Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war on terror. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Obama sends Bush to teach Syria how to kill civilians legally

Syrian President Bashir Assad being advised
by former American President George W. Bush
In a last ditch effort to avoid air strikes and cruise missile attacks on Syria,
President Barack Obama has deployed former President George W Bush as a special envoy to instruct Syrian President Bashir Assad on the how to kill civilians without committing war crimes.

"No one alive knows more about this than former President Bush," Obama said. "He has by some estimates, authorized the killing of over a million Iraqi men, women, and children and untold tens of thousands of Afghans--all without committing war crimes or human rights violations. That's why I gave him immunity for actions taken in those wars just the other day."

Bush had already arrived in Syria and begun what he called his "Cheneying" of the young president of Syria.

He took a brief break to explain the advice he's giving Assad in an exclusive interview with Fox News.

"See, first thing I told him is we're the deciders.  We decide what's the right way to kill terrorists.  And that's the first step.  Only kill terrorists.  And they can come in any gender or age or sexual oriented minority."

The Fox interviewer Chris Wallace asked if he advised Assad against the use of chemical weapons.

"Of course I did! That's the first thing I said! There's nothing more bad than killing someone with a gas that leaves their body mostly intact.  I told him a real leader uses weapons that blows them bodies into pieces and buries them in rubble so it takes their relatives a while to find them and put them back together."

"See when they're busy doing that, they can't be terroristing as much."

"So explosives are the only weapons that are moral?" Wallace asked.

"I never said that," Bush bristled.  "We got stuff that can burn people to death. Inside and out at the same time.  And they can't put it out even in water.  They just kinda run around like a Bugs Bunny cartoon till they run out of juice, heh heh."

"You can also take them out one at a time Old West style with good old bullets even if you have to do it from a helicopter to get more of them like reporters and kids trying to help terrorists we're in the middle of killing."

Wallace asked if killing, even if limited to these legal methods, won't generate more enemies for the Assad regimes.

"You know I don't really think about that.  But if you think that's a problem, you can bring some people in and ask them how they feel about your leadership.  Sometimes you have to use special 'enhanced' interrogation methods we've developed like waterboarding to get an honest answer out of them."

"Don't those methods sometimes lead to additional deaths?" Wallace asked.

"Not that I know of.  I mean not people that wouldn't lose their life later anyway."

Wallace said there may be some limits to how Bush's experience could apply to Syria since President Assad is killing his own people and Bush was killing people on the other side of the world.

"Chris, that's what's great about America. We know how other people need to do things even if we haven't done it ourselves yet."

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

War on Terror shift to Pakistan over Iran Pipeline




I was puzzled why, after years of doing our bidding in the War on Terror, Pakistan suddenly was recognized as a haven of terrorists that must be dealt with--even though the same extremist groups had been there all along, often acting with the blessing and support of Pakistani intelligence, and tacitly the US.

I had a fleeting hope that Obama was actually going to end the War on Terror by extinguishing the relatively small terrorist groups that might be motivated to launch 9/11 type attacks against us, dig up the body of bin Laden, do the DNA tests, declare him dead, and thereby end the remaining public support for the War on Terror.

I should have known that was too much to hope for since Obama never addressed the real reasons for our invasions of Iraq or Afghanistan.

Iraq has tens of trillions of dollars worth of easy extracted oil, but no contracts with American companies before the war. One of our goals in the Iraq War was to force them to give up 88% of their oil income to oil companies as stated in a Bush sponsored Hydrocarbon Law. For comparison, the Saudis, only give up about half. Despite Bush and members of both parties in Washington strong-arming Iraqis to pass it, they could only get the Iraqi cabinet to pass it, never the whole parliament--even when the oil companies offered millions in bribes to each member.

Similarly, energy companies courted the Taliban for a pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan to take natural gas to India but gave up in frustration shortly before 9/11. In 2006, India was concerned about continuing the project until America gave assurances that we would protect the pipeline. Those assurances were repeated in 2008. (Thanks to chill_wind at DU, who provided another good background link on the pipeline)

The Pakistan link of the pipeline route seemed to be in place--until IRAN proposed an alternative to the Afghanistan route that ran from Iran to Pakistan to India instead. And Pakistan accepted the offer:

Perhaps the most convenient distraction of the entire War on Terror has been the fact that war makes privatization easier. Energy economist John Foster notes how the focus on national security masks a critical motive of the AfPak war: “Rivalry for pipeline routes and energy resources reflects competition for power and control in the region.”

