Ron Paul House Floor Speech: Republic Almost Completely Dead
Note :
Beware of coorporative sellouts who promise peace and change and hope .
the doors will be now wide open for World War 3 !
…………bring it on Obomba !
Infowars.com
May 27, 2011
The Defense Authorization Act or H.R. 1540, aka The Forever War Act of 2012, was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives earlier today on a vote of 322 to 96.
The Senate will now vote on its own version and then the two bills will need to be reconciled before going to Barry Obama for his signature into law.
The law authorizes the United States to use military force anywhere it says there are terrorists, including within the borders of our own country. It represents the largest hand-over of unchecked war authority from Congress to the executive branch in modern American history.
The founders were seriously opposed to handing this much power over to executive, fearing tyranny. If enacted into law, this provision will make Obama a dictator who can wage war without the consent of the American people.
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US Embassy in Baghdad to Double Staff
http://www.commondreams.org
The US Embassy in Baghdad, already the largest in the world, is expected to double its staff after American forces pull out of the country later this year.
“We’ll be doubling our size if all of our plans go through and if we receive the money from Congress in 2011 and then again in 2012,” James Jeffrey, the US ambassador in Iraq, said.
“This will be an extraordinarily large embassy with many different functions,” James Jeffrey, the US ambassador in Iraq. He also said a private security force some 5,500 strong will protect the large US diplomatic presence in Iraq. (photo: AFP) He said the staff would increase “from 8,000 plus personnel that we have now to roughly double that by 2012,” adding that US forces would make up only a very small part of that number.
“This will be an extraordinarily large embassy with many different functions. Some we took over from USFI (United States Forces in Iraq) and some of them continuation of the work we are doing now.”
Mr Jeffrey said that US military advisers and trainers would stay or be added to support the Iraqi military with US-made equipment such as M1A1 tanks and other weaponry. He said the added personnel would not include combat troops.
Fewer than 50,000 US troops are currently in Iraq, down from a peak of more than 170,000 and ahead of the planned full withdrawal in late 2011.
Jeffrey and Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, the commander of US military forces in Iraq, told members of the Armed Services Committee in February that the embassy would be well protected after the withdrawal.
A private security force some 5,500 strong will protect the large US diplomatic presence in Iraq, Jeffrey told the lawmakers.
He and Austin said they were confident that the force was adequate, and that Iraq will remain stable once US troops have departed.
They said that in 2012, the American presence in Iraq will consist of up to 20,000 civilians at sites that include two embassy branches, two consulates, and three police training centres.
The figure includes armed private security personnel, support staff and diplomats.
Currently there are 2,700 armed security contractors in Iraq, Jeffrey told the senators.
Haiti: Washington’s Cynical Campaign to Keep Aristide in South Africa
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http://www.voltairenet.org by Glen Ford* With unbounded hypocrisy, the United States shrieks “democracy!” at the world while denying Haitians every political right of citizenship in their own land. Having deposed and kidnapped the popularly elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004, the U.S. now pretends not to be the main party standing in the way of his return from South African exile, ahead of the scheduled 20 March run-off elections.
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5 March 2011 From Countries |
If diplomacy is a form of lying, then the United States’ efforts to delay indefinitely the return to Haiti of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is a triumph of the most foul diplomacy. Aristide has a passport, but no permission to land in Haiti and, it appears, no permission to take off from South Africa, where he has lived in exile since his overthrow in a U.S.-backed coup in 2004. The passport was provided by the outgoing government of Aristide’s onetime ally, President Rene Preval. But the U.S., which really runs the country in a troika with France and Canada, is unalterably opposed to an Aristide comeback. After last year’s devastating earthquake, the Americans said Aristide would be a distraction from the job of national reconstruction. Very little in the way of reconstruction has gotten done since then, but the Americans now claim that Aristide would distract from the runoff elections scheduled for March 20. Three out of four Haitians were already distracted from taking part in the first round of elections in November, without Aristide’s presence. That was undoubtedly because Aristide’s party, Fanmi Lavalas, by far the most popular political grouping in the country, was prohibited from participating – also at the insistence of the Americans and the tiny Haitian elite with which they are allied. Brazil acts as rent-a-cop for the United Nations mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, but documents show the United States has pressured Brazil to use its influence with South Africa to keep Aristide’s feet planted firmly on African soil. Brazil dearly wants to get a seat on the United Nations Security Council, and feels it cannot afford to make the Yankees angry. South Africa claims its under no pressure from anybody, but then claims it has an obligation to consult “all the role-players to work out the ideal conditions for him to go back.” Clearly, those “role-players” are the Americans and their French and Canadian co-conspirators. Aristide’s lawyer says he will not attempt to leave South Africa without permission. Of course, if South Africa gave its blessing to an Aristide flight to Haiti, the U.S. would be forced to abandon the charade and give Aristide a yes or a no, in its own voice – which would expose Washington as the occupying power in Haiti. Gone would be all pretensions that the Americans favor Haitian democracy. In hopes of putting the U.S. on the spot, a group of social activists, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, Danny Glover, Randall Robinson, Dick Gregory, and 11 others sent a letter, last week, to South African President Jacob Zuma. The letter expressed hope that President Zuma “can assist the Aristides in making their transition as soon as possible.” It said, “All the last remaining obstacles to the Aristides’ return have been removed” and expectations have been raised among Haitians that Aristide will soon arrive. But even Aristide’s lawyer, Ira Kurzban, who was wildly optimistic only a few weeks ago, seems resigned that Aristide won’t be going home any time soon. So, all the Haitian people have to look forward to is this month’s elections that they didn’t want, anyway, for candidates that were essentially forced on them by the United States – an exercise that nobody but Americans believes has anything to do with democracy.
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Libya and Imperialism
| http://www.globalresearch.ca
by Sara Flounders
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Global Research, February 24, 2011
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Of all the struggles going on in North Africa and the Middle East right now, the most difficult to unravel is the one in Libya. What is the character of the opposition to the Gadhafi regime, which reportedly now controls the eastern city of Benghazi? Is it just coincidence that the rebellion started in Benghazi, which is north of Libya’s richest oil fields as well as close to most of its oil and gas pipelines, refineries and its LNG port? Is there a plan to partition the country? What is the risk of imperialist military intervention, which poses the gravest danger for the people of the entire region? Libya is not like Egypt. Its leader, Moammar al-Gadhafi, has not been an imperialist puppet like Hosni Mubarak. For many years, Gadhafi was allied to countries and movements fighting imperialism. On taking power in 1969 through a military coup, he nationalized Libya’s oil and used much of that money to develop the Libyan economy. Conditions of life improved dramatically for the people. For that, the imperialists were determined to grind Libya down. The U.S. actually launched air strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986 that killed 60 people, including Gadhafi’s infant daughter – which is rarely mentioned by the corporate media. Devastating sanctions were imposed by both the U.S. and the U.N. to wreck the Libyan economy. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 and leveled much of Baghdad with a bombing campaign that the Pentagon exultantly called “shock and awe,” Gadhafi tried to ward off further threatened aggression on Libya by making big political and economic concessions to the imperialists. He opened the economy to foreign banks and corporations; he agreed to IMF demands for “structural adjustment,” privatizing many state-owned enterprises and cutting state subsidies on necessities like food and fuel. The Libyan people are suffering from the same high prices and unemployment that underlie the rebellions elsewhere and that flow from the worldwide capitalist economic crisis. There can be no doubt that the struggle sweeping the Arab world for political freedom and economic justice has also struck a chord in Libya. There can be no doubt that discontent with the Gadhafi regime is motivating a significant section of the population. However, it is important for progressives to know that many of the people being promoted in the West as leaders of the opposition are long-time agents of imperialism. The BBC on Feb. 22 showed footage of crowds in Benghazi pulling down the green flag of the republic and replacing it with the flag of the overthrown monarch King Idris – who had been a puppet of U.S. and British imperialism. The Western media are basing a great deal of their reporting on supposed facts provided by the exile group National Front for the Salvation of Libya, which was trained and financed by the U.S. CIA. Google the front’s name plus CIA and you will find hundreds of references. The Wall Street Journal in a Feb. 23 editorial wrote that “The U.S. and Europe should help Libyans overthrow the Gadhafi regime.” There is no talk in the board rooms or the corridors of Washington about intervening to help the people of Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or Bahrain overthrow their dictatorial rulers. Even with all the lip service being paid to the mass struggles rocking the region right now, that would be unthinkable. As for Egypt and Tunisia, the imperialists are pulling every string they can to get the masses off the streets. There was no talk of U.S. intervention to help the Palestinian people of Gaza when thousands died from being blockaded, bombed and invaded by Israel. Just the opposite. The U.S. intervened to prevent condemnation of the Zionist settler state. Imperialism’s interest in Libya is not hard to find. Bloomberg.com wrote on Feb. 22 that while Libya is Africa’s third-largest producer of oil, it has the continent’s largest proven reserves – 44.3 billion barrels. It is a country with a relatively small population but the potential to produce huge profits for the giant oil companies. That’s how the super-rich look at it, and that’s what underlies their professed concern for the people’s democratic rights in Libya. Getting concessions out of Gadhafi is not enough for the imperialist oil barons. They want a government that they can own outright, lock, stock and barrel. They have never forgiven Gadhafi for overthrowing the monarchy and nationalizing the oil. Fidel Castro of Cuba in his column “Reflections” takes note of imperialism’s hunger for oil and warns that the U.S. is laying the basis for military intervention in Libya. In the U.S., some forces are trying to mobilize a street-level campaign promoting such U.S. intervention. We should oppose this outright and remind any well-intentioned people of the millions killed and displaced by U.S. intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Progressive people are in sympathy with what they see as a popular movement in Libya. We can help such a movement most by supporting its just demands while rejecting imperialist intervention, in whatever form it may take. It is the people of Libya who must decide their future. |
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| Sara Flounders is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Sara Flounders
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“CIA spy” Davis was giving nuclear bomb material to Al-Qaeda, says report
found on : http://in.news.yahoo.com
London, Feb 20(ANI): Double murder-accused US official Raymond Davis has been found in possession of top-secret CIA documents, which point to him or the feared American Task Force 373 (TF373) operating in the region, providing Al-Qaeda terrorists with “nuclear fissile material” and “biological agents,” according to a report.
