lead large organisations, his spokesman said. He also intends to talk about his achievements and setbacks while in office.

Appearing alongside Mr Bush will be Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, and Colin Powell, the former secretary of state.

Wayne Slater, co-author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” said the speeches were part of an attempt to secure the former president’s future reputation.

He said: “This is part of the legacy tour. George Bush, who left office with a couple of unpopular wars and an economy going down the tubes, is going to be on the stage with winners, not losers.”

Israel’s “Exclusive Rights”

Rattling the Cage: Our exclusive right to self-defense

By LARRY DERFNER

Virtually all of Israel is now speaking in one voice against the Goldstone report, against any attempt to blame us over the war in Gaza. We’ve honed our message to a sharp point and, inspired by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s performance at the UN, we’re delivering it with just the right tone of outrage:

How dare anyone deny us the right to self-defense! How dare anyone deny us the right to fight back against terrorism!

Very nice. Puts everyone else on the defensive. The right to self-defense is up there with motherhood and apple pie – who’s going to come out against it, especially for us, for Israel, for the Jews, for the people of the Holocaust?

The right to self-defense – perfect.

But I’d like to ask: Do the Palestinians also have the right to self-defense?

We probably wouldn’t admit it out loud, but in our heads we would say – again, in one voice – “No!”

This is the Israeli notion of a fair deal: We’re entitled to do whatever the hell we want to the Palestinians because, by definition, whatever we do to them is self-defense. They, however, are not entitled to lift a finger against us because, by definition, whatever they do to us is terrorism.

That’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it was in Operation Cast Lead.

AND THERE are no limits on our right to self-defense. There is no such thing as “disproportionate.” We can blockade Gaza, we can answer Kassams with

F-16s and Apaches, we can take 100 eyes for an eye.

We can deliberately destroy thousands of Gazan homes, the Gazan parliament, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Interior, courthouses, the only Gazan flour plant, the main poultry farm, a sewage treatment plant, water wells and God knows what else.

Deliberately.

After all, we’re acting in self-defense. By definition.

And what right do the Palestinians have to defend themselves against this?

None.

Why? Because we’re better than them. Because we’re a democracy and they’re a bunch of Islamo-fascists. Because ours is a culture of life and theirs is a culture of death. Because they’re out to destroy us and all we are saying is give peace a chance.

One look at the ruins of Gaza ought to make that plain enough.

Here is our idea of the “laws of war”: When Israeli bulldozers rolled across the border into Gazan villages and flattened house after house so Hamas wouldn’t have them for cover after the IDF pulled out, that was self-defense. But if a Palestinian boy who’d lived in one of those houses threw a stone at one of the bulldozers, that was terrorism.

The Goldstones of the world call this hypocrisy, a double standard. How dare they! Around here, we call it moral clarity.

Israeli police storm Jerusalem holy site

FILE — The golden shrine of the Dome of the Rock mosque, located in the al-Aqsa mosque compound, or Temple Mount, can be seen as hundreds of Jewish worshippers, bottom, gather at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, Judaism holiest site, in this Monday Oct. 4, 2004, file photo. Israeli police forces raided Jerusalem’s famed Temple Mount on Sunday Oct. 25, 2009 after Palestinian demonstrators pelted them with stones, police said. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

By RAWHI RAZIM (AP) – 33 minutes ago

JERUSALEM — Israeli forces stormed Jerusalem’s holiest shrine Sunday, firing stun grenades to disperse hundreds of Palestinian protesters who were pelting them with stones.

Although there were no serious injuries, it was one of the most intense incidents of violence in recent unrest around the hilltop compound known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary. In the past, clashes at the site have erupted into deadly violence.

Muslim leaders had urged the crowd to gather at the site’s Al-Aqsa Mosque early Sunday in response to what they said was “Jewish conquest.” Israeli police said the protesters hurled a fire bomb and poured oil on the ground to make the forces slip.

A large wall of riot police, holding plexiglass shields, closed in on the crowd, sending many protesters — overwhelmingly young men — running into the mosque for cover. Forces didn’t enter the holy site, but protesters inside occasionally opened the shuttered doors to throw objects. At one point, protesters shot water and a fire extinguisher toward the door.

Three police officers were lightly wounded, and 15 protesters were arrested, including the Palestinian president’s adviser on Jerusalem affairs for alleged incitement, said spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

Palestinian medics accused Israel of preventing ambulances from reaching the area. Two protesters were seen being taken away with injuries, including an elderly man who was shot in the leg with a rubber bullet.

Hundreds of protesters remained holed up inside, and later Sunday, police said the crowd had gathered outside for a new round of clashes. Hundreds of police remained in the area, and emergency medical services were on high alert, in case of further violence, police said.

Around midday, small groups of youths were seen darting in and out of alleyways, throwing stones and bottles at police, who responded with more stun grenades.

Israel’s national police chief, Dudu Cohen, accused a small group of Muslim extremists of trying to foment violence.

“The police will act with a strong hand against anyone who disrupts order on the Temple Mount and against those incite to riot,” he said.

The disputing claims to the hilltop compound in Jerusalem’s Old City lie at the heart of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It is revered as the holiest site in Judaism, home to the biblical Temples.

It also is the third-holiest site in Islam, after the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina, and believed to be the place where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven. The Al-Aqsa Mosque and famous gold-covered Dome of the Rock lie inside.

The site has been under Israeli control since 1967, but it is administered by a Muslim religious body known as the Waqf. The compound is opened for several hours a day to allow tourists and Jews to visit, though they are not permitted to pray there.

Tensions have been high in recent weeks since local Muslim leaders accused Israel of digging under the compound and plotting to harm Muslim holy sites.

They have provided no evidence to support the claims, though Israel has carried out archaeological digs in nearby areas. Two weeks ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu angrily accused Muslim extremists of spreading baseless lies.

The Palestinians seek to make east Jerusalem the capital of a future independent state, while Netanyahu says he will never share control of the holy city.

Religious and nationalist sentiment connected with the site have made it a flashpoint for violence in the past. A visit in 2000 by Ariel Sharon, then an Israeli opposition leader, helped ignite deadly clashes that escalated into violence that engulfed Israel and the Palestinian territories for several years.

In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority condemned the Israeli operation. “Jerusalem is a red line that Israel should not cross,” said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, spokesman for President Mahmoud Abbas.

In the Gaza Strip, the ruling Hamas militant group called on Palestinians to rise up against Israel, for Arabs and Muslims worldwide to punish Israel. “The real battle begins again,” declared spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.

AP correspondents Michael Barajas and Dalia Nammari contributed to this report.

ISI Once Again Warning Tehreek Taliban Leaders of Incoming Predators

[One would think that the Taliban foot soldiers would grow tired of being sacrificed by their leaders in order to allow the show to go on.  We all know how many times in the past Baitullah was tipped-off, but he didn't warn anyone else, willingly sacrificing dozens of his own men and an equal number of innocent Pashtun countrymen.  The worst Predator slaughters have been at funerals, where Mehsud willfully created a situation where many people would be martyred against their will.  The same deception was pulled by Hakeemullah recently, showing that the game goes on, even after Mehsud was eliminated.  The Army and the militants are playing an evil game with the people's lives, all to enable the US to maintain another one-hundred thousand men or so next door on a permanent war-footing.]

US drone strike kills 24 in Bajaur

By Anwarullah Khan

KHAR: A US drone attack on a militant hideout in Damadola in Bajaur killed 24 people, three foreigners among them, on Saturday.

Officials said 12 people were wounded in the attack on an underground hideout in Chohetra, 14km north of regional headquarters Khar. ‘I heard two loud explosions when a meeting of the Taliban was in progress,’ a local resident Hazrat Gul said.

According to an official of the political administration, two relatives of the militant ‘commander’ in Bajaur, Maulvi Faqir Mohammad, were among the dead.

Sources said Maulvi Faqir had left the meeting only a few minutes before the attack.

Assistant Political Agent Mohammad Jamil said the pilotless plane fired at least two missiles at the hideout.

Abusing the Families of FATA to Play American Games

more about "Abusing the Families of FATA to Play…", posted with vodpod

Israeli Police Enter al-Aqsa (Temple Mount)