One such route is the massive Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-India-Pakistan pipeline, which would transport 30 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year. Meanwhile, Iran is planning an alternative pipeline through Pakistan and India, to which Pakistan has agreed to in principle.
(from Vancouver, BC's Straight.com)
What is the US response to losing this game of geopolitical chess? Patrick Clawson, Deputy Director for Research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said:

Washington fears the pipeline will reduce the West's economic leverage over Tehran - economic leverage that is necessary to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
The only thing I disagree with in that quote is that Washington probably doesn't want the economic leverage to make Iran drop their nuclear program, but instead wants Iran to drop their nuclear program so that the US has the full range of options to coerce Iran to conform to our oil & gas companies business interests.

The real decision-makers in Washington have no concern about nuclear proliferation. If they did, they would bomb or invade North Korea every time they did a nuclear test or launched a missile over Japan.

The real decision-makers in Washington have no concern about terrorism. If they did, they would have gone after the country that the FBI found sent one of their intelligence agents to pick up two of the hijackers at the Los Angeles airport, set them up in an apartment, and then funneled money to them from the their ambassador's wife until 9/11. The Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 also found this country same country involved in the attack: Saudi Arabia.

Business interests dictate foreign policy. If you want to find out how much, read the Pulitzer Prize winning history of oil, THE PRIZE by Daniel Yergin. When oil companies want something, they don't ask senators and presidents for favors, they give orders. You might also read OVERTHROW by Steven Kinzer on why the US overthrew various other countries governments, including the secular, democratically elected one in Iran in 1953.

Business uses our state department and military to coerce deals with other countries because it costs them next nothing. They make a tens of million dollars of political donations and reap hundreds of billions in profit when the politicians follow their orders and cook up a war. And we don't present them with a bill for the military action or get a cut of the profits from the oil or land we stole for them.

Worst of all though is that our elected leaders don't talk honestly about any of this with the public and instead misplace blame for events like 9/11 and make up embarrassingly juvenile fairy tales about an "Islamofascist" menace from countries that have no ability invade or hold territory in the United States, and no technology equal to ours unless we sell it to them. To the extent that we are not let in on the real debate, we do not have a real democracy.



Monday, September 29, 2008

apply methods of War on Terror to Wall Street economic terrorists

The money lost on Wall Street didn't just disappear. Like a street scammer playing the shell game, they move the pea around and around then slip it off the table into their hand so it isn't under any of the shells. In this case, their hand is off-shore accounts, and it is the same hand any bailout money will end up in.

These Wall Street scammers have done far more damage to our economy than any Middle Eastern terrorists have, so we need to use the Bush administration's methods on his buddies:

  • No assumption of innocence, especially for execs at companies seeking bailouts. If you buy or sell something that isn't a tangible product or service for a living, you are a danger to society. The less an average person can understand what it is you buy and sell, the greater danger you are to society. If you doubt that, watch the documentary THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM about Enron.

  • No fourth amendment rights to restrictions on searches. If they get the cash, we get to dig through their trash--their personal trash. And bank accounts, phone records, or anything else that would tell us where the money went.

  • Likewise, no fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. We should use every means at our disposal to find out what they know about money laundering, hiding assets, and which politicians and regulators are on the take. There has been some great advances made in lie detection technology in the last decade. Brains scans can determine if someone is lying with 100% accuracy, and even if they won't speak, they can detect whether or not someone recognizes a photo or some other stimulus. We should give those technologies their first real world test.

  • Forfeiture of property beyond what they stole or scammed. This requires borrowing the forfeiture rules from the War on Drugs, were if they find one pot seed in your carpet, they'll take your car or house even if it was from someone who was housesitting for you. If forfeiture is supposed to be a deterrent to drug dealers, it should be equally effective on these equally greedy bastards.

  • Pre-emptive military strikes on countries that harbor Wall Street types and their assets. We cannot wait for the United Nations to act against the Cayman Islands, Seychelles, and Lichstenstein. We must strike before the economic terrorists can move their assets to another safe haven. We cannot wait for the final proof that could come in the form of a Great Depression.

  • Torture. If torture works on ideologically motivated prisoners as the Bushies claim, imagine how much more effective it will be to get off-shore account numbers from some pampered trust fund baby. Hell, you wouldn't even have to strip them naked. Just take away their valets and they won't know how to put their own clothes on.