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) is warning that the situation on the sub-continent has turned “grave” as it appears that open warfare is about to break out between Pakistan and the United States, The European Union Times reports.
The SVR warned in its report that the apprehension of 36-year-old Davis, who shot dead two Pakistani men in Lahore last month, had fuelled this crisis.
According to the report, the combat skills exhibited by Davis, along with documentation taken from him after his arrest, prove that he is a member of US’ TF373 black operations unit currently operating in the Afghan War Theatre and Pakistan’s tribal areas, the paper said.
While the US insists that Davis is one of their diplomats, and the two men he killed were robbers, Pakistan says that the duo were ISI agents sent to follow him after it was discovered that he had been making contact with al Qaeda, after his cell phone was tracked to the Waziristan tribal area bordering Afghanistan, the paper said.
The most ominous point in this SVR report is “Pakistan’s ISI stating that top-secret CIA documents found in Davis’s possession point to his, and/or TF373, providing to al Qaeda terrorists “nuclear fissile material” and “biological agents”, which they claim are to be used against the United States itself in order to ignite an all-out war in order to re-establish the West’s hegemony over a Global economy that is warned is just months away from collapse,” the paper added. (ANI)
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Pentagon Fingered as a Source of Narco-Firepower in Mexico
http://narcosphere.narconews.com
The Big Clubs in Mexico’s Drug War Aren’t Slipping Through the Gun-Show Loophole
Another series of leaked State Department cables made public this week by WikiLeaks lend credence to investigative reports on gun trafficking and the drug war published by Narco News as far back as 2009.
The big battles in the drug war in Mexico are “not being fought with Saturday night specials, hobby rifles and hunting shotguns,” Narco News reported in March 2009, against the grain, at a time when the mainstream media was pushing a narrative that assigned the blame for the rising tide of weapons flowing into Mexico to U.S. gun stores and gun shows.
Rather, we reported at the time, “the drug trafficking organizations are now in possession of high-powered munitions in vast quantities that can’t be explained by the gun-show loophole.”
Those weapons, found in stashes seized by Mexican law enforcers and military over the past several years, include U.S.-military issued rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers and explosives.
The State Department cables released recently by WikiLeaks support Narco News’ reporting and also confirm that our government is very aware of the fact that U.S military munitions are finding their way into Mexico, and into the hands of narco-trafficking organizations, via a multi-billion dollar stream of private-sector and Pentagon arms exports.
Narco News, in a report in December 2008 [“Juarez murders shine a light on an emerging Military Cartel”] examined the increasing militarization of narco-trafficking groups in Mexico and pointed out that U.S. military-issued ammunition popped up in an arms cache seized in Reynosa, Mexico, in November 2008 that was linked to the Zetas, a mercenary group that provides enforcement services to Mexican narco-trafficking organizations.
Tosh Plumlee, a former CIA asset who still has deep connections in the covert world, told Narco News recently that a special-operations task force under Pentagon command, which has provided training to Mexican troops south of the border, has previously “… found [in Mexico] hundreds of [U.S.-made] M-67s [grenades] as well as thousands of rounds of machine gun-type ammo, .50 [and] .30 [caliber] and the famous [U.S.-made] M-16 — most later confirmed as being shipped from Guatemala into Mexico as well as from USA vendors. …”
Similarly, an AP video report from May 2009 confirms that “M16 machine guns” have been seized from Mexican criminal groups engaged in the drug war.
“It’s unclear how cartels are getting military grade weapons,” the AP report states.
Narco News offered an answer to that question in March 2009, when it reported that the deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports, measured in the billions of dollars.
Those exports are approved through the State Department, under a program known as Direct Commercial Sales. A sister program, called Foreign Military Sales, is overseen by the Pentagon and also taps U.S. contractors to manufacture weapons (such as machine guns and grenades) for export to foreign entities, including companies and governments.
Between 2005 and 2009, a total of $41 billion worth of U.S. defense articles were exported under the FMS program and a total of nearly $60 billion via the DCS program, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The bulk of those exports went to seven nations, including South Korea, but Mexico, too, was a receiving nation, with some $204 million in military arms shipments approved for export in fiscal year 2008 alone, according to the most recently available DCS report.
So, based on that evidence, it is clear that there is a grand river of military-grade munitions flowing out of major gun factories in the U.S. and being exported globally — completely bypassing the mom-and-pop gun store. That river of doom, however, does not bypass the drug war in Mexico.
The WikiLeaks Cables
Two separate diplomatic cables that came out of the U.S. consulate in Monterrey, Mexico, in early 2009 discuss drug war-related attacks on the U.S. consulate in that city as well as on a Monterrey TV station — with each incident involving the use of U.S. military grenades.
From a State Department cable created on Jan. 12, 2009, by the American Consul General in Monterrey and sent to the Secretary of State, U.S. Northcom and other U.S. consulates:
On January 6 the Televisa TV station in Monterrey was attacked by unknown assailants, who shot eight .40 caliber rounds into the station wall and threw a grenade over a fence into the parking lot, which exploded but did not injure anyone.
… The Consulate [in Monterrey] was attacked in a similar manner on October 11, 2008, and is located approximately one mile from the Televisa station.
… The investigators recovered the grenade fuse spoon, which appears to be from a US military M67 fragmentation grenade. ATF is investigating if any M67 grenades from this lot were exported to foreign militaries. The M67 grenade is different than the M26 grenade [an older U.S.-made grenade from the Vietnam era] used to attack the Consulate on October 11, but five M67 grenades were recovered during a raid several days after the Consulate attack in a Gulf Cartel warehouse. [Emphasis added.]
So the State Department cable makes clear that the attacks on the TV station and on the consulate itself involved military grade explosives made in the USA that somehow found their way to Mexico. A second cable issued in March 2009 lays out the plausible path those grenades followed on their journey to Mexico’s drug war.
From a cable issued by the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey on March 3, 2009, and sent to the Secretary of State, the FBI as well as various other consulates:
AmConsulate General Monterrey’s ATF Office, the ATF Explosives Technology Branch, and AmEmbassy Mexico DAO have been working with Mexican law enforcement authorities to identify the origin of various grenades and other explosive devices recovered locally over the past few months, including the unexploded M26A2 fragmentation grenade hurled at the Consulate itself during the October 11, 2008 attack. Other ordnance recovered includes 21 grenades recovered by Mexican law enforcement on October 16, 2008 after a raid at a narco-warehouse in Guadalupe (a working class suburb of Monterrey), and twenty-five 40mm explosive projectiles, a U.S. M203 40mm grenade launcher, and three South Korean K400 fragmentation grenades recovered the same day in an abandoned armored vehicle that suspected narco-traffickers used to escape apprehension.