Israeli police enter Aqsa compound

Al-Aqsa mosque has been a flashpoint in tensions between Israeli police and Palestinians [AFP] Israeli police have entered al-Aqsa mosque compound, clashing with Muslim worshippers and arresting Palestinian protesters. Al Jazeera has learnt that the clashes erupted on Sunday after Israeli police tried to storm the compound in occupied Jerusalem’s Old City. The site is known to Jews as the Temple Mount and is revered by Muslims as al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), comprising al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. At least 10 people were injured and another 15 detained, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Jerusalem said. Micky Rosenfeld, the Israeli police spokesman, put the number of people held at 12, saying that the arrests took place after youths  threw stones and a petrol bomb at police on a routine patrol near the mosque. Palestinian officials said the Israeli police had closed off the compound to visitors, leaving hundreds of worshippers inside. Palestinian account Speaking to Al Jazeera, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein, the mufti of Jerusalem, said: “Israeli forces entered the compound from the Maghareba and Silsila gates. “The forces have cordoned off the compound, preventing all Muslims from entering the mosque. “The situation is extremely serious, and I expect it to escalate. “The Israeli forces have beaten the mosque’s guards and staff, as well as worshippers, including women. “I was personally prevented from entering the mosque. They are preventing us by force from reaching the mosque, where Sheikh Abdul Azeem Salhab, head of the endowments council, several endowments department staff and a number of worshippers are at present under siege.” “We are beieged in the al-Haram al-Sharif yard, while they are trapped inside the al-Aqsa mosque. “A large number of Israeli policemen and security officers are deployed inside al-Haram al-Sharif. They have detained most of the Palestinian worshippers who were inside the compound. “The Israeli side gave no new pretexts to justify the new raid, only their regular security claims.” Worshippers inside Shmuel Ben-Ruby, the Jerusalem police spokesman, admitted that security forces used stun grenades to disperse the demonstrators. He said the protesters also poured oil on the ground to make the police forces slip and hurled a fire bomb. Ben-Ruby said police did not enter mosque itself. Israel had closed access to Muslim males under the age of 50, but later lifted the restrictions. The tensions exploded into violence on September 27, when Palestinians hurled rocks at a group of visitors whom they suspected of being rightwing Jewish extremists. Police, who responded with stun grenades, said the group was made up of French tourists. The incident came in the midst of a month in which Jews mark three of their most important holidays. Suspicions were rife among Palestinians that Jewish worshippers would try to pray at the revered site during this period. Competing claims Israel captured the compound from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast War and it has since served as a symbol of the two sides’ competing claims to Jerusalem. Day-to-day administration of the site remains in Muslim hands. The site of al-Aqsa is the holiest place in Judaism and third holiest in Islam, and any perceived change in the status quo there has often led to outbreaks of deadly violence. In September 2000, the second Palestinian uprising, or intifada, erupted after Ariel Sharon, a rightwing politician who went on to become Israel’s prime minister, visited the site.

Rise of Punjabi Taliban

Kamal Siddiqi and Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Hindustan Times

The arrest this week of two ranking members of the “Punjab Taliban” has raised fears the Taliban are spreading their operations beyond the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and into the Pakistani heartland.

Officials say two Punjabi militants, Commander Iqbal and Gul Muhammad, helped plot the attack on Pakistan Army Headquarters as well as other recent suicide bombings in Lahore and Islamabad. Until recently, “Taliban” was a word associate with Pashtuns.

“Today the bulk of attacks in heartland Pakistan are carried out by Pakistanis from Punjab or Sindh, or by Pashtun fighters assisted by heartland Pakistanis,” says Rohan Gunaratne, author of Inside Al Qaeda. Punjabi militant groups, Notably the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba (LeT), were long encouraged by Islamabad.

“Punjab-based groups, especially the LeT, were initially the creatures of the Inter-Services Intelligence, and had a Kashmir focus,” says Teresita Schaffer of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The change began when President Pervez Musharraf outlawed two Punjabi militant groups —Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) — because of their attacks on Shias.

Many Jhangvi fighters then moved to the NWFP. “Jhangvi is now the eyes, ears and operational arm of Al Qaeda and the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan [based in Waziristan],” says Gunaratne. “It is hard to distinguish between the three.”

Islamabad has struggled to keep the third Punjabi militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammad, from joining the Taliban. “The Jaish are ambivalent when it comes to fighting the Pakistani state,” says Ajai Sahni of the Institute of Conflict Management.

Faithful Lashkar

So far the 50,000-strong LeT, the fourth and largest Punjabi militant group, has largely resisted the Taliban siren call.

“LeT and, to an increasingly diminishing extent, Jaish, have strong umbilical cords to the system,” says Sahni. It helps that LeT is Wahabi AND the other Punjabi groups embrace the Deobandi school. “Not one LeT member has been involved in a single terrorist attack inside Pakistan,” Gunaratne notes.

That’s a key reason Islamabad shies from an LeT crackdown. But how long can the LeT be firewalled from the Taliban?

There are already an estimated 5,000 to 9,000 South Punjabi youth fighting in Afghanistan and Waziristan.

Tariq Pervez, the chief of Pakistan’s new National Counter-Terrorism Authority, says jihad veterans in South Punjab provided foot soldiers and implemented terror plans conceived, funded by Al Qaeda. But officialdom differs on the degree of Punjabi radicalisation. Bahawalpur regional police officer, Mushtaq Sukhera, says reports about South Punjab “were nothing more than a figment of the Western press’s imagination.”

Seraiki Problem

Ayesha Siddiqa, a security analyst, says that while there is a new focus on South Punjab, the Punjabi Taliban phenomenon is not new. Gunaratne traces Punjabi Taliban fighters to 2002. “While in the past Punjabis were recruited from the NWFP, today they are being recruited in the mainland areas.”

Rising poverty levels in South Punjab, the Seraiki belt, have helped turn the area into a fertile breeding ground for militant outfits. The government has been surprisingly slow to recognise this trend, says Siddiqa. Even North Punjabis can now be found among the Taliban.

The total number of Punjab madrassas rose from 1,320 in 1988 to 3,153 in 2000, an rise of almost 140 per cent. Many are Saudi funded. One concern, says Farzana Shaikh, Pakistani expert at Chatham House, “is whether public opinion will support a tough campaign against these groups after having been told for years that they supported Pakistani security objectives vis a vis India.”

Many believe Talibanisation cannot take place in a region where Sufi Islam is strongly entrenched. South Punjab is dotted with Sufi shrines and for generations its people have practiced the Barelvi version of Islam and turned their backs on the Deoband school. But this is changing. The madrassas and the funding they have received have made the Deobandi school popular among lower income groups.

If the Taliban spread their tentacles across Punjab, said one Pakistani analyst. “This would change the battlefield completely.”

Gunaratne argues that when Musharraf curbed LeT infiltration into Kashmir, this eroded the military’s control of the group. “Al Qaeda has made inroads,” he says. “Hence the attack on the Jewish house in Mumbai. The LeT is presently idling and if it is not rehabilitated, more of its members will join the Taliban.”

Incoming German government to seek withdrawal of nuclear weapons

Berlin – Germany’s incoming coalition government will seek a withdrawal of US nuclear missiles deployed in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Saturday.

Merkel told a news conference that Germany would not go it alone, but would hold talks on the issue with its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Designated Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle underscored Germany’s goal of becoming ‘a country free of nuclear weapons.’

‘We want to see a withdrawal of the remaining nuclear missiles stationed in Germany,’ said Westerwelle, leader of the pro-business Free Democrats (FDP).

Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the FDP unveiled their new coalition contract on Saturday, paving the way for the formation of a centre-right government next week.

The US, which deployed nuclear weapons in various European countries in the 1950s, is estimated to have 20 atomic warheads at bases in Germany.

No official details are available, but some of the missiles are believed to be stationed at Buechel in the state of Rhineland- Palatinate.

In the Shadow of Leviathan: Americas’ Arising Fear-Based Society

Posted by LindaKimball On October – 23 – 2009

“Thought crime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.  You might dodge successfully for awhile…but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”  George Orwell, 1984

“The fact is we are witnessing an all-out drive to impose thought control that seeks to ban the ability—the right—to think or speak for one’s self.  Thinking is becoming a crime.”    (Globally Acceptable Truth and the Crime of Thinking, Tom DeWeese,  Address to the 10th Annual  Freedom 21 Conference, 10/16/09)

In an article entitled “Dems Undermine Free Speech in Hate Crimes Ploy,” the Washington Examiner exposes the insidious machinations of House statists in their determination to impose totalitarian hate crime laws upon the American people. Hate crime laws do much more than undermine free speech however, for in that what one says is the result of what first takes place in the mind,  hate crime laws are mind-control devices.
( http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2361178/posts)

Hate crime laws are not just alien to America’s traditional Christian-based worldview, but in violent opposition to it.  They are part of a program of psycho political terrorism utilized by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks after they seized control of Orthodox Christian Russia and put into practice long-term plans to abolish on a vast cultural scale every vestige of belief in the Biblical God, family, morality, private property, and other signs of “the capitalist petite Bourgeoisie.”  By way of various sadistically brutal forms of behavior modification, torture, psychotropic drug experimentation, re-education, and psychological terror tactics, Russians were terrorized into submission while Bolsheviks systematically stole their property, confiscated and perverted their children,  desecrated and blasphemed churches, crucified thousands of nuns and priests, and in general, committed monstrous crimes against humanity which took the lives of sixty-million men, women, and children. For example:

“About 200,000 clergy, many crucified, scalped and otherwise tortured, were killed during the approximately 60 years of communist rule in the former Soviet Union, a Russian commission reported this week. In addition, another 500,000 religious figures were persecuted and 40,000 churches destroyed in the period from 1922 to 1980, the report said. Half the country’s mosques and more than half the synagogues were also destroyed“Clergymen were crucified on churches’ holy gates, shot, scalped [and] strangled,”said Alexander Yakovlev, head of the Commission for the Rehabilitation of          the Victims of Political Repression. The commission prepared the report for Russian President Boris Yeltsin. “I was especially shocked by accounts of priests turned into columns of ice in winter,” Yakovlev said. “It was total cruelty.” (http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left.html)

Former red-diaper baby David Horowitz observes that it is,

“not for nothing that George Orwell had to invent terms like ‘double-think’ and ‘double-speak’ to describe the universe totalitarians created.”

Though publicly they describe themselves as scientific, forward-thinking, enlightened, and progressive, they are in reality, notes Horowitz,

“…religious fanatics who regard their opponents as sinners and miscreants and agents of civil darkness…when they engage an opponent it is rarely to examine and refute  his argument but rather to destroy the bearer of the argument and remove him from the  plan of battle.” (The Surreal World of the Progressive Left, David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine.com, 1/25/2008)

Over the course of the twentieth century, progressive religious fanatics—or in Dostoevsky’s words, devilish Gnostic irreligionists—murdered anywhere between 100,000,000-200,000,000  “sinners and miscreants and agents of civil darkness.”