  • Access to attorneys. If they can contact an attorney, they could use code words or even facial expressions to give approval to shift assets to different shell corporations or off-shore accounts.

  • Renditions. It is very likely that even the Americans most hurt by these assholes won't have the stomach to waterboard or sexually assault a banker, broker, or hedge fund manager. Therefore, we should consider outsourcing this work to a country that has a better track record of dealing with oligarchs run amok: Russia. It would also help stabilize relations after the Bush administration & McCain's saber-rattling in their direction.

    Prison sentences could also be outsourced. Imagine how much we could save on gaurds, food, health care, and accommodations if we store these assholes in CHINA.


These terrorists steal not merely to enrich themselves, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America's middle class grows fearful, politically weaker, and smaller in number. They stand against us, because we stand in their way.

We are not deceived by their pretenses to piety. We have seen their kind before. They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies. (Applause.)

Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This is not, however, just America's fight. And what is at stake is not just America's freedom. This is the world's fight. This is civilization's fight. This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance and freedom.

We ask every nation to join us. We will ask, and we will need, the help of police forces, intelligence services, and banking systems around the world.

I also want to speak tonight directly to the capitalists throughout the world. We respect your faith. It's practiced freely by many millions of Americans, and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends. Its teachings are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of profit blaspheme the name of the wealthy. The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack capitalism itself. The enemy of America is not our many capitalist friends; if you want to make a living providing clearly defined financial services on honest terms that don't exploit the desperate or push the middle class into poverty, we have no quarrel with you. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government and politicians of any party that supports them.

The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.

Fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice -- assured of the rightness of our cause, and confident of the victories to come. In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom, and may He watch over the United States of America.

Thanks to George W. Bush's speech writers and legal advisor like Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo, and Jay Bybee for these policies and words


Friday, August 03, 2007

before 93 WTC bombing, FBI wanted mole to give bombers LIVE explosives

The gist of it is, the mole or informant was so freaked out by the suggestion that he started taping his conversations with his handlers and presented them as evidence in court. He also said that if the FBI had listened to his advice, let him be in on the bomb-making and substitute harmless powder for the explosives, he could have prevented the bombing.

What does that have to do with anything at this late date?

There are two facts about the "War on Terror" that are routinely ignored by the American media, but not by the rest of the world:
  • the war is not about terrorism but controlling oil with tens of trillions of dollars and other natural resources.
  • acts of terrorism can be provoked or even staged to suit a political agenda.
Author of the torture memos (which makes him a prima facie war criminal) said as much in an Los Angeles Times column:
Another tool would have our intelligence agencies create a false terrorist organization. It could have its own websites, recruitment centers, training camps and fundraising operations. It could launch fake terrorist operations and claim credit for real terrorist strikes, helping to sow confusion within Al Qaeda's ranks, causing operatives to doubt others' identities and to question the validity of communications.

LA Times link
And so did Donald Rumsfeld when he was Secretary of Defense:

The board recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.

Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at "stimulating reactions" among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction -- that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to "quick-response" attacks by U.S. forces.

LA Times link

There is a long history of the FBI and intel agencies infiltrating groups like the Klan, militias, and foreign terrorist groups, not just to gather information, but to prod them to act, then catch them in the act.

Or if it is more politically expedient, NOT catch them, as the story below seems to imply.

Oddly enought, two of the 9/11 hijackers lived with an FBI informant, and two of the hijackers were supported by Saudi intelligence agents according to Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11.

If your friend kills your wife and you know it and still have a beer with him every week, is it unreasonable to assume you wanted him to kill your wife?

KEY EXCERPTS:





Plot Warning Is Reviewed By the F.B.I.
BLUMENTHAL, RALPH. New York Times. Oct 29, 1993. pg. B.1

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is reviewing the allegations of an informer who said after the World Trade Center explosion that he had warned law-enforcement agents of a plot to build a bomb, and that if they had worked with him, they would have prevented the blast, officials said.

But some officials disputed important parts of the informant's account yesterday, saying that conversations with him took place half a year before the attack on the trade center, and months before the bomb was actually built.

The comments of the informer, Emad A. Salem, are in transcripts of telephone conversations with the police and F.B.I. agents that Mr. Salem secretly recorded. In the transcripts, Mr. Salem is quoted as saying that the bombing could have been foiled but for an F.B.I. supervisor's rejection of a plan to have him work with the plotters building the bomb, then substitute harmless powder for the explosives.