Local Mexican law enforcement has recovered a Grenade spoon and pull ring from an exploded hand grenade used in a January 6, 2009 attack on Televisa Monterrey, a Monterrey television station. Based upon ATF examination, it appears that the grenade used in the attack on the Consulate has the same lot number, and is of similar design and style, as the three of the grenades found at the narco-warehouse in Guadalupe. On January 7, 2009, the Mexican Army recovered 14 [U.S.-made] M-67 fragmentation grenades and 1 K400 fragmentation grenade in Durango City, Durango. ….
The lot numbers of some of the grenades recovered, including the grenade used in the attack on Televisa, indicate that previously ordnance with these same lot numbers may have been sold by the USG [U.S. Government] to the El Salvadoran military in the early 1990s via the Foreign Military Sales program. We would like to thank AmEmbassy San Salvador for its ongoing efforts to query the Government of El Salvador as whether any of its stocks of grenades and other munitions have been diverted or are otherwise unaccounted for. [Emphasis added.]
Again, this is the U.S. state Department confirming that it suspects U.S. military munitions sold in the 1990s to a foreign military were subsequently diverted to Mexican narco-traffickers.
Narco News sources indicate that it is likely some of the U.S. military weapons now being used by Mexican narco-trafficking groups may be from a past era, but they also contend it is likely a number of those weapons, such as the guns, have been rebuilt for the current drug war.
Former CIA asset Plumlee told Narco News:
There was some talk among [U.S.] task force members about a … gun-making operation ongoing in or around Oaxaca, Mexico, more like a “refurbish” type operation from old stored weapons from the old Contra days (1980-‘90 era). [There’s] a lot of those weapons still around Panama and El Salvador. I was told most of those old weapons were “burned out” and of not much value. However, if there was a supplier or someone who could retrofit these weapons [they] could be fixed and moved just about anywhere….
And as food for thought on that front, a former U.S. Customs Inspector, who asked that his name not be used, brought to Narco News’ attention a federal criminal case now pending in U.S. court in Nashville.
In that case, five top officials with a gun manufacturer called Sabre Defence Industries LLC stand accused of illegally trafficking gun parts, such as gun barrels and components, on an international scale. Sabre, now shut down in the wake of its run-in with the feds, made and marketed assault rifles and machine-gun components for military, law enforcement and civilian use worldwide.
In fact, its biggest client was the U.S. military, which had awarded it contracts worth up to $120 million “for the manufacture of, among other things, M16 rifles and .50 caliber machine gun barrels,” according to the indictment returned in mid-January of this year against the company and its officers.
“The indictment unsealed today alleges a nearly decade-long scheme to thwart U.S. import/export restrictions on firearms and their components,” said Lanny A. Breuer, an assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, in a press statement released on Feb. 8. “The defendants allegedly went to great lengths to conceal their activities and evade U.S. laws – mislabeling packages, falsifying shipping records, and maintaining a fictitious set of books and records, among other things. The illegal trade of firearms and their components poses serious risks and, as this case shows, we cannot and will not tolerate it.”
Federal authorities have not released any details on where the Sabre-made gun parts ended up, though the indictment alleges many of the parts were shipped overseas.
As a note of caution, however, the former Customs inspector points out that once a criminal group has a supply of parts, setting up a gun-making operation is not a complicated matter.
“For the small arms, and I would include, for simplicity, everything up to and including M2 .50 BMG machine guns, and even the 40 mm grenade launcher, M19, you can put them together on the kitchen table, or on the workbench in the garage,” the former inspector says.
For now, though, it simply is not known whether any of Sabre’s weapons parts ended up in gun-making chop shops south of the U.S. border, or elsewhere, or whether any of the M16s it made for the U.S. military were later provided to the Mexican government — via the FMS or DCS programs — and subsequently diverted by corrupt officials to narco-trafficking groups.
But the State Department cables recently made public by WikiLeaks do seem to confirm that the U.S. government is very aware that much of the heavy firepower now in the hands of Mexican criminal organizations isn’t linked to mom-and-pop gun stores, but rather the result of blowback from U.S. arms-trading policies (both current and dating back to the Iran/Contra era) that put billions of dollars of deadly munitions into global trade stream annually.
As the death toll mounts in the drug war now raging in Mexico, it pays to remember that weapons trafficking, both government-sponsored and illegal, is a big business that feeds and profits off that carnage. Bellicose government policies, such as the U.S.-sponsored Merida Initiative, that are premised on further militarizing the effort to impose prohibition on civil society only serve to expand the profit margin on the bloodshed.
Stay tuned….
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Where did all the Haiti relief money go?
| http://www.thegrio.comBy Garry Pierre-Pierre
12:33 PM on 01/11/2011 |
Read More: Charity, Donations, Earthquake, Haiti, Haiti One Year Later, Haitian Relief, Money, Rene Preval
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In this Jan. 17, 2010 file photo, people walk down a street amid earthquake rubble in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull, File)
Organizations like the Red Cross have said that because of an ineffectual Haitian government they have had to play roles that they were ill equipped to fill. For instance, the Red Cross said that it has to essentially provide water and sanitation to the Metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince. But the Red Cross received more than $1 billion in donations after the earthquake, the largest response in its history.
UNICEF officials said last week that they have provided more than 11,000 latrines, serving more than 800,000 people. In addition some 360,000 insecticide-treated bed nets were distributed to more than 160,000 households in malaria endemic Southern coastal regions.
WATCH MORE COVERAGE OF HAITI: ONE YEAR LATER HERE:
“We have seen results in the past year, but significant gaps remain and much more must be done,” said Francoise Gruloons-Ackermans, UNICEF’s representative in Haiti. “Haiti poses huge institutional and systemic issues that predated the earthquake and that require more than an emergency response to resolved.”
According to Gruloos-Ackermans, four million children in Haiti still face inequitable access to water, sanitation, health care and protection from disease.
While the aid organizations were tampering their progress with a dose of reality, many Haitians say that part of the problems stem from the fact that projects are designed and implemented with little input from Haitian government officials or Haitians who know what’s going on on the ground. For instance, six weeks before the UN donors’ conference a group of more than 1,700 Haitian community organizers fanned across the country asking villagers and city dwellers what their hopes and aspirations for the development of their country. Most people said that they had a desire for self-determination and direct participation in the rebuilding effort after the earthquake.
“I’m working with a lot of sophisticated people but who have absolutely no notions of what this country is about,” Michelle Montas told Slate recently. Montas, who retired as UN Secretary General’s Ban Ki Moon press secretary came back to work with the UN as a special adviser with the UN mission in Haiti. Even she couldn’t convince the UN brass to incorporate Haitians in their decision making.
“I work at the U.N and every day I have to go to meetings. I”m the only Haitian there, and I have to tell them, ‘your perception is not right.’ I feel that is a lost battle.”
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Empire: The Pentagon Can Barely Keep Track of Its Thousands of Bases
http://www.alternet.org
The United States has 460 bases overseas! It has 507 permanent bases! What is the U.S doing with more than 560 foreign bases? Why does it have 662 bases abroad? Does the United States really have more than 1,000 military bases across the globe?
In a world of statistics and precision, a world in which “accountability” is now a Washington buzzword, a world where all information is available at the click of a mouse, there’s one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one.
The man who wrote the definitive book on it didn’t know for sure. The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist didn’t even come close. Yours truly has written numerous articles on U.S. military bases and even part of a book on the subject, but failed like the rest.
There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it’s 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure.
Keeping Count
In a recent op-ed piece, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof made a trenchant point: “The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?”
For years, the late Chalmers Johnson, the man who literally wrote the book on the U.S. military’s empire of bases, The Sorrows of Empire, made the same point and backed it with the most detailed research on the globe-spanning American archipelago of bases that has ever been assembled. Several years ago, after mining the Pentagon’s own publicly-available documents, Johnson wrote, “[T]he United States maintains 761 active military ‘sites’ in foreign countries. (That’s the Defense Department’s preferred term, rather than ‘bases,’ although bases are what they are.)”
Recently, the Pentagon updated its numbers on bases and other sites, and they have dropped. Whether they’ve fallen to the level advanced by Kristof, however, is a matter of interpretation. According to the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report, the U.S. military now maintains 662 foreign sites in 38 countries around the world. Dig into that report more deeply, though, and Grand Canyon-sized gaps begin to emerge.