Totalitarian Bolshevism can be understood as an umbrella under which shelters Marxist-socialism, Darwinian scientism, progressivism, positivist materialism, sex-positivism, rationalism, idealism, feminism, atheism, occultism, empiricism, relativism, and nihilism.  These cancerous ideological ‘isms’ emerged mainly out of Enlightenment France and Germany, spawning both Marxist-socialism and Hitler’s National Socialism and today, continue to spread and secrete yet more toxic cells:  heterosexism, normativism, sexism, and ageism, among others.

Whereas twentieth century’s Big Brother touted himself as positivist, materialist, atheist, and  ‘red,’  today’s Big Brother is decidedly ‘green,’ says Steve Milloy in his book, “Green Hell.”  Yesterdays’  ‘isms’  have reshaped themselves into yet another apocalyptic, messianic, utopian- globalism, one that is blatantly spiritual and occult, pantheistic, politically correct, and in exclusive globalist salons, brazenly Luciferian.

“Without a doubt, President Obama is a true believer in the green cause.  Viewing our current living standards as excessive and immoral, he’s determined to downsize our lifestyles—for the good of the planet…If the greens succeed, we will see their vision for our future implemented with staggering speed.   By the time you finish this book you may well be appalled by that vision, but you may also find yourself in awe of the sheer totality of the green’s agenda and their single-minded determination to achieve it.“  (Green Hell, Steve Milloy, pp. 6-7)

As Fyodor Dostoevsky astutely observed, Progressive religious fanaticism is at bottom, the creature in rebellion against the Creator, His creation, immutable truths, and moral absolutes. Hence it is rebellion against the very idea of normal, says David Horowitz:

“the enemy is no longer a ruling class, a hegemonic race or even a dominant gender. Instead it is the sexual order of nature itself. Oppression lies in the very idea of the “normal,” the order that divides humanity into two sexes. Instead of a classless society as the redemptive future, queer theorists envisage a gender free world.” (quote from “Are Evangelical Churches Drifting Left?” Barbara Sowell, http://faultlineusa.blogspot.com/)

In sum, it is little ‘g’ godmen, their pride swollen to satanic proportions, usurping the throne of the Creator in order to correct His ‘mistakes.’

From Karl Marx, who declared that he would “walk triumphantly like a god” through the ruins of the old Christian-based order to today’s ‘elite’ insider transnational Progressive green-spiritual globalists, all have or are proclaiming their godhood, like Barbara Marx Hubbard for example:

“We are immortal…We can create new life forms and new worlds. We are gods!” a revelation channeled from her spirit guide ‘Christ’ to Barbara Marx Hubbard, influential transnational green Progressive, one of the directors of the World Future Society along with Robert McNamara and scholars from Georgetown University, George Washington University, and the University of Maryland.  (False Dawn, Lee Penn, pp. 316, 326)

Fueled by satanic pride, Bakunin—one of Karl Marx’s partners in the First International—described the emancipation of man and destruction of the old order in these words:

“The Evil One is the satanic revolt against divine authority, revolt in which we see the fecund germ of all human emancipations, the revolution. Socialists recognize each other by the words, “In the name of the one to whom a great wrong has been done.” Satan (is) the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds (he) emancipates (and) stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty…in urging (man) to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge. In this revolution we will have to awaken the Devil in the people, to stir up the basest passions. Our mission is to destroy, not to edify. The passion of destruction is a creative passion.”

Considered by many to be the 19th century’s greatest apocalyptic prophet, Fyodor Dostoevsky defined the conjoined ‘isms’ and their ultimate program of the “destruction of everything” as the politics of apocalypse—in other words, the politics of catastrophic death and destruction. This is made clear by Karl Marx in his poem, Human Pride:

“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet/ Full in the face of the world/ And see the collapse of this pygmy giant/ Whose fall will not stifle my ardour/ Then will I wander godlike and             victorious/ Through the ruins of the world/ And, giving my words an active voice/ I will feel equal to the Creator.”

In another piece Marx made his demonically-fueled hatred of the world and his death-wishing toward its’ people even more clear:

“A silent, unavoidable revolution is taking place in society, a revolution that cares as little about the human lives it destroys as an earthquake cares about the houses it ravages. Classes and races that are too weak to dominate the new conditions of existence will be defeated.” (Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand, p. 42)

During his commencement address at Harvard in the 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn raised the alarm when  he warned that America was already tilting towards evil. Americans—specifically the ruling class and intelligentsia— have forgotten God said Solzhenitsyn, and embraced instead, scientistic-socialism….the politics of destruction.   America is on the same highway to hell taken previously by the Russians, warned Solzhenitsyn.

Also raising the alarm is Natan Sharansky, a dissident in the former Marxist-socialist Soviet Union. Sharansky describes the Soviet Union as a tyranny where,

“there were no dissidents (because) they were simply killed immediately.” Under the terrorist-tactics of hate crime laws, speech codes, and other mind-control tactics, everyone became double thinkers. To outside observers notes Sharansky, double thinkers appear as true believers: “everybody says the same thing, everybody votes the same way, everybody speaks with passion.” But it is an illusion caused by fear of speaking the truth. These people, he noted, “live with self-censorship throughout their lives. Since the regime      demands loyalty right from childhood, many don’t even notice. They just automatically control how they express themselves.” But when a “fear society disappears or becomes      weak, people suddenly start saying what they feel,” Sharansky commented, and “It’s such a big relief.”

To determine if a society is fear-based, Sharansky applies what he defines as the “town square test.” In this test, if you,

“can go to the center of town and publicly express your views without being punished, you have a free society” even though that society may not be just. However, if you are “punished for your views you live in a fear society,”said Sharansky. “In such societies there are always three types of population: True believers, who accept the ideology…dissidents, who take risks to speak publicly; and double thinkers, who have doubts or disagreements about the official ideology but are afraid to express them publicly.” In conclusion, Sharansky comments that the level “of dissidence is always a function of how tough the regime is.” (The Power of Freedom, published in The      American Enterprise, Apr/May 2005, pp. 38-39)

Measured by Sharanskys’ town-square test we can see that America is quickly descending into a fear-based society. As her freedom-producing Christian-based worldview fades while simultaneously replaced by  green-progressive totalitarianism, the three types of population described by Sharansky come into focus.  In general, Progressive Liberals are the true believers. Rabid zealots, brazen liars, rebels against all authority, they freely destroy, transgress, scoff, demean, blaspheme, demonize, and otherwise psychologically terrorize the large body of fearful double thinkers.

More than fifty years ago, Conservative poet and journalist Anthony Harrigan foresaw the rise of this generations’ destructive true believers.  Observing that a ‘process of decay’ was being fostered by a modernist orthodoxy fueled by immorality, Harrigan presciently noted that:

“Modernists are determined to force acceptance of pornography as medical science, filth as artistic realism, and abnormality as a mere difference of opinion…Though the life of the country is basically decent, Americans are in the hands of a cultural ruling class, having led to destruction the humane elements in our civilization, is conducting us to ruin.”  For what cause?  To raise up a revolutionary army of “liberal-bred” barbarians “motivated by a destructive impulse” and unchecked by “traditional values and   restraints.”  (The Conservative Intellectual Movement of America, George H. Nash, p. 40)

With the ‘cultural ruling class’ seen as The Ministry of Truth, Orwell describes the diabolical ‘process of decay’ fostered by them:

“There was a whole chain of…departments dealing with proletarian literature….Here was produced rubbishy newspapers, containing almost nothing except sport, crime, astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, and films oozing with sex.  The rubbishy entertainment and spurious news…was referred to as prolefeed.” (1984)

Protecting and fomenting the destruction of America is a vast matrix of interconnected front groups, activist organizations, and phony civil rights defenders such as the ACLU, the most infamous terroristic enforcer of politically correct ‘true belief.’  (See matrix here: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/)

All around the outside edges are the dissidents, for example, the Conservative blog-o-sphere, Tea Partiers, Minutemen, political leaders like Jim DeMint and Randy Forbes, and a variety of Conservative organizations and civil rights defenders such as the Alliance Defense Fund.

Supremely immoral, reeking of perversity, a  double-speaking transnational green-progressive  leviathan is moving with crushing force across our nation, fostering obscenity and blasphemy, instilling fear and confusion into the hearts of Americans and stifling individual liberty while it perverts Americas’ youth, imposes mind-control and relentlessly destroys the spiritual foundations of America’s traditional Christian-based order.  Its’ devilish tactics come into focus in the following examples:

1. Cultural Marxism: the politics of rebellion, perversity, and nihilism fueled by satanic pride.

2. Multiculturalism: the insidious destruction of America’s traditional culture by way of elevating all other cultures in the name of politically correct tolerance.

3. Political correctness, speech codes, and hate crime laws: a psychic-cage for the   soul/mind of traditional-values Americans.

4. ‘Gay rights/’gay’ marriage: rebellion against the idea of normal.

5. Sex education: called ’sex pol’ by Marxist-socialists, it’s purpose is the subversion and perversion of our youth, the awakening of the Devil, as Bakunin said. (Read: The Gay-Straight Alliance and the Quiet Revolution, http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/Articles/The%20Gay%20Straight%20Alliance%20and%20the.html)

6. Social justice: the hammering down of everything good, everything excellent, everything normal, everything true into the perversely foul mud of demonic nothingness.