The review of Mr. Salem's allegations that has been undertaken by the F.B.I. is not a formal investigation. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which looks into suspected ethical lapses, has not been called in, officials said. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity. Reno Declines to Comment

FULL TEXT

Sunday, July 15, 2007

FACTS Missing from the Iraq Debate (updated)

NOTE: cross-posted at John Edwards website to make his staffers actually consider bringing it to his attention. Consider doing the same to other candidates.


If Democrats were serious about ending the war, they would make the GOP lies about the war all the more obvious by giving up on vague platitudes and state the facts about Iraq plainly and often.

Some of the facts I have in mind have been covered in the press on page A13 or further back, but have only been acknowledged by a handful of Democrats, not the leadership, and NO republicans.

The main ones: the war is about oil, the Iraqis want us to leave, the insurgency is NOT al Qaeda, and the Iraqi government is only "sovereign" as long as they agree with Bush.

If a member of your family was killed, and the cop assigned to the case never got more detailed in his updates on the case than saying, "Well, he was in a dangerous neighborhood, and we all know what happens there," you would rightly be worried about whether he was actually working the case.

Unfortunately, that is the case with most Democrats and Iraq. While they did an admirable job of exposing the lies about why we went into Iraq, they never dropped the other shoe and loudly explained the truth.

I could almost buy that they are trying to avoid kicking the dragons and quietly back out of the war except for a couple of nagging details--many back the Hydrocarbon Law that Iraqis rightly see as theft of their oil income, and many Democratic withdrawal proposals have massive loopholes about leaving some troops for counter-terrorism, force protection, and training Iraqis

Some of the facts I have in mind have been covered in the press on page A13 or further back, but have only been acknowledged by a handful of Democrats, not the leadership, and NO republicans.

I'm willing to listen to any proposals provided they squarely and upfront acknowledge the FACTs. Conversely, the less I hear about these things, the more I suspect the person talking is lying.


I don't expect Republicans to be honest on these issues. Like NASCAR racers, they wear their corporate sponsorship on their sleeve and read the talking points their owners fax them.

I do expect Democrats who want progressives to vote for them to be honest about these issues because too many have divided loyalties with one foot in the corporate camp, and one foot with the American people. Getting them to tell the truth about Iraq is one way to find out if the foot on our side isn't going to be on our neck if they get elected.







Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Once upon a time, an ideological enemy we had no diplomatic relations with, tested a nuke...

At the time, we were in a war with that country's neighbor, concerned that more people might be enslaved the ideology we didn't like.

They went on to develop a nuclear arsenal that is today relatively modest by US & Russian standards, but nonetheless far more than Iran or North Korea are likely to have any time soon.

Our president, who hated the very bad ideology, did a very odd thing. He went and made friends with them even though we were still fighting in the neighboring country.

Those who wanted us to be very afraid of the very bad ideology were sure that the country with the nukes would attack us or at least infect us with the very bad ideology.

Today, we don't worry about that country nuking or even attacking us in the near future because we owe them too much money and we buy too much of the stuff they make since they seem to have become infected with our ideology even though we haven't been infected with theirs at all.

Likewise, the neighboring country we fought in so long to convince them not to adopt the very bad ideology tried it for a while and decided they'd rather be like us.

We don't get to pick those countries leaders or have troops there, but for some reason they like us anyway.

With the other bad idea, there were countries we made friends with, countries we were a little friendly with, and one or two we shunned.

The ones we became friends with changed quickly, the ones we were a little friendly with changed a little less quickly, and the ones we shunned didn't seem to change at all.

Now some of the same people who said to be afraid of the very bad ideology want us to be afraid of a different very bad ideology and say we must fight a very long war to convince them the ideology is a very bad idea and that one of those countries may get a nuclear bomb.

Which method is likely to get the quickest results? Kill a lot of people or make friends?

Sometimes in history, making friends doesn't work so well. Hitler and Stalin probably would have taken other people's land and killed a lot of people no matter what. But those countries were roughly our equals. Today, maybe two countries in the world are our peers, and the rest are fleas on our ass militarily. They might be difficult for us to invade and occupy, but they would have absolutely no chance of invading and occupying us.

Therefore, there is little danger in making friends (except to the people who wanted to steal stuff while we were fighting and invading).

Our elected leaders like to make up very simple stories that are easy for us to understand. Why don't they tell this one more often? Maybe because it has a happy ending for us--but not for the people who matter.




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