A Legacy of Bases
In 1955, 10 years after World War II ended, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a major investigation of bases, including a map dotted with little stars and triangles, most of them clustered in Europe and the Pacific. “The American flag flies over more than 300 overseas outposts,” wrote reporter Walter Trohan. “Camps and barracks and bases cover 12 American possessions or territories held in trust. The foreign bases are in 63 foreign nations or islands.”
Today, according to the Pentagon’s published figures, the American flag flies over 750 U.S. military sites in foreign nations and U.S. territories abroad. This figure does not include small foreign sites of less 10 acres or those that the U.S. military values at less than $10 million. In some cases, numerous bases of this type may be folded together and counted as a single military installation in a given country. A request for further clarification from the Department of Defense went unanswered.
What we do know is that, on the foreign outposts the U.S. military counts, it controls close to 52,000 buildings, and more than 38,000 pieces of heavy infrastructure like piers, wharves, and gigantic storage tanks, not to mention more than 9,100 “linear structures” like runways, rail lines, and pipelines. Add in more than 6,300 buildings, 3,500 pieces of infrastructure, and 928 linear structures in U.S. territories and you have an impressive total. And yet, it isn’t close to the full story.
Losing Count
Last January, Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. He expected that number to increase by 12 or more, he added, over the course of 2010.
In September, I contacted ISAF’s Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that “there are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields.” Perplexed by the loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a Public Affairs Officer with the International Security Assistance Force. “There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan,” he wrote in an October 2010 email. “There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan.”
By then, it seemed, the U.S. had lost up to 150 bases and I was thoroughly confused. When I contacted the military to sort out the discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given — from Shanks’ 400 base tally to the count of around 250 by Younger — I was handed off again and again until I landed with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at ISAF Joint Command’s Public Affairs. “The number of bases in Afghanistan is roughly 411,” Brown wrote in a November email, “which is a figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the Combat Out Post-level.” Even this, he cautioned, wasn’t actually a full list, because “temporary positions occupied by platoon-sized elements or less” were not counted.
Along the way to this “final” tally, I was offered a number of explanations – from different methods of accounting to the failure of units in the field to provide accurate information — for the conflicting numbers I had been given. After months of exchanging emails and seeing the numbers swing wildly, ending up with roughly the same count in November as I began with in January suggests that the U.S. command isn’t keeping careful track of the number of bases in Afghanistan. Apparently, the military simply does not know how many bases it has in its primary theater of operations.
Black Sites in Baseworld
Scan the Department of Defense’s 2010 Base Structure Report for sites in Afghanistan. Go ahead, read through all 206 pages. You won’t find a mention of them, not a citation, not a single reference, not an inkling that the United States has even one base in Afghanistan, let alone more than 400. This is hardly an insignificant omission. Add those 411 missing bases to Kristof’s total and you get 971 sites around the world. Add it to the Pentagon’s official tally and you’re left with 1,073 bases and sites overseas, around 770 more than Walter Trohan uncovered for his 1955 article. That number even tops the 1967 count of 1,014 U.S. bases abroad, which Chalmers Johnson considered “the Cold War peak.”
There are, however, other ways to tally the total. In a letter written last Spring, Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Barney Frank, Ron Paul, and Walter Jones asserted that there were just 460 U.S. military installations abroad, not counting those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nicholas Kristof, who came up with a count of 100 more than that, didn’t respond to an email for clarification, but may have done the same analysis as I did: search the Pentagon’s Base Structure Report and select out the obvious sites that, while having a sizeable “footprint,” could only tenuously be counted as bases, like dependent family housing complexes and schools, resort hotels (yes, the Department of Defense has them), ski areas (them, too) and the largest of their golf courses — the U.S. military claimed to possess a total of 172 courses of all sizes in 2007 — and you get a total of around 570 foreign sites. Add to them the number of Afghan bases and you’re left with about 981 foreign military bases.
As it happens, though, Afghanistan isn’t the only country with a baseworld black-out. Search the Pentagon’s tally for sites in Iraq and you won’t find a single entry. (That was true even when the U.S. reportedly had more than 400 bases in that country.) Today, the U.S. military footprint there has shrunk radically. The Department of Defense declined to respond to an email request for the current number of bases in Iraq, but published reports indicate that no fewer than 88 are still there, including Camp Taji, Camp Ramadi, Contingency Operating Base Speicher, and Joint Base Balad, which, alone, boasts about 7,000 American troops. These missing bases would raise the worldwide total to about 1,069.
War zones aren’t the only secret spots. Take a close look at Middle Eastern nations whose governments, fearing domestic public opinion, prefer that no publicity be given to American military bases on their territory, and then compare it to the Pentagon’s official list. To give an example, the 2010 Base Structure Report lists one nameless U.S. site in Kuwait. Yet we know that the Persian Gulf state hosts a number of U.S. military facilities including Camp Arifjan, Camp Buering, Camp Virginia, Kuwait Naval Base, Ali Al Salem Air Base, and Udari Range. Add in these missing sites and the total number of bases abroad reaches 1,074.
Check the Pentagon’s base tally for Qatar and you’ll come up empty. But look at the numbers of Department of Defense personnel serving overseas and you’ll find more than 550 service men and women deployed there. While that Persian Gulf nation may have officially built Al Udeid Air Base itself, to call it anything but a U.S. installation would be disingenuous, given that it has served as a major logistics and command hub for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Add it in and the foreign base count reaches 1,075.
Saudi Arabia is also missing from the Pentagon’s tally, even though the current list of personnel abroad indicates that hundreds of U.S. troops are deployed there. From the lead up to the First Gulf War in 1990 through the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military stationed thousands of troops in the kingdom. In 2003, in response to fundamentalist pressure on the Saudi government, Washington announced that it was pulling all but a small number of troops out of the country. Yet the U.S. continues to train and advise from sites like Eskan Village, a compound 20 kilometers south of Riyadh where, according to 2009 numbers, 800 U.S. personnel (500 of them advisors) were based.
Discounted, Uncounted, and Unknown
In addition to the unknown number of micro-bases that the Pentagon doesn’t even bother to count and Middle Eastern and Afghan bases that fly under the radar, there are even darker areas in the empire of bases: installations belonging to other countries that are used but not acknowledged by the United States or avowed by the host-nation need to be counted, too. For example, it is now well known that U.S. drone aircraft, operating under the auspices of both the CIA and the Air Force and conducting a not-so-secret war in Pakistan, take off from one or more bases in that country.
Additionally, there are other sites like the “covert forward operating base run by the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi,” exposed by Jeremy Scahill in the Nation magazine, and one or more airfields run by employees of the private security contractor Blackwater (now renamed Xe Services). While the Department of Defense’s personnel tally indicates that there are well over a hundred troops deployed in Pakistan, it counts no bases there.
Similarly uncounted are the U.S. Navy’s carrier strike groups, flotillas that consist of massive aircraft carriers, the largest warships in the world, as well as a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an attack submarine, and an ammunition, oiler, and supply ship. The U.S. boasts 11 such carriers, town-sized floating bases that can travel the world, as well as numerous other ships, some boasting well over 1,000 officers and crew, that may, says the Navy, travel “to any of more than 100 ports of call worldwide” from Hong Kong to Rio de Janeiro.
“The ability to conduct logistics functions afloat enables naval forces to maintain station anywhere,” reads the Navy’s Naval Operations Concept: 2010. So these bases that float under the radar should really be counted, too.
A Bang, A Whimper, and the Alamo of the Twenty-First Century
Speaking before the Senate Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans, and Related Agencies early last year, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Dorothy Robyn referenced the Pentagon’s “507 permanent installations.” The Pentagon’s 2010 Base Structure Report, on the other hand, lists 4,999 total sites in the U.S., its territories, and overseas.
In the grand scheme of things, the actual numbers aren’t all that important. Whether the most accurate total is 900 bases, 1,000 bases or 1,100 posts in foreign lands, what’s undeniable is that the U.S. military maintains, in Chalmers Johnson’s famous phrase, an empire of bases so large and shadowy that no one — not even at the Pentagon — really knows its full size and scope.