7. Critical theory: the mindless vomiting out of the acid of destructive criticism upon everything good, true, excellent, normal, and traditional.

8. Redistributive Justice: the evisceration of our standard of living and individual liberties in order to ’save the planet’—in other words, death and  slavery on behalf of Gaia.

9. Sustainability: Extreme population control and theft of private property to achieve the ‘new’ communism–communitarianism.

10. Religious Pluralism: the erasure of America’s founding Christian-based worldview by way of elevating Wicca, animism, Islam, New Age occult spirituality, Buddhism,   shamanism, and atheism in the name of politically correct tolerance and diversity.

Death of Freedom

In an article entitled, “American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper,” author Stanislav Mishin notes that, “on and off for the past century,” Americans have been stealthily prepared to accept totalitarianism, and with the election of Barack Obama,

“It must be said, that like the   breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breath taking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple…”

“The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia,” notes Mishin, “and a bloody test it was.”

Who financed the bloody test?  “Wall Street,” says Mishin.

In his book “The Naked Capitalist,” W. Cleon Skousen exposes the unholy alliance of bankers and capitalists collectively defined as “Wall Street” by Mishin.  Skousen verifies his findings through the writings of Dr. Carroll Quigley, both a professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University and mentor to Bill Clinton. In his opus, “Tragedy and Hope,” Quigley deliberately reveals one of the worlds’ best kept secrets: the existence of a gigantic leviathan of political and economic power poised to seize control of the planet.

The gargantuan power complex says Quigley, has been–right from the start—controlling Marxist-Communist-Socialist groups,

“…the power that…Left-wingers exercised was never their own power or communist power but…the power of the international financial coterie.”  (p. 954, Tragedy and Hope)

Why did Quigley expose the existence of the global financial coterie?  Because he says, it is now too late for the little people to turn the tide.  He urges them to not fight the noose which is already around their necks, for they will only hang themselves.

“On the other hand, those who go along with the immense pressure which is beginning to   be felt by all humanity will eventually find themselves in a man-made millennium of peace and prosperity.”  (The Naked Capitalist, Skousen, pp. 4-6)  See funders here: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/guideDesc.asp?type=funder

‘Elite’ transnational progressive Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN and former Chancellor of the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica speaks of the fate that will befall the politically incorrect:

“…all those who hold contrary beliefs” to politically correct thought favored for the “next   phase of evolution” will “disappear.“  A hellish fate awaits all who resist political and spiritual globalization, “..those who criticize the UN are anti-evolutionary, blind, self-serving people.  Their souls will be parked in a special corral of the universe for having been retarding forces, true aberrations in the evolution and ascent of humanity.”  (False     Dawn, Lee Penn, p. 133)

In other words, the ‘chosen ones’ are evolving into gods and hell awaits all ‘selfish‘ ones who stand in the way!   ”….and you will be like God…” (Genesis 31-7)

The lessons learned from the Russian experiment says Mishin,

“were taken and used properly to prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.”

Among the lessons applied by The Ministry of Truth to Americans,

“First the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education…”  then, said Mishin, “their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of (them) were for the most part little more than Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more than happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the ‘winning’ side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another.”

In conclusion Mishin writes,

“The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is.  The world will only snicker.”  (American Capitalism Gone with a Whimper, Stanislav Mishin, Pravda.Ru)

Warnings from the Wise and the Valiant….

“… when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.” –Samuel Adams, Founding Father
“It is when a people forget God that tyrants forge their chains.” – Patrick Henry, Founding Father

“Whenever the pillars of Christianity shall be overthrown, our present republican forms of government, and all the blessings which flow from them, must fall with them.”  – Samuel F.B. Morse, the son of educator Jedediah Morse, known as “Father of American Geography.”

“…the events of the Russian Revolution can only be understood now, at the end of the century…What emerges here is a process of universal significance.  And if I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century…I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.”  (Alexander Solzhenitsyn to Amerika: Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag, from Russia with Love, Joe Clarke, Jul. 8, 2009)

…the Self-Sacrificially Courageous

“Death is more eligible than slavery.  A free-born people are not required by the religion    of Jesus Christ to submit to tyranny, but may make use of such power as God has given them to recover and support their liberties…”  The men of Marlborough, Massachusetts who took part in the Boston Tea Party

….and regarding the imposition of hate crime laws, the Prophetic

“If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”  —George Washington

copyright Linda Kimball 2009

Linda Kimball writes on culture, politics, and worldview

Additional Resources

Founders quotes: http://www.earstohear.net/Separation/warnings.html

Marx and Satan, Richard Wurmbrand

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“Saudi-Backed, Anti-Iranian” Means CIA and Mossad

[The White House Feigns ignorance of some CIA programs, in order to maintain its deniability. There has never been even one anti-Iranian operation anywhere that was not controlled or monitored by the CIA.  Even if it was true that the Jundullah outfit that attacked in Iran was really not a Pakistani group, even though it was based in S. Waziristan, the CIA knew of their actions and aims beforehand and chose to let them happen, just the way they "let 911 happen."  Every Sunni terrorist outfit, especially all those described as being "al Qaida related" are CIA sponsored, using Saudi money, under ISI direction, facilitated by the Mossad.]

Saudi-Iranian hostility hits boiling point

By M K Bhadrakumar

Conventional wisdom suggests that the terrorist strike by Jundallah in southeastern Iran on Sunday might have had the backing of the United States or Britain. But Jundallah today holds “fatal” attraction for a number of foreign powers that are interested in disorienting Iran’s policies.

Both Washington and London scrambled with unusual speed to not only disclaim any hand in the strike that killed seven senior commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps as well as 42 other people, but to condemn it in strong terms.

On Sunday, a US State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, was instructed to issue a categorical US denial. “We condemn this act of terrorism and mourn the loss of innocent lives. Reports of alleged US involvement are completely false,” he said.

In London, a spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said, “We reject in the strongest terms any assertion that this attack has anything to do with Britain.” She said Britain condemned the incident in restive Sistan-Balochistan province in the southwest as a terrorist attack and that “terrorism is abhorrent wherever it occurs. Our sympathies go to those who have been killed or injured in the strike and their families”.

The fact is that the attack was staged with careful timing. For one thing, the next major step in the diplomatic process involving technical-level discussions was to take place in Vienna on Monday to work out the details of a plan to ship a majority of Iran’s stockpile of lightly enriched uranium out of the country to be enriched in Russia to a higher grade.

Torpedoing nuclear talks?
Both the US and Iran have reasons to seek progress at the talks in Vienna. US President Barack Obama has a personal stake in the outcome.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed ElBaradei, said on Monday the talks on Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium had got “off to a good start”. Delegates from Iran, the US, Russia and France talked for two-and-a-half hours and agreed to meet again on Tuesday morning. “Most technical issues have been discussed,” ElBaradei said.

According to details revealed by Time magazine, quoting US administration officials, “Obama personally weighed in three times during secret, multiparty negotiations with the Iranians over the last four months – in what has become not just a test of Iran’s nuclear intentions but also a test of Obama’s effort to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions.” Tehran is suspected by many of developing a nuclear weapons program, a charge it denies.

The backroom talks began as early as June when Obama astutely seized the opening provided by Iran’s acute need of specially manufactured plates of enriched uranium to produce isotopes for caner treatment, X-rays and insecticides to offer to Tehran via the director general of the IAEA hat the US could arrange for the manufacture of the specialized plates by using Iran’s low-enriched uranium stashes produced in its Natanz plant.

Obama personally got Moscow and Paris to agree to the idea of Russia accepting the low-enriched uranium from Iran and to enrich it to the level needed to power Iran’s research reactor so that in a follow-up step, France could turn it into the specialized plates that are used to produce isotopes.

As Time put it, “What followed was a careful set of high-level negotiations between Iran, the IAEA, Russia, France and the US to iron out the details.” At the meeting at Geneva on October 1 between Iran and the key Western powers, Russia and China, “US negotiator, William Burns, had a one-on-one conversation with his Iranian counterpart to confirm the amount of uranium involved in the deal, and they agreed to the October 19 meeting to determine the details of the transfer.”

Clearly, Obama must be out of his mind to have his intelligence agencies mount a terrorist attack on Iran which would torpedo his own gameplan to address the Iran nuclear file at the present sensitive juncture.

Not only that, General Stanley A McChrystal and Richard Holbrooke, the two key US officials involved with Afghanistan, have gone out of their way in recent weeks to stress the importance of Iran’s cooperation. Most certainly, a covert operation of the magnitude mounted against Iran on Sunday by US special forces based in Afghanistan ran the high risk of provoking Tehran to retaliate.

McChrystal, the top US general in Afghanistan, from all accounts has a highly logical mind and intellect. He would know what he could do without earning Iran’s wrath. Despite Tehran’s serious doubts about the efficacy of the US’s manipulation of the Afghan presidential election result, it has sat on the fence and watched the goings-on. If Tehran wanted to make trouble for the US in Afghanistan, it could have easily done something else.

All in all, therefore, Tehran has been extremely circumspect about jumping to conclusions regarding the strike on Sunday. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei avoided leveling any direct charges against Washington. He confined himself to saying, “The enemies should know that such animosities … cannot stain the unity of religions and tribes. Those who violate the lives and security of the people will be punished for their treacherous deeds.”

Similar restraint is also noticeable in the statements by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s judiciary chief, Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani, and Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar. Curiously, Larijani, a key official dealing with national security, also suggested that the motive behind the terrorist attack was to disrupt Shi’ite-Sunni ties. “Such cowardly acts will not have any effect on the trend of solidarity between the Shi’ites and Sunnis,” he said.

This brings us to Saudi Arabia, whose relations with Iran are passing through a period of mutual antipathy bordering on hostility. Tehran has alleged that Iranian hajj pilgrims are being maltreated by Saudi authorities and that Saudi intelligence is accountable for the mysterious disappearance of an Iranian nuclear scientist who was on pilgrimage to Mecca recently.

Saudi newspapers with links to the establishment have carried in recent months extremely vituperative attacks against the regime in Tehran, often at a personal level directed against the Iranian leadership. They have almost gone into mourning now that the turmoil on Tehran’s streets following the disputed presidential election has receded. Ahmadinejad has alleged that his opposition kept up links with Riyadh in trying to bring about “regime change” in Tehran.

Saudi Arabia has two great worries over Iran. First, that Obama is pressing ahead with the normalization process with Tehran – a “thaw” was visible at the Geneva talks on October 1- and Tehran has begun responding to US overtures. The worst Saudi nightmare is coming true.

King Abdullah, who had refused to visit Damascus, landed there two weeks ago on a three-day visit in a desperate attempt to bring Syria into the Arab fold and to “isolate” Iran. Riyadh is worried that Iran’s status as a regional power will get a massive boost if the normalization process with the US advances, and that can only be at the cost of Saudi Arabia’s pre-eminence in the region. Riyadh helplessly watches a beeline of other Persian Gulf states reaching out to Tehran for accommodation.

In other words, Riyadh has a vested interest, which is no less than Israel’s, to disrupt the US-Iran nuclear talks. Ironically, alongside the reports on the terrorist strike on Sunday, Iranian news agencies were quoting “sources privy to the Vienna talks” that the Obama administration was “considering official acknowledgement and endorsement of uranium enrichment in Iran”. These “informed sources close to the talks in Vienna” said the US had “in a series of secret meetings informed its European partners of Washington’s decision on acceptance of uranium enrichment in Iran”.

Riyadh humbled in Yemen
Saudi Arabia’s second concern is that as the civil war in Yemen has entered a crucial phase, Sana’a has sought Iranian mediation. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki has announced plans to visit Yemen. The supreme leader’s foreign policy advisor, Ali Akbar Velayati, has already been there.

Yemeni government forces and Houthi Shi’ites have been engaged in a war in the northern parts of the country after Yemeni government armed forces unleashed Operation Scorched Earth on August 11. Sana’a claims the Houthi fighters are trying to restore the Zaidid imamate (office of an imam) system, which was overthrown in a 1962 coup. But the Houthi Shi’ites who make up around 40% of the population say they are defending their minority rights.

Observers view this as a Saudi-Iranian proxy war. The large-scale Saudi assistance to the Sunni-dominated Sana’a government has not helped the latter to crush the Houthi fighters and Sana’a is now compelled to seek Tehran’s good offices. It is a huge setback to Saudi prestige and the entire region is watching.

Iran’s stature vastly enhances as it steps in as the peacemaker in the strategically vital country. A recent Iranian statement said:

The Islamic Republic of Iran has invariably stressed the importance of Yemen’s territorial integrity and independence, sovereignty and the independence, sovereignty and national unity of the country. Iran, alongside the Republic of Yemen, is exerting efforts within the context of peace, security and stability. We believe that increasing tension and debates that lead to bloodshed do not serve peace, stability or national unity in Yemen. We hope to see national unity, security and stability in the republic of Yemen, through measures and the wisdom of the leadership and government of Yemen.

Thus, Tehran makes a point in claiming that Jundallah has links with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the two entities with which Saudi intelligence has historically had dalliance of one kind or anther – more so the Taliban. Significantly, the Jundallah leadership has been interviewed by al-Arabiya television. In a December interview, the Jundallah leader, Abd el Malik Regi, threatened attacks on Tehran if the Iranian government didn’t grant the country’s Sunnis “full rights”.

Pro-Saudi media organizations and the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center have consistently white-washed Jundallah as a purely “homegrown” Iranian group which does not enjoy any outside help whatsoever.

What merits attention is that the Jundallah’s core cause is the championing of the rights of Iran’s Sunni minority ever since the organization launched its violent campaign in 2005. Evidently, like any terrorist organization, Jundallah also has evolved through shifting alliances in its search for external patrons.

An ABC News report in April 2007 alleged secret US (and Pakistani) encouragement to Jundallah. But it also said, “US officials say the US relationship with Jundallah is arranged so that the US provides no funding to the group, which would require an official presidential order [from Obama as of today].” The tribal sources told the ABC that money from foreign sources were being funneled to the Jundallah leadership through “Gulf states”.

Curiously, a raid mounted on a safe house by Pakistani security forces in January 2008, while searching for a kidnapped Iranian diplomat in Peshawar, stumbled on cadres of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni fundamentalist outfit that is notorious for its brutal attacks on the Shi’ite community in Pakistan. The Saudi patronage of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is a well-known fact.

There is reason to believe, on careful analysis, Saudi-Iranian hostility has spilt over into Iran’s eastern Sistan-Balochistan province.

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.

The Phony Radicalism of Michael Moore

By Sheldon Richman

With phony radicals like Michael Moore around, the ruling elite has nothing to worry about.

The filmmaker likes to pose as a radical critic of the status quo, but he isn’t. All the evidence you need is in his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story. Sure, he rails against home foreclosures, bank bailouts, low wages, other real and imagined problems, but his solution would not disturb the sleep of any big banker, corporate bigwig, or political big shot.

The tipoff comes right at the beginning of the movie. He paints an idyllic picture of life in America in the 1950s. His father worked for a big auto company, through which the family got free medical and dental care. All was well. He realizes that a major reason things were so good was that the U.S. military had destroyed Japan’s and Germany’s competitive industrial bases in World War II. But the dominance was great while it lasted. It was a time when an alliance of big government, big business, and big labor ruled the roost. The military-industrial complex was thriving.

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That seems fine with Moore, which puts him in the camp of the corporatists of Franklin Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, who thought free markets and competition among independent firms were passé. The new world required big monolithic entities that sat down together and worked things out nicely. The spirit of Mussolini hovered over all of it.

Of course, Moore blasts Wall Street because it got all that taxpayer bailout money and is not being held accountable for it. That is worth getting mad about. But how would he feel if the money had been given with lots of conditions and regulations? He might have liked that.

He certainly doesn’t mind that the government had the taxpayers’ money to give away in the first place. He never once suggests that the people should keep their own money because the political elite has no right to it. He also never indicts the Federal Reserve for its legal counterfeiting. That would be the true radical position. Moore sides with the politicians. He even complains that the top income-tax rate was lowered from 90 percent some years ago! Conveniently, he gets the history wrong. He says Republican Ronald Reagan cut the 90 percent rate, but it was really Democrat Lyndon Johnson who did it, following through on John Kennedy’s proposal. (Reagan presided over a cut from 70 to 50 and then to 28 percent.) At any rate, he is perfectly comfortable with government’s taking 90 percent of people’s earnings. He seems indifferent about whether the money is made through honest trade or political privilege.

Favoring a high top rate may not win him favors from some in the establishment, but for generations there has been a wing of that establishment that understood that high marginal rates were the price of the lucrative corporate state. So Moore may not be the pariah among the ruling elite that he makes himself out to be.

Moore’s movie contains much else to make us doubt his radical bona fides. He blusters about Robert Rubin, Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, and their relationship to the current financial problems. Rubin, a Wall Street hotshot, and Summers were Treasury secretaries under President Bill Clinton. Geithner ran the New York Federal Reserve Bank from late 2003 to 2009, overseeing the Wall Street bailouts. In Moore’s eyes, they are the rogues who, along with former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, gave us the meltdown of 2008.

So far so good. But when he gets to the election of Barack Obama in November 2008 he declares, “This is not what Wall Street wanted.” Yeah? Then why are Moore’s bêtes noires Rubin and Summers close Obama economic advisors, and why is Geithner secretary of the Treasury?

A true radical would not have given Obama a pass. Moore says he’s for socialism, but all he means by that is that workers have some say in their companies. Nothing very radical about that.

If Moore were truly a radical critic of capitalism as he conceives it, he’d be for its true opposite: the radical separation of business and State — that is, the free market.

Sheldon Richman is policy advisor to The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) and editor of The Freeman magazine.

15 hurt in Peshawar car bomb blast

PESHAWAR: Fifteen people sustained injuries in a remote control car bomb blast happened in Peshawar’s posh locality of Hyatabad.

Sources said the explosion occurred in a car parked outside a restaurant in Phase 2 of Hyatabad. Gunshots were also heard after the blast. Police officials and rescue workers reached at the blast site and shifted wounded persons to Hyatabad Medical Complex. Police have cordoned off the area. Law enforcement agencies have arrested a suspected man and shifted him at undisclosed location for interrogations.

The sources of Bomb Disposal Squad said the blast carried out through remote control device in which 40 kilograms of explosive was used.

Four Pakistanis slain in Iran Guard attack: report

TEHRAN: Four Pakistani citizens were among those slain in the attack on Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards in Sistan-Baluchestan province, a local news agency reported on Friday.