All we know is that it raises the ire of adversaries like al Qaeda, has a tendency to grate on even the closest of allies like the Japanese, and costs American taxpayers a fortune every year. In 2010, according to Robyn, military construction and housing costs at all U.S. bases ran to $23.2 billion. An additional $14.6 billion was needed for maintenance, repair, and recapitalization. To power its facilities, according to 2009 figures, the Pentagon spent $3.8 billion. And that likely doesn’t even scratch the surface of America’s baseworld in terms of its full economic cost.
Like all empires, the U.S. military’s empire of bases will someday crumble. These bases, however, are not apt to fall like so many dominos in some silver-screen last-stand sequence. They won’t, that is, go out with the “bang” of futuristic Alamos, but with the “whimper” of insolvency.
Last year, rumbling began even among Washington lawmakers about this increasingly likely prospect. “I do not think we should be spending money to have troops in Germany 65 years after World War II. We have a terrible deficit and we have to cut back,” said Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank. Similarly, Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas announced, “If the United States really wants to assure our allies and deter our enemies, we should do it with strong military capabilities and sound policy — not by keeping troops stationed overseas, not siphoning funds from equipment and arms and putting it into duplicative military construction.”
Indeed, toward the end of 2010, the White House’s bipartisan deficit commission — officially known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — suggested cutting U.S. garrisons in Europe and Asia by one-third, which would, in their estimation, save about $8.5 billion in 2015.
The empire of bases, while still at or close to its height, is destined to shrink. The military is going to have to scale back its foreign footholds and lessen its global footprint in the years ahead. Economic realities will necessitate that. The choices the Pentagon makes today will likely determine on what terms its garrisons come home tomorrow. At the moment, they can still choose whether coming home will look like an act of magnanimous good statesmanship or inglorious retreat.
Whatever the decision, the clock is ticking, and before any withdrawals begin, the U.S. military needs to know exactly where it’s withdrawing from (and Americans should have an accurate sense of just where its overseas armies are). An honest count of U.S. bases abroad — a true, full, and comprehensive list — would be a tiny first step in the necessary process of downsizing the global mission.
Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation,and regularly at TomDispatch. His latest book, The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, will be published later this month. He is currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @NickTurse, on at http://nickturse.tumblr.com/Tumblr, and on NickTurse.com.
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America’s Failed War in Afghanistan — No Policy Change Is Going to Affect the Outcome
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At the end of the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal this weekend, the leadership of the Afghan Taliban issued a statement characterizing the alliance’s adoption of a loose timeline for a 2014 end to combat operations as “good news” for Afghans and “a sign of failure for the American government.” At the summit, President Barack Obama said that 2011 will begin “a transition to full Afghan lead” in security operations, while the Taliban declared: “In the past nine years, the invaders could not establish any system of governance in Kabul and they will never be able to do so in future.”
While Obama claimed that the US and its allies are “breaking the Taliban’s momentum,” the reality on the ground tells a different story. Despite increased Special Operations Forces raids and, under Gen. David Petraeus, a return to regular US-led airstrikes, the insurgency in Afghanistan is spreading and growing stronger. “By killing Taliban leaders the war will not come to an end,” said the Taliban’s former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, in an interview at his home in Kabul. “On the contrary, things get worse which will give birth to more leaders.”
Former and current Taliban leaders say that they have seen a swelling in the Taliban ranks since 9-11. In part, they say, this can be attributed to a widely held perception that the Karzai government is corrupt and illegitimate and that Afghans—primarily ethnic Pashtuns—want foreign occupation forces out. “We are only fighting to make foreigners leave Afghanistan,” a new Taliban commander in Kunduz told me during my recent trip to the country. “We don’t want to fight after the withdrawal of foreigners, but as long as there are foreigners, we won’t talk to Karzai.”
“The Americans have very sophisticated technology, but the problem here in Afghanistan is they are confronting ideology. I think ideology is stronger than technology,” says Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former senior member of Mullah Mohammed Omar’s government. “If I am a Taliban and I’m killed, I’m martyred, then I’m successful. There are no regrets for the Taliban. It’s very difficult to defeat this kind of idea.”
But it is not simply a matter of ideology versus technology. The Taliban is not one unified body. The Afghan insurgency is fueled by fighters with a wide variety of motivations. Some are the dedicated jihadists of which Zaeef speaks, but others are fighting to defend their land or are seeking revenge for the killing of family members by NATO or Afghan forces. While al Qaeda has been almost entirely expelled from Afghanistan, the insurgency still counts a small number of non-Afghans among its ranks. Bolstering the Taliban’s recruitment efforts is the perception in Afghanistan that the Taliban pays better than NATO or the Afghan army or police.
The hard reality US officials don’t want to discuss is this: the cultural and religious values of much of the Pashtun population–which comprises 25-40 percent of the country–more closely align with those of the Taliban than they do with Afghan government or US/NATO forces. The Taliban operate a shadow government in large swaths of the Pashtun areas of the country, complete with governors and a court system. In rural areas, land and property disputes are resolved through the Taliban system rather than the Afghan government, which is widely distrusted. “The objectives and goal of the American troops in Afghanistan are not clear to the people and therefore Afghans call the Americans ‘invaders,’” says Muttawakil. “Democracy is a very new phenomenon in Afghanistan and most people don’t know the meaning of democracy. And now corruption, thieves and fakes have defamed democracy. Democracy can’t be imposed because people will never adopt any value by force.”
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North American Union – “U.S. Super Spy Center” Uncovered in Mexico
-Megaplex includes offices for the CIA, FBI, DEA, Defense Intelligence, BATF, Department of Treasury and others.
- U.S. Intelligence Operatives will no longer have to disguise themselves as diplomats.
- Mexico will now have a Military ‘Liaison’ for NORTHCOM.
- U.S. is now in charge of all tactical efforts against the drug war, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism in Mexico.
- Obama and Hillary Clinton are credited for the creation of the Office of Bi-lateral Intelligence in Mexico (OBI).
With the approval of Felipe Calderón’s Administration, the U.S. Government finally got what it always wanted: To set up a super spy center in Mexico City. It was the escalation of the drug war in the country what opened the door to all U.S. intelligence agencies, including the military, to operate out of the Federal District without having to disguise their agents as diplomats.
The establishment of the Office of Bi-national Intelligence (OBI) was authorized by Calderon, after negotiations with Washington, which began under the government of his predecessor, Vicente Fox Quesada. The creation of the super spy center was authorized by the director of the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN), Guillermo Valdés Castellanos, without taking into account any objections from the Mexican military.
Through the OBI, Calderon has given the green light to U.S. Intelligence agents to spy on organized crime syndicates and drug cartels. They can also spy on Mexican government agencies, including the Secretariat of National Defense, Navy, and the diplomatic missions in Mexico.
The building headquarters, which includes offices from the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Department of Treasury is located at 265 Paseo de la Reforma Avenue, approximately 250 meters from the U.S. embassy.
The most significant presence at the OBI building is that of the Pentagon, which includes the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and the National Security Agency (NSA). It is followed by the U.S. Department of Justice, also with three agencies: the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
With two services, there is the Department of Homeland Security: Coast Guard Intelligence (CGI) and the Bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), while the Treasury Department has officers of the Bureau of Intelligence on Terrorism and Financial Affairs (TFI) .
In addition, the OBI opened two remote offices: one in Ciudad Juarez and one in Tijuana, housing U.S. agents and “task force commanders” who coordinate operations against drug trafficking with the support of Mexican Government personnel.
It is not known how many intelligence agents from the U.S. are operating in Mexico with the authorization of the Mexican Federal Government, since the creation of this center was announced on August 31st. The maintain that the exact number is “classified.”
The building occupied by the OBI in the Federal District is right next to the Mexican Stock Exchange and is part of what the security and intelligence services in Mexico define as a “soft target area” in reference to the possibility of an attack on U.S. interests in Mexico.
At this strategic point for Washington in the Mexican Federal District, there are also facilities for transnational corporations such as Ford, American Airlines, as well as Marriott and Sheraton hotels, among others.
The building where the OBI is located gives the impression of an ordinary business facility, with banks, insurance, telecommunications, commercial offices and private offices. The only thing that stands out is the entry and departure of U.S. citizens.
The building directory lists the names of the occupants all the way up to the 21st floor. However, after the 22nd floor, there are three penthouses that are only listed as “occupied.” And on the roof there is a dozen satellite dishes placed just above the logo of the telecommunications company Axtel.
“It’s the best covert location for the agencies to operate,” said the source that provided the location of the OBI. The ordinary appearance of the building is the way in which the United States often disguise intelligence centers around the world.