On Sunday, a suicide bomber blew himself up in Pisheen town during a meeting of Guards and local tribesmen, slaughtering more than 40 people, including 15 members of the Guards.

The bomber struck in front of a local gymnasium where a handicraft exhibition was taking place in Pisheen, near the Pakistani border in the south-eastern province.

“Four Pakistani citizens, who were near the handicraft exhibition, also died in the incident,” Jalal Sayyah, deputy governor of Sistan-Baluchestan said.

He said investigations revealed that the bomber wanted to go to the meeting, “but fearing he would be searched… he blew himself up inside the exhibition.”

The bomber had crossed into Iran from Pakistan a day before the attack Sayyah said.

“He was trained four months ago in one of (Abdolmalek) Rigi’s bases in Pakistan,” he added, referring to the leader of the rebel Jundallah (Soldiers of God) group which claimed the bombing.

Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar was in Pakistan on Friday to discuss ways of cracking down on Jundallah.

“We have evidence that shows Rigi easily crosses (the border) and conducts his activities,” Mohammad Najjar told Iran state television after landing in Islamabad, where he was received by Pakistani counterpart Rahman Malik.

Tehran says that Jundallah chief Rigi is based in Pakistan and has asked Islamabad to hand him over.

“We have come to ask our friends… to deliver Rigi to us to ease this tension in the Islamic republic and it’s of course not good for the relations of the two countries,” the Iranian minister said.

Top Iranian officials, including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have alleged that Pakistani intelligence service, along with those of Britain and the United States, had a role in the recent bombing.

The Guardian: ISI supports Sipah-e-Sahaba and other sectarian and extremist organizations in Pakistan

After the Lahore attack on cricket, west’s nuclear ally fears implosion

Militant assault on cricket tourists puts sharp focus on fragile democracy at risk of disintegration and international isolation

Saeed Shah in Lahore

The Guardian, Thursday 5 March 2009

Whole provinces beyond the writ of the state, Islamist insurgents uniting for a broader fight, terror attacks conceived, plotted and exported: Pakistan was in serious danger of implosion before the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team on Tuesday brought the parlous security situation in the country to a wider international audience.

But security is not the only problem of a country which the United States now considers a greater threat than neighbouring Afghanistan. With the economy teetering, political tumult building and social conditions ripe for extremists, nuclear-armed Pakistan faces six critical threats to the rule of law and governance of the state.

Security

The current violence started in summer 2007, when security forces routed armed militants at the Red Mosque in Islamabad. That event turned militant groups which were focused on India or Afghanistan inwards, to Pakistan itself. A campaign of suicide bombings started, in which Taliban-style extremists in the north-west, near the Afghan border, joined forces with jihadist groups based in Punjab, Pakistan’s heartland. The fatal attack on Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and the strike against Islamabad’s Marriott hotel demonstrated that insurgents were aiming high and frequently being successful.

Large parts of Pakistan have been snatched from government control. Most of the tribal area, the semi-autonomous sliver of land that runs along the Afghan border, is now firmly in the control of the Pakistani Taliban, who play host to al-Qaida commanders. Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may be hiding in the tribal territory. This week, the Guardian learned that three rival Pakistani Taliban groups had formed a united front to wage war in Afghanistan, promising further instability there.

Much of the North-West Frontier province is menaced by marauding extremists, with citizens having to form village militias to defend themselves. The vast Swat valley has been taken over by a band of Taliban guerrillas. In an attempt to bring some peace to Swat, the government agreed last month to impose Islamic law in the area. In Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest but most sparsely populated province, the threat from Afghan Taliban elements is compounded by a long-running Baluch nationalist rebellion. Punjab, by far the most populous and richest province, is also threatened by extremists in its midst. There are many jihadist groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, the outfit blamed for the Mumbai attack in November.

Intelligence services

The aims of Pakistan’s premier spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), are the big question: does it still support at least some of the extremist groups?

The ISI, once heavily backed by Washington, masterminded the mujahideen resistance in Afghanistan to the Soviet invasion in the 1980s, training and financing the insurgents. The ISI then decided to use the same tactics against India, founding a series of militant groups that started a violent resistance to Indian rule in the disputed region of Kashmir. The agency also nurtured a number of sectarian outfits, such as Sipah-e-Sahaba.

Then, in the mid-1990s, the ISI helped create a new Islamic movement in Afghanistan, the Taliban, which rapidly managed to take over the country. It also spawned a copycat Pakistani Taliban movement.

The problem is that many of these militant groups, which were used to further Pakistan’s foreign policy and domestic aims, have slipped out of the ISI’s control. The groups have turned on the state itself, under the influence of al-Qaida.

The economy

The rule of President Pervez Musharraf, from 1999 to 2008, was characterised by an economic boom. But, just as elections were held in February 2008, that boom was turning to bust.

Inflation is now running at some 25%, while the currency and the stockmarket have been pummelled over the last year. Much of Pakistan’s textile industry, which had accounted for about half of its exports, is closed as a result of chronic power shortages and lack of competitiveness.

Late last year, Pakistan was forced to go on its knees to the IMF for an emergency $7.6bn bail-out, as it was threatened by imminent bankruptcy. The economic crisis means that unemployment and poverty are on the increase, the very conditions that breed extremism.

The economy and poor governance have meant a failure to provide the country with an education and health system that serves most of the population. As a result, many poor people send their children to free madrasa schools, where the education is almost exclusively religious, sometimes preaching a radical version of Islam. Millions of children have few workplace skills and knowledge only of Islam.

Politics

Pakistan’s politics has always been tumultuous, with the country under military rule for most of its 61 years of existence. The last period of army rule ended in 2008, but the new democratic dispensation has floundered.

In particular, the two main political parties, the Pakistan Peoples party, which runs the federal government, and the party of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, are in a state of war. Last week, Islamabad dismissed the provincial government in the all-important Punjab province, which had been run by Sharif’s party.

Sharif and a pressure group of lawyers calling for judicial independence are now going to take their opposition on to the streets. With poor governance in Islamabad and a lack of fundamental political consensus on how the country should be run, there are already rumours that the army is about to step back in.

The military

Army chief Ashfaq Kayani has repeatedly indicated that he does not want to see the army step back into the political fray, but with a government struggling to cope with the security situation, many predict that he will eventually intervene.

The army is pervasive in Pakistan, dominating the economy: there are dozens of military businesses, it is prominent in land ownership, and, of course, it is the most important political institution. When foreign leaders want to deal seriously with Pakistan, they talk to the army chief.

The army is in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, making the unity and integrity of the military an international concern. The ISI also comes under the army. Politicians and ordinary Pakistanis live in fear of the military.

International allies

Since 9/11, Pakistan has been courted by the west, which suddenly realised that the country held the key to international security. Relations with India steadied somewhat after a critical stand-off in 2002. But the Mumbai attacks have drawn the two neighbours back into confrontation.

China too watches with concern at the apparent disintegration of its neighbour and close ally.

Pakistan’s western backers are impatient with its failure to deal with the militant safe havens along the Afghan border. Britain is concerned at Pakistani involvement in its own terror problems: Gordon Brown said recently that three-quarters of known British terror plots had links to Pakistan. American efforts to take matters into its own hand with attacks on Pakistani territory have frayed relations further.

But the west cannot turn on a country whose co-operation is needed for security. The fear is that isolation could push Pakistan into collapse.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/05/sri-lanka-cricket-team-attack

British HC clarifies Brown’s statement about Pakhtuns

[SEE: PASHTUNS ARE TERRORISTS SAYS GORDON BROWN]

British HC clarifies Brown’s statement about Pakhtuns

PESHAWAR: Britain has explained its stance over NWFP assembly that British PM has not labeled Pakhtuns as “terrorists” in his statement.

A letter from British high commissioner has been sent to speaker NWFP assembly Karamat Chagharmatti, which contains written clarification that British PM Gordon Brown has not used the word “terrorist” against Pakhtuns.

A clarification statement said that Pakistan and Britain are allies in war on terror. And that Britain has helped Malakand affectees through Friends of Pakistan forum.

The letter also highlighted that a large number of Pakhtuns are peacefully living in British society.

In its previous session, NWFP assembly had passed a resolution against British PM’s statement in which Gordon Brown declared Pakhtuns as “terrorists”.

America’s Phoney War in Afghanistan

By F. William Engdahl
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October 21, 2009 “Information Clearing House” — One of the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.

Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured.

Even during the 2008 Presidential campaign candidate Obama argued that Afghanistan not Iraq was where the US must wage war. His reason? Because he claimed, that was where the Al Qaeda organization was holed up and that was the “real” threat to US national security. The reasons behind US involvement in Afghanistan is quite another one.

The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.

Geopolitics of Afghan Opium

According even to an official UN report, opium production in Afghanistan has risen dramatically since the downfall of the Taliban in 2001. UNODC data shows more opium poppy cultivation in each of the past four growing seasons (2004-2007), than in any one year during Taliban rule. More land is now used for opium in Afghanistan, than for coca cultivation in Latin America. In 2007, 93% of the opiates on the world market originated in Afghanistan. This is no accident.

It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA’s service, brought him back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood mythology around his “courageous leadership of his people.” According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the Opium “Godfather” of Afghanistan today. There is apparently no accident that he was and is today still Washington’s preferred man in Kabul. Yet even with massive vote buying and fraud and intimidation, Karzai’s days could be ending as President.

The second reason the US military remains in Afghanistan long after the world has forgotten even who the mysterious Osama bin Laden and his alleged Al Qaeda terrorist organization is or even if they exist, is as a pretext to build a permanent US military strike force with a series of permanent US airbases across Afghanistan. The aim of those bases is not to eradicate any Al Qaeda cells that may have survived in the caves of Tora Bora, or to eradicate a mythical “Taliban” which at this point according to eyewitness reports is made up overwhelmingly of local ordinary Afghanis fighting to rid their land once more of occupier armies as they  did in the 11980’s against the Russians.

The aim of the US bases in Afghanistan is to target and be able to strike at the two nations which today represent the only combined threat in the world today to an American global imperium, to America’s Full Spectrum Dominance as the Pentagon terms it.

The lost ‘Mandate of Heaven’

The problem for the US power elites around Wall Street and in Washington is the fact that they are now in the deepest financial crisis in their history. That crisis is clear to the entire world and the world is acting on a basis of self-survival. The US elites have lost what in Chinese imperial history is known as the Mandate of Heaven. That mandate is given a ruler or ruling elite provided they rule their people justly and fairly. When they rule tyrannically and as despots, oppressing and abusing their people, they lose that Mandate of Heaven.

If the powerful private wealthy elites that have controlled essential US financial and foreign policy for most of the past century or more ever had a “mandate of Heaven” they clearly have lost it. The domestic developments towards creation of an abusive police state with deprivation of Constitutional rights to its citizens, the arbitrary exercise of power by non elected officials such as Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and now Tim Geithner, stealing trillion dollar sums from taxpayers without their consent in order to bailout the bankrupt biggest Wall Street banks, banks deemed “Too Big To Fail,” this all demonstrates to the world they have lost the mandate

In this situation, the US power elites are increasingly desperate to maintain their control of a global parasitical empire, called deceptively by their media machine, “globalization.” To hold that dominance it is essential that they be able to break up any emerging cooperation in the economic, energy or military realm between the two major powers of Eurasia that conceivably could pose a challenge to future US sole Superpower control—China in combination with Russia.

Each Eurasian power brings to the table essential contributions. China has the world’s most robust economy, a huge young and dynamic workforce, an educated middle class. Russia, whose economy has not recovered from the destructive end pf the Soviet era and of the primitive looting during the Yeltsin era, still holds essential assets for the combination. Russia’s nuclear strike force and its military pose the only threat in the world today to US military dominance, even if it is largely a residue of the Cold War. The Russian military elites never gave up that potential.

As well Russia holds the world’s largest treasure of natural gas and vast reserves of oil urgently needed by China. The two powers are increasingly converging via a new organization they created in 2001 known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). That includes as well as China and Russia, the largest Central Asia states Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

The purpose of the alleged US war against both Taliban and Al Qaeda is in reality to place its military strike force directly in the middle of the geographical space of this emerging SCO in Central Asia. Iran is a diversion. The main goal or target is Russia and China.

Officially, of course, Washington claims it has built its military presence inside Afghanistan since 2002 in order to protect a “fragile” Afghan democracy. It’s a curious argument given the reality of US military presence there.

In December 2004, during a visit to Kabul, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld finalized plans to build nine new bases in Afghanistan in the provinces of Helmand, Herat, Nimrouz, Balkh, Khost and Paktia. The nine are in addition to the three major US military bases already installed in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001-2002, ostensibly to isolate and eliminate the terror threat of Osama bin Laden.

The Pentagon built its first three bases at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan; and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was constructed a mere 100 kilometers from the border of Iran, and within striking distance of Russia as well as China.

Afghanistan has historically been the heartland for the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy then was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.

Afghanistan is similarly regarded by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military power could directly threaten Russia and China, as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little has changed geopolitically over more than a century of wars.

Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.

Al Qaeda doesn’t exist as a threat

The truth of all this deception around the real purpose in Afghanistan becomes clear on a closer look at the alleged “Al Qaeda” threat in Afghanistan. According to author Erik Margolis, prior to the September 11,2001 attacks, US intelligence was giving aid and support both to the Taliban and to Al Qaeda. Margolis claims that “The CIA was planning to use Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda to stir up Muslim Uighurs against Chinese rule, and Taliban against Russia’s Central Asian allies.”

The US clearly found other means of stirring up Muslim Uighurs against Beijing last July via its support for the World Uighur Congress. But the Al Qaeda “threat” remains the lynchpin of Obama US justification for his Afghan war buildup.

Now, however, the National Security Adviser to President Obama, former Marine Gen. James Jones has made a statement, conveniently buried by the friendly US media, about the estimated size of the present Al Qaeda danger in Afghanistan. Jones told Congress, “The al-Qaeda presence is very diminished. The maximum estimate is less than 100 operating in the country, no bases, no ability to launch attacks on either us or our allies.”

That means that Al-Qaeda, for all practical purposes, does not exist in Afghanistan. Oops…

Even in neighboring Pakistan, the remnants of Al-Qaeda are scarcely to be found. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Hunted by US drones, beset by money problems and finding it tougher to lure young Arabs to the bleak mountains of Pakistan, al Qaeda is seeing its role shrink there and in Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports and Pakistan and U.S. officials. For Arab youths who are al Qaeda’s primary recruits, ‘it’s not romantic to be cold and hungry and hiding,’ said a senior U.S. official in South Asia.”

If we follow the statement to its logical consequence we must conclude then that the reason German soldiers are dying along with other NATO youth in the mountains of Afghanistan has nothing to do with “winning a war against terrorism.” Conveniently most media chooses to forget the fact that Al Qaeda to the extent it ever existed, was a creation in the 1980’s of the CIA, who recruited and trained radical muslims from across the Islamic world to wage war against Russian troops in Afghanistan as part of a strategy developed by Reagan’s CIA head Bill Casey and others to create a “new Vietnam” for the Soviet Union which would lead to a humiliating defeat for the Red Army and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now US NSC head Jones admits there is essentially no Al Qaeda anymore in Afghanistan. Perhaps it is time for a more honest debate from our political leaders about the true purpose of sending more young to die protecting the opium harvests of Afghanistan.

F. William Engdahl – Author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation.. He also authored A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His latest book is Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press)  www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Obama Quashing Goldstone Report to Cover American Complicity in Israeli War Crimes

Goldstone Challenges Obama: Show Me Flaws in Gaza Report

Hanan Awarekeh Readers Number : 78

22/10/2009 South African jurist Richard Goldstone, who led a damning United Nations probe into Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip last winter, has challenged Barack Obama’s administration to justify its claims that the report is one-sided and flawed. Goldstone’s report, commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council, accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes in the Gaza offensive. Most of the report’s accusations were directed at Israel. During that war more than 1400 Palestinians were killed, including 420 children and over 5300 others were injured. Israel has rejected the report as biased and the U.S. has said it would support Israel’s efforts to prevent a UN Security Council debate on the report. Goldstone told Al Jazeera on Thursday that he is still waiting for the U.S. to clarify its claim that the report has a number of flaws. “The Obama administration joined our recommendation calling for full and good-faith investigations, both in Israel and in Gaza, but said that the report was flawed,” Goldstone told Al Jazeera. The commission chair said that once Washington points out the flaws, he would be ready to respond. “I have yet to hear from the Obama administration what the flaws in the report that they have identified are. I would be happy to respond to them, if and when I know what they are,” he said. The remarks follow a U.S. opposition to a UN Human Rights Council resolution on the report in Geneva last Friday. Russia and China are also among those who voted against a discussion of the Goldstone probe in the Security Council. The report passed by 25 votes to six, 11 countries abstained, and five countries did not vote, among them Britain and France. Goldstone said he believes Russia, France and China will oppose having the report on Operation Cast Lead in Gaza debated in the UN Security Council. He added that while he is not an expert on the political power ties in the UN, he believes these three nations will refuse to move forward with the report. He said the report could still be brought before the UN General Assembly, and added that if the UN refuses to discuss this report, it would be the end of UN involvement in international crises. Goldstone’s comments come at a time when Israel is undergoing a diplomatic struggle aimed at minimizing damage caused by the report on the international front. Alongside the PR campaign to be launched by Israeli representatives against the report, an Israeli security cabinet meeting on Wednesday raised the possibility of succumbing to international pressure and appointing an inquiry committee to probe the Gaza war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to formulate his position on the matter, while Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israeli army Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi have expressed their objection to such a probe. However, the Israeli Justice Ministry, and the attorney general’s office, are not ruling out the option.

Software for Taking Advantage of Human Nature

ISV enlists in Defence program

Department of Defence’s collaborative program with IT industry snaps up Adelaide-based artificial intelligence software developer.

Spandas Lui

Independent software vendor (ISV), Intelligent Software Development, has joined the Department of Defence’s innovation program as an Associate.

The Rapid Prototyping, Development and Evaluation (RPDE) program was established in 2006 as an initiative to facilitate effective collaboration between the Department and a broad range of industries to aid in network-centric warfare. Participants range from engineering firms, IT organisations and universities.

While the company is only two years old, Intelligence Software managing director, Dr Don Perugini, said he was familiar with Government and Defence projects and is confident the ISV’s Behavioural Simulation technology, an environment and population modelling software, will find be useful in this program.

“We think there are many uses for this type of technology in Defence,” Dr Perugini said. “It’s a sophisticated modelling software that can model human centric environments and can provide a lot of insight to how to influence human behaviours across a whole population.

“It could be used for intelligence or what Defence calls psychological operations [PsyOps] to deduce how to influence a population to get the best outcome for a particular operation.”