The reception and parking are guarded by private security services, while Federal District Police provide outside support.
Furthermore, the city government has installed special surveillance cameras with sirens to observe the movement of pedestrians and vehicles outside the building.
The scope and power of the OBI in Mexico is similar to the El Paso Intelligence Center, in Texas (EPIC), which dates back to 1974 and operates exclusively to combat drug trafficking, weapons and money laundering on the border between Mexico and United States.
EPIC has been credited for creating the strategies launched against drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico. Among the most successful are Operation White Tiger, which was used to investigate the activities of the Hank Rhon family in 1997, the capture and extradition, a year earlier, of Gulf Drug Cartel Leader Juan Garcia Abrego, and the discovery of narco-graves in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in 1998.
Subordination
Overrun by drug trafficking, the government of Felipe Calderón agreed to the establishment of the OBI in Mexico a proposal of the then head of National Intelligence in the United States, Admiral Dennis Blair, who last March was accompanied by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, during his working visit to Mexico.
According to the formal agreement, the new U.S. office workers interact with their Mexican counterparts, under the coordination of the State Department and the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE).
For the Pentagon, the strong presence of its agents in Mexico is intended to merge the intelligence and espionage services of both countries to identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of drug trafficking organizations and organized crime gangs.
Under this directive, issued on 18 March by Gen. Victor Eugene Renuart, then head of Northern Command (NORTHCOM), Mexico has carried out several operations against drug traffickers.
Since then, among some of the actions taken the drug lords have been the killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva, (aka El Barbas), Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, and Ezequiel Cardenas Guillen (aka Tony Tormenta), in addition to the arrests of other drug lords, such as Edgar ‘Barbie’ Valdez Villarreal.
Since the killing of Beltran Leyva in December of 2009, U.S. intelligence services, mainly the DEA, have mentioned their participation in various operations, against the very Arturo Beltran Leyva, Barbie Valdez, Teodoro Garcia Simental (aka El Teo), Jose Gerardo Alvarez Vazquez (aka El Indio or El Chayán), operator of the Beltran Leyva organization and Carlos Ramon Castro, a drug dealer who worked for several organizations.
As part of the Mexican government’s need to justify the militarization of the fight against drug trafficking, the Pentagon has strengthened its cooperation with the Mexican military. In early 2009, just as the Department of State and the Mexican Exterior Relations Secretariat (SRE) fine-tuned the details for the establishment of the OBI, the U.S. Department of Defense stepped up military training for Mexicans in Mexico and in several U.S. military bases.
The training has been an unprecedented event in the history of military relations between the two countries. For the first time, the Pentagon has brought counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism expertise from Iraq and Afghanistan to their offices in central Mexico.
In the case of Mexico, the training courses are developed and run by the Defense Department, and are focused on intelligence and tactical operations against drug trafficking, terrorism and the implementation of counterinsurgency tactics.
In addition to the courses offered in Mexico, the Mexican military has significantly increased the number of special forces troops in the Army, Air Force and the Navy to attend specialized intelligence training in U.S. military bases.
Liaisons
The main example of this cooperation is the presence -for the first time in the bilateral relationship- a member of the Mexican Army as a “liaison” between the Mexican military (Central Command) and the Northern Command in Colorado (NORTHCOM), according to a military source who spoke to the Mexican magazine Proceso.
On Wednesday 10, The Washington Post published on its front page a note informing that the liaison will also serve as deputy commander of the Institute for Security and Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere at Fort Benning, Georgia. From the sixties to the eighties, these facilities housed in the so-called School of the Americas, which went down in history as a supplying center for Latin American dictators, which are characterized by the systematic violation of human rights.
A U.S. official, who told the Post on condition of anonymity, said that given the seriousness of the drug violence in Mexico, “we have received direct instruction from the President (Barack Obama) and the highest levels in government, to really examine what more can be done in this counter-narcotics cooperation with Mexico.”
The establishment of the Office of Bi-national Intelligence (OBI) implies that for the first time in the history of Mexico, surveillance, supervision and qualification of work against organized crime between federal government agencies, including the military, rests in part on foreign officials.
According to the document unveiled by the White House on March 25, 2009 on the establishment of the OBI, the office is also responsible for overseeing the proper use of resources that Washington provides the Calderon administration in combating drug trafficking through the ‘Merida Initiative.’
“We will be coordinating our efforts with the government of Mexico through high-level contacts, which in part are related to the new intelligence services responsible for overseeing the implementation of Merida Initiative,” according to the document released by the White House (published by Proceso).
A year later, on March 23, 2010, Hillary Clinton announced during her working visit to the Federal District, in the context of the implementation of Plan Merida, the establishment of two “pilot programs” in the Tijuana-San Diego and Ciudad Juárez-El Paso corridors.
The two governments declared in a joint statement, that in the case of Ciudad Juárez, the program considers the development of “a model for the Mexican Government to collect and analyze tactical intelligence” as well as to “take action against drug trafficking, extortion, kidnapping and other criminal activities.”
However, the actual operations of the OBI in security and intelligence services, Mexicans will be subordinates of the U.S.. Agencies of the U.S. Government will play the role as experts in intelligence work, apart from previous advisory roles in order to increase Mexico’s ability to use information resources against drug cartel operations.
Link to Original Article in Spanish
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related Art .
U.S. squirm in Scandinavian spying row
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This is why i don’t like G.W.Bush !
1.400.000 souls and counting ,Sir !
Venezuela Welcomes Possible Cancellation of US-Colombia Military Accord
http://venezuelanalysis.com
Chavez (right) and President Santos (Telesur)
By James Suggett – Venezuelanalysis.com
Mérida, October 26th 2010 (Venezuelanalysis.com) – In response to reports that Colombia may not open seven of its military bases to United States military personnel as previously planned, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said the decision reflects “rationality, common sense, and responsibility.”
The vice president of the Colombian Senate, Alexandra Moreno, told the news agency EFE last week that Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos does not plan to present the US-Colombia military accord to the Colombian Congress for approval.
“The president has expressed to us that he will not process [the accord] in the Congress, that he will leave it aside, and we hope this policy continues,” said Moreno, who heads the Foreign Relations Committee in the Colombian Senate. “The accord fell apart the moment the Supreme Court said it was imperative for it to be approved by the Congress and that has not been done, so there is no military cooperation accord in those terms at this moment.”
Following Moreno’s announcement, government officials declared that no final decision has been made about whether or not to present the military accord to Congress.
The accord was originally signed in October 2009 as an extension of previously existing military cooperation with the US, a status that allegedly meant it did not need congressional approval. In August, however, the Colombian Supreme Court ruled that the deal constituted a new international treaty and thus had to be approved by the Congress before taking effect.
The deal, officially titled “Complementary Accord for Cooperation and Technical Assistance in Defense and Security between the Governments of Colombia and the United States of America,” would have granted US military personnel diplomatic immunity for their actions in Colombia, and permitted the US to increase its military presence and carry out military and espionage operations across the South American continent from seven Colombian bases.
The majority of South American countries opposed the deal, including Venezuela and Ecuador, which share lengthy borders with Colombia and have suffered the spillover effects of Colombia’s decades-old civil war, including the influx of millions of refugees, most of them poor peasants. Venezuela said the accord heightened the risk of US military interventions against governments that are politically at odds with Washington.
On Sunday, President Chavez applauded Santos’s decision. “The majority of the peoples of the region should breathe a sigh of relief. Rationality, common sense, and responsibility have prevailed,” he told the Venezuelan daily Ultimas Noticias.
“The previous government acted as part of the Pentagon’s war strategy,” Chavez added, referring to ex-Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, whose administration signed the original accord without congressional approval.
Chavez and Uribe shared friendly economic relations, but diplomatic relations soured and were severed several times by issues such as a Colombian attack on rebels in Ecuadoran territory in 2008, the US-Colombia military accord in 2009, and Uribe’s recent accusations that Chavez supports the Colombian rebels.
When Santos took office in August, the two countries renewed diplomatic relations and held talks on economic policies and policies toward armed rebel groups. Chavez said on Sunday that during these talks, various officials from both governments discussed the possibility of Colombia not activating the accord with the US, but that “it was not a condition.”
Senator Moreno, in her interview with EFE, said if the military deal were to be presented to Congress, “the debate would be of a different character in the Congress, very distinct from the one that was carried out initially.”