The technology has mainly been used to guide government environmental policies and defence applications. Having spent more than 10 years in the Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO), Dr Perugini said he would remain focused in the two verticals but saw potential to branch out to other areas.

“There is a lot of scope in the business market research sector and other industries,” he said. “I guess we will get there over time but right now we are being fairly specific.”

RPDE operates on a project-by-project basis. Intelligence Software will contribute to the program when needed.

Juniper Cobra, Making the World Safe for Israeli Aggression

1,000 troops arrive in Israel for exercise

Servicemembers set to practice shooting down missiles

By Nancy Montgomery, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Friday, October 23, 2009

TEL AVIV, Israel — More than 1,000 U.S. troops and some of the U.S. Army’s most sophisticated weaponry arrived in Israel this week to practice shooting down ballistic missiles to protect Israel from potential adversaries, most likely Iran.

The missile defense exercise, called Juniper Cobra, has been a biennial event since 2001. But this year’s training comes at a time of increased regional tensions, with deep concerns about Iran’s suspected plans to build a nuclear weapon.

“[The exercise] has to be viewed within the context of Iran getting closer to a nuclear weapon. It’s to provide reassurance to Israelis, and to demonstrate the depth of our concern to everybody else,” said John Pike at the globalsecurity.org Web site.

“It’s a very prompt and sizable demonstration of what the new administration’s missile defense plans are.”

Last month, President Barack Obama laid out plans for a missile shield against Iran, defending Europe and the Middle East. That plan would emphasize countering short- and medium-range ballistic missiles with interceptors based on ships, rather than intercontinental missiles from land-based interceptors.

The new plan illustrates a change in the perception of the threat, experts said, especially from Iran.

“The trends in the proliferation of ballistic missiles … potentially with nuclear weapons, is creating a higher sense of urgency,” said Baker Spring at the Heritage Foundation.

“Obviously Iran is the most visible and most likely threat. … But what happens if Pakistan really goes sour?” he said, or if Iran gets a nuclear weapon and starts a new arms race in the Middle East?

But U.S. and Israeli military officials downplayed current events, saying that the exercise was just one in a series, and had been long in the planning. Also, the Middle East is usually fraught by tensions.

“When is it not?” asked U.S. Navy Rear Adm. John Richardson, commander of the exercise. “This is the fifth in a series of Juniper Cobra exercises, which has consistently enhanced the relationship” between U.S. and Israeli forces, he said. “We want to come away from the exercise with best practices to make ourselves even better.”

In fact, the exercise in 2005 was roughly the same size, and was also held amid “rising Middle East tensions,” according to newspaper reports at the time. Likewise, officials said then that there was no connection between tensions and the exercise.

“There is absolutely no connection with this exercise and any event in the region,” a USAREUR spokeswoman said. “As always, we are interested in implementing lessons learned from training exercises.”

U.S. troops, primarily from U.S. Army Europe and the European Command, began arriving in Israel about 10 days ago for the exercise.

“To us, it’s not at [a political] level,” said Lt. Col. Kevin Ciocca, commander of the 5th Battalion, 7th ADA, 069th Air Defense Artillery Brigade, based in Kaiserslautern. “We train soldiers.”

Ciocca has some 400 troops working on the exercise. For them, he said, it was about operating equipment, readying systems, practicing what they’d do in war.

“Training soldiers and getting them ready for combat, irrespective of the political environment,” Ciocca said. “The big event really for us is the opportunity for soldiers training with ships, with aircraft, with coalition forces. These are things we can’t really replicate in Germany.”

Near the end of the exercise, he said, his soldiers, who operate Patriot missile systems, would be firing six live missiles to hit targets. The Israelis, he said, would fire four.

There is also U.S. Navy involvement, although far less than news reports have said. Quoting unnamed Israeli defense officials, some reports said that 17 U.S. Navy ships were to be part of the drill. In fact, Richardson said, there was only one: the USS Higgins, a guided-missile destroyer, which will not be firing any interceptor missiles.

Richardson said that new capabilities were being tested this year, although he declined to elaborate further. But in April, about 100 Europe-based personnel took part in a missile defense exercise that for the first time incorporated a U.S.-owned radar system, U.S. X-Band radar.

That system, which was deployed to Israel a year ago and marked the first time U.S. troops were permanently deployed to Israel, is intended to give Israel earlier warning in the event of a missile launch from Iran. The X-Band is situated at Nevatim air base in the Negev Desert, one of the bases involved in the exercise.

The X-Band is designed to detect and track missiles soon after launch. According to Defense News, the system is expected to “double or even triple the range at which Israel can detect, track and ultimately intercept Iranian missiles.”

Spring said missile defense is a far better option than retaliation.

“What the American people crave and what the Israelis crave is not retaliation,” Spring said. “What they really want is to be protected.”

This year’s Juniper Cobra exercise is expected to cost an estimated $10 million to $15 million, said Maj. Daniel Meyers, U.S. Army Europe spokesman.

“Can you put a cost on friendship. Can the partnership capacity that is gained through this exercise be measured in dollars?” he said.

Pakistan offensive against Taliban creates angry refugees

A policeman keeps guard over men who fled a military offensive in South Waziristan as they wait to registrater as internally displaced persons in Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan, on Wednesday. Faisal Mahmood/Reuters

Some 30,000 refugees who fled the Pakistan Army’s offensive against the Taliban in South Waziristan have yet to receive food or other supplies promised by the government.

By Issam Ahmed | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Dera Ismail Khan, Pakistan – Antimilitary feelings are running high among refugees in this town just outside South Waziristan, where more than 100,000 Pakistanis have fled from an Army offensive aimed at destroying the Pakistani Taliban network.

Many bring with them tales of indiscriminate bombings and high civilian casualties. And frustration is rising as the government fails to provide aid to those displaced by the fighting since it began Saturday.

The delay feeds concerns that, unlike during the Army’s relatively successful offensive in Swat during the spring, neutral or pro-Taliban leanings among residents of South Waziristan could make it harder to hold onto any gains there. A growing refugee crisis could also undermine the government’s battle for hearts and minds.

“We feel this is a war against our whole tribe,” says Aslam Khan, an elderly Mehsud tribesman who arrived from the town of Sararogha two weeks ago and is attempting to register himself and nine members of his family to ensure they are eligible for aid.

Long lines, no aid

Hundreds of men like him show up every morning at the city’s five refugee registration points on behalf of their extended families (one man appeared to register 33 relatives). But many are turned away after hours of waiting and told to return the next day by inundated authorities. On Wednesday, fresh registrations were halted due to a shortage of forms.

Not that registration guarantees help: An aid official admits that because of delays in verifying ID cards, none of the 30,000 refugees who registered after the conflict began on Saturday have yet received food, items such as blankets or mosquito nets, or the $60 in monthly benefits promised to them by federal information minister Qamar Zaman Kaira last week.

Despite the influx of refugees, which began as early as August, the government has not prepared any camps in which to house them. North West Frontier Province governor Owais Ghani reiterated his position on Tuesday that all of the refugees can be absorbed into relatives’ homes in Dera Ismail Khan, which serves as a winter home for many South Waziristan residents.

Not so, says the aid official: “Not everyone has relatives here. So now what are we supposed to do? Some people are already out on open tents, in grounds. People are being housed in single houses with one bathroom and up to five families.”

Angry at the Army

Mr. Khan, the elderly tribesman, says his bitterness is compounded by the carnage he witnessed just before fleeing his hometown. He says he saw a family of four dive for cover as a jet targeting a militant hideout flew over the town’s main street; the hideout was destroyed, but the family died.

Other refugees echo Khan’s hostility toward the government. Several of them voice the theory that the United States is aiding both the Pakistani Army and the Taliban, possibly to weaken Pakistan and steal its nuclear arsenal.

Such cynicism may help explain Mehsud tribal elders’ rejection Tuesday of a government request to form a lashkar, or tribal militia, to take on the Taliban, a decision reported by McClatchy Newspapers.

“I don’t know anything about the Taliban, but the operation is killing people,” says Shakeel Ahmed, a student from Ladha, in South Waziristan. Of the dozen or so refugees interviewed, none expressed resentment toward the Taliban.

Also on Tuesday the Taliban engaged in fierce fighting with the Army in the key town of Kotkai, home of Qari Hussain, known as the master of suicide bombers. A day earlier the Army had claimed it was on the cusp of conquering the town.

As of Wednesday, nine soldiers and 91 militants had been killed, according to military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.

Militants hiding among refugees?

Meanwhile, concern among local officials that militants may have snuck into Dera Ismail Khan, which has a history of violence by Sunni militants against Shiites, has put the town on knife’s edge.

Army convoys racing through require all cars in their vicinity to halt or risk being shot. Mobile phone signals are being blocked by the military, while military police, pickets, and barricades guard the town’s housing compound for military officers and their families.

“We’re very concerned about the entry of miscreants into the city,” says Commissioner Humayun Khan, the region’s top administrator. He adds that the authorities are monitoring visitors to the town and host families have been told they will be held responsible for those in their care.

All of this contributes to a tense atmosphere. “Talibanization has been occurring here for some years now, and most people are afraid to go out in the evenings,” says Usman Elahi, a local engineer. All four local cinemas were boarded up two years ago for fear of targeting by extremists groups, he adds.

The tension permeates other parts of the country as well. Schools and colleges throughout Pakistan remained shut on Wednesday following two suicide bombings that hit the Islamic University of Islamabad and killed eight people, including the two bombers.