Military accords with the US “have not had results,” and there is less support for them than in the past, said Moreno. She also suggested that Santos, despite having served as Uribe’s minister for defense, may bring a shift in policy away from Uribe’s military policy. “There has been a 180 degree turn by President Santos and the priority will no longer be war, conflict, and military issues,” said the congressperson.
President Santos met with US officials on Monday to renew what he called a “true strategic partnership.” He will travel to Venezuela this Friday to meet with President Chavez and discuss the continuation of bilateral accords in the areas of cross-border economic relations, infrastructure, and military policy in the border region.
Published on Oct 26th 2010 at 4.15pm
Obama administration fingerprints on Ecuador coup attempt
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A must see ! Video: Unipolar World Will Lead to War – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
http://dprogram.net
(RussiaToday) – Speaking on the UN summit sidelines, Iran’s leader says the biggest trouble facing the world is domination by the United States. In an exclusive interview with RT, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad explains how he wants to change the existing world order.
See Also:
Ahmadinejad Lost in Translation
Iran’s president takes centre stage at the United Nations but his attack on the “unjust” west failed to be heard.
By Aljazeera
September 21, 2010 — Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has addressed the General Assembly on the second day of the UN’s millennium development goals summit. But it is not what he said on Tuesday that has made the news but what happened during the simultaneous translation of his speech, which has caused controversy.
Right from the start, his speech was overshadowed by technical problems, as the president was heard saying: “there’s no translation.” And these problems continued to cause confusion two minutes into his speech. All this was followed by an ominous announcement: “The interpreters would like to state that they are reading from a written text translated into English.” With that, the translation stopped altogether.
Despite all the technical issues, Ahmadinejad managed to communicate his message that there is a need for an overhaul of what he called “undemocratic and unjust” global decision-making bodies.
The much anticipated speech has now left many wondering what actually went wrong as the Iranian president’s speech ended the same way as it had started, without any translation.
Ahmadinejad, who arrived in New York on Saturday, told the Associated Press news agency that “the future belongs to Iran,” and challenged the US to accept that his country has a major role in world affairs.
US officials have made it clear that there are no plans for Barack Obama, the US president, to have any contact with the Iranian leader in New York this week.
Tight security
The New York Post, a right-wing tabloid, criticised US government spending on security preparations surrounding the Iranian leader’s visit.
“Ahmadinejad has access to a private elevator on his floor, a source said, and everything he touches is supplied by his aides. His rooms’ windowpanes were swapped for bullet-proof glass,” the paper reported.
On the topic of Iran’s nuclear programme, which Iran insists is for power generation rather than bomb-making, Obama plans to reiterate that the “door is still open” for international engagement, a US security official said on Monday.
Source: Information Clearing House
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Mainstream Bullshit
from : http://www.sott.net
Archie Kennedy
MWC News
Thu, 16 Sep 2010 21:00 CDT
The media have a responsibility and that responsibility is to inform us of what’s going on. If a nuclear power plant is at risk of spreading nuclear death two miles from our town, it is the responsibility of the media to let us know that the danger exists and why it exists. To a certain extent, we put our trust in them. It is a social contract. They are there to inform us, to warn us, to let us know what’s going on. Who, what, where, when, and why; all the information we need regarding the forces that impact us in our daily lives is delivered on our doorsteps, it comes in through the cable. We sleep well knowing that no midnight asteroid is about to send us back to the Stone Age.
But can we? At this point, trusting mainstream media is not a rational or intelligent choice to make. You may have noticed. They are not always honest. They have lied by saying things that are not true, by not saying things that are true, and very often through spinning bullshit, which is slightly different than lying. Sometimes bullshit is worse than lies. It’s not that they have done so several times, or even often. It’s that they do it all the time and they do it consistently.
Economic Lies
Economists have been lying and continue to lie through a critical time as the world economy becomes increasingly volatile and we become vulnerable to financial devastation. At this point in time the media and countless so-called economists have lulled faithful believers with a pack of lies. They have done it in 2008 and 2009 and they continue with the same lies and backward analysis in 2010. The same economists, experts, and corporate shills that have led us to the doors of the economic slaughterhouse are portrayed as gurus that have the holy grail of economic wisdom and direction. They are the same shysters, criminals, and corporate shills that have orchestrated the biggest sell out in history.
When Wall Street falters, they get excited. When Main Street slides into the Third World, they barely notice. While America shivers over burning barrels, Obama fiddles in blissful ignorance; he seems a sort of ‘let them eat cake’ monarch. A reporter recently asked Obama about his efforts to curb poverty in America. Obama’s reply could have come from the mouth of any imbecile or stooge that just walked out of any neo-liberal seminar. Obama said, “The most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy… It’s more important than any program we could set up. It’s more important than any transfer payment we could have.” Which is code for saying that the ruling class is the filter through which all spending must pass through? And it is implied, in all this that wealth emanates from the ruling class to the working classes and not the other way around. Will mainstream media even mention this or anything close? The short answer is ‘no’.
They are defining and will increasingly define poverty as ‘the New Normal’. And as America swirls down the toilet of depression, mainstream media bubbles along with cautious optimism that the stock market will continue to score enormous profits for the ruling class. Not once will they notice that what is good for Wall Street is bad for Main Street. To mention this class dichotomy is incorrect, politically.
War Lies
Even the most serious proponent of the substance and integrity of mainstream media would have to admit, when it comes to war, that the Pentagon, the President of the United States, and mainstream media make Orwell’s 1948 imagination seem prophetic. In 2010, doublespeak is expected and as you will read below, the infrastructure for constant surveillance is under construction. War is peace. What’s good is bad and what’s bad is good. The Iraq war ended but today, alternative media are reporting that American and Iraqi troops killed at least eight civilians in Fallujah, Iraq. American has no intention of leaving. It is just one more pack of lies. There is no end to the examples of doublespeak and outright lies that fill today’s media.
If you maintain a watch with war news stories collectors, like Anti War.com, you will see that atrocities happen in Afghanistan with sickening regularity. Civilians are killed by unmanned robots (drones) or NATO forces but mainstream media doesn’t report it or, if they do, they present it as just one more ‘whoops’ moment. American gangsters are running loose in uniform in Afghanistan and kill with impunity. A band of GI Joes has recently been found to have been cutting body parts off Afghan civilians they had killed for sport and had been keeping them for trophies. It was barely mentioned in mainstream media but you’d have to look for it. Imagine, for a moment, how the story would play if this was done by Cubans or Iranians. Do you think they’d notice?
The Americans have been bombing civilian populations in Pakistan with increasing regularity. In the past two days, according to Jason Ditz reporting for Anti-war.com, American drones have killed 37 people, one of which may belong to the Naquin Network, yet another group on that long list of enemies. The other victims are reported to be civilians or, people that have not conclusively been linked to the group.
In another very disturbing development, the American state is carrying out the extrajudicial execution of an American named Anwar al Awake who they allege is a terrorist. The individual case itself is alarming enough. The fact that it re-defines the scope of power of the American state however, is the real issue. Have mainstream media noticed? Currently, for mainstream media, the issue is about how to fight the legal battle against this bizarre development in American law. If they can kill their own citizens above the rule of law, we have entered a horrific new reality.
Then there is the sheer danger consequential to slaughtering, terrorizing and destroying whole nations. Media have the responsibility to let us know how badly the USA, the UK, Canada and all the other NATO participants have destroyed the cultures, livelihoods, and lives of the people they so routinely and mindlessly murder and maim. It is the same as the nuclear plant analogy. There will be consequences for us all. There will be future 9 11s and worse. And it will happen because of what we are doing now. If our tax dollars are in the service of whipping up hate around the world against us, we should know.
The media have been portraying the ongoing atrocities as an aberration; maybe it was rogue soldiers, maybe it was poor communication, maybe the victims were human shields. Victims are dismissed as ‘collateral damage’. What will not be discussed is the ugly and likely possibility that these victims are victims of collective punishment.
A dark and sinister reality had emerged within the American dream. Mainstream media isn’t reporting it; they are the maestros. The only objective views of this ‘new normal/World Order’ will be here in alternative media and if you indulge in reading or watching what you are reading at the moment (MWC News), chances are you have not swallowed the cool aid.
The State
Mainstream media is not just a simple money pig. It is much more than that. With the marriage of the corporation and the state fully consummated, it is natural for the corporate media to mouth the interests of both. Mainstream media has become a tool employed by those that want to tell you that the Western world needs to, more than anything else, shore up its security. In a similar vein to Hitler’s fire in the Reichstag, the billionaires that run the White House want us to be terrified.
They want a to funnel billions of tax dollars into their own pockets through the sale of weapons systems. As a result we have seen nine years of talking heads discussed, in very serious tones, the need for security. We are in a new age, we are told. Threatened by Muslim extremists. If you can remember the 60s, 70s or even well before then, you will know that terrorism or guerilla warfare has been around a long, long time and there is nothing new or more sinister today than there was in 1970. Terrorism is another word for guerilla warfare which is naturally adopted by those with little or no power.
This thrust is more threatening to freedom than we may notice at first. In a free society, the threat of danger is always present. It’s part of the social contract. Criminals run free until they have actually committed the crime; that’s the price of living in a free society.
Hyping ubiquitous threats has muted opposition to the construction of a massive, although unseen, state apparatus in the United States that would shame the USSR in its heyday. The Washington Post, to its credit, has recently reported vague parameters on the growing American state apparatus. In an article entitled “Top Secret America” Dana Priest and William Arkin report that the American government has created a massive underworld that “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
Here is an excerpt from the article: “These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
The investigation’s other findings include:
- Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
- An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
- In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.” [Source]
Kudos to the Washington Post. Given the magnitude of the story however, it is almost hidden from view. Where are the talking heads? The hyped up concern about a Soviet style neighbour watching neighbour reality emerging in the USA?
The common narrative is not aimed to challenge this kind of ominous development. Instead, it is to continue to cry for the need for more security and less freedom. The story line shouts the need for an iron state apparatus.
Corporate media is becoming synonymous with state media, much like Pravda of the old USSR. Corporate media don’t just make money and parrot the wishes and plans of the ruling class. They also strive to indoctrinate and shape the rabble into a uniform and docile mass of petty chauvinism.
Ruling Class Media
The term, ‘ruling class’ has not been in common usage except for that band of serious Marxists selling papers at the university. However, there is no better description for the class that run government. They rule and they rule because they belong to those that are wealthy enough to tell politicians what to do. They are, properly, the ruling class.
They have their own specific interests and those interests happen to be against the interests of the rest of us. These interests include selling weapons, controlling resources, and dominating each and every corner of the world. Those munitions/oil billionaires that set the tone, the content, and the agenda for the media they also own and control. A small-town newspaper does not have the resources to hire investigative journalists and they pick up the main stories from the newswire. Those newswire stories are fed through the filters of the corporate media. Here, Noam Chomsky explains who sets the content and the agenda for the mainstream:
“The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.”
Chomsky also makes the point that the media has a specific motive and that motive is the audience itself. That is why news stories are very short and their patterns are quite simplistic. Short attention grabbing sound bites or pleasing optics are important. Content is also important but not in the way it should be. The main thrust of the business is not to inform, the business is about grabbing an audience and people are the product. Chomsky continues:
“Take the New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses.” (Lifted from)
But there is more to this than selling audiences. You will notice that the media will make certain issues relevant and important. They will spin them out in a seamless drum beat to the corporate party line and with each other, sometimes word for word. For example, in the 90s the ruling class wanted to cut social programs in the USA and in Canada. The deficit was the ‘terrorist threat’ of the time. Right wing think tanks and bond rating agencies like Moody’s of New York suddenly had a lot to say about how societies are governed and how tax money is spent. You may argue; but the deficit was a real problem at the time and it has returned. Notice however that when tax dollars are spent on weapons systems, the media does not make an issue of the deficit. It is rarely mentioned, if at all. That is because those that control the media are the same people that profit from building weapons systems.
According to Peter Phillips, “The eleven largest or most influential media corporations in the United States are General Electric Company (NBC), Viacom Inc. (cable), The Walt Disney Company (ABC), Time Warner Inc.(CNN), Westinghouse Electric Corporation (CBS), The News Corporation Ltd. (Fox), Gannett Co. Inc., Knight-Ridder Inc., New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., and the Times Mirror Co. These eleven major broadcast and print media corporations now represent a major portion of the news information systems in the United States. For many people their entire source of news and information comes from these eleven corporations.” (Source)
General Electric is in the business of making battlefield computer systems. Their director, former senator Sam Nunn (who also directs Chevron/Texaco) isn’t likely to promote journalists that research his connections or to report any stories that work against the interests of NBC. He is not likely to be happy about his reporters making anti war statements either.
Steve Mizrach points out, “Opinion in our society must be carefully shaped and moulded within certain careful boundaries: those who transgress those boundaries are libel to wind up “extremists,” “ideologues,” “fanatics,” or “agitators. Now that dissidents in the U.S. can no longer be labelled ‘fellow travellers’ of the Moscow-run Commie conspiracy, the task has become more urgent. And how is it that consent, that most valuable of social products is manufactured?” (Source)
Mizrach points out that the following tactics are employed by what we may regard, realistically, as the enemy; that is, mainstream media. They mould opinion particularly on Sunday talk shows by parading the opinions of sycophants that are the mouthpieces that have been schooled within the hallowed halls of the University of Corporate Indoctrination.
These are bolstered by spin doctors, or, PR devils. “PR managers, known as “spin doctors” when working in government, are able to carefully craft speeches and advertisements which evoke powerful images in the American psyche, frequently using “power words” such as freedom, fairness, liberty, justice, and peacekeeping for policies which dominate, discriminate, imprison, exploit, and terrorize much of the rest of the world.” (Mizrach)
Mizrach also points out the real purpose of public opinion polls is not so much to measure public opinion as it is to shape it. They also employ academics and think tanks to shape and mould public opinion.
Together, these tools are used against us. They are more threatening an enemy to the citizens of Western nations than an army of bin Laden. They are used not only to shape public opinion. They are used to lie to us and to indoctrinate the impressionable and the young.
Class War
Non Americans look upon our American brothers and sisters and what they have served up on a daily basis under a disguise called ‘news’. We watched in incredulity as the American health care debate raged. The word socialist, we discovered, is a dirty word in America. Ignorant to a fault, the politicians and the media spun lies and distortions with wide eyed enthusiasm as if the rest of the world wasn’t watching. It looked like a Jerry Springer show, a pitiful crowd of beaten down as angry victims proudly showing their own ignorance to the world, utterly oblivious. But that is not America, it is a fraction of America and we find the same backward and angry lumpen attitudes everywhere. The difference is, in the USA, it is cultivated.
It should be obvious by now that we are on the losing side of a very aggressive class war. The ruling elites have the clear advantage. They are waging war on the rest of us and we, as a collective, are only dimly aware that it’s happening. CNN, Fox, and CTV are not telling. A large part of that ignorance is a result of their slick packaging and their endless supply of Presidents, Prime Ministers, and sexy stories. They are very good at slick visuals and clever sound bites. Their whole focus is on the packaging, the face. They have their reputation and influence. They have paid reporters that are on the scene. They have very little in terms of substance. For that, you turn to us; to alternative media.
It is hard for us to actually recognize them as our enemy. They have such pretty smiles and they tell such human and touching stories. But don’t ever forget; these useful idiots are aiming to impoverish you, to strip away your rights. It’s happening. They callously disregard the suffering of ‘collaterals’. They tell you that they are ensuring that you are ‘secure’ by whipping up hate all over the planet. The stunned mouthpieces don’t even know they are doing it. Some of the worst war crimes in living memory are enabled by these treacherous talking heads. They are taking part in the ultimate economic betrayal of America and the rest of the post-industrial world. They protect the ruling class and work for the benefit of that class against you and me. They are certainly our enemy. What is vital is that you and I recognize this. We can’t fight back as long as we allow ourselves to be lulled by the likes of Jerry Springer and CNN.
For our part, we have MWC News, Counterpunch, Democracy Now, and a large choice of alternative media outlets to seek out pertinent news, honest opinions, and insightful analysis. The internet is a genie let out of a bottle. This fluid and democratic flow of information is the blessing of this uncontrolled machine that sits before you. The corporations do not own or control this. They certainly have an advantage but on this front, our fight has just begun. We need to expand, to develop better tools and a wider audience. We need to fight back. Together we stand on the front lines. Recognize it.
Interview with CIA Veteran Michael Scheuer ‘Only the Taliban Are Not Corrupt’
Marc Hujer, Spiegel




































