From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Iraq
February 2nd, 2007This is a long but excellent article. It takes you inside the pathological decision making process that has brought us to this point. While it doesn’t give me much hope that the military will stop this, it confirms my analysis that this diabolical regime is not even considering alternatives to war with Iran.
I forgot, I already gave up on hope.
Via: Vanity Fair:
…Waging war against Iran could be the most catastrophic choice of all. It is widely believed that Iran would respond to an attack by blockading the Strait of Hormuz, a 20-mile-wide narrows in the eastern part of the Persian Gulf through which about 40 percent of the world’s oil exports are transported. Oil analysts say a blockade could propel the price of oil to $125 a barrel, sending the world economy into a tailspin. There could be vast international oil wars. Iran could act on its fierce rhetoric against Israel.
America’s 130,000 soldiers in Iraq would also become highly vulnerable in the event of an attack on Iran. “Our troops in Iraq are supplied with food, fuel, and ammunition by truck convoys from a supply base in Kuwait,” says Lang. “Most of that goes over roads that pass through the Shiite-dominated South of Iraq. The Iranians could cut those supply lines just like that—the trucks are easy to shoot at with R.P.G.’s,” or rocket-propelled grenades.
In hopes of avoiding that, the Iraq Study Group advised Bush to open direct talks with Iran. Members of both parties in Congress have publicly given similar advice, as have former secretary of state Colin Powell and Robert Gates, the new secretary of defense. Still, it would be naïve to think that either a wall of opposition or the possibility of dire consequences would necessarily deter this president. Even before his January 10 speech, many inside the military had concluded that the decision to bomb Iran has already been made. “Bush’s ‘redline’ for going to war is Iran having the knowledge to produce nuclear weapons—which is probably what they already have now,” says Sam Gardiner, a retired air-force colonel who specializes in staging war games on the Middle East. “The president first said [that was his redline] in December 2005, and he has repeated it four times since then.”
In April, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker that U.S. troops were already on the ground in Iran, negotiating alliances with the Azerbaijanis in the North, the Kurds in the Northeast, and the Baluchis in the Southeast. In September, Time reported that a U.S. campaign to wipe out Iran’s nuclear program could entail bombing up to 1,500 targets. More recently, Paul Craig Roberts, a former assistant secretary of the Treasury under Ronald Reagan, asserted in the Baltimore Chronicle that Bush “will attack Iran with tactical nuclear weapons, because it is the only way the neocons believe they can rescue their goal of U.S. (and Israeli) hegemony in the Middle East.” Adds former C.I.A. officer Philip Giraldi, “I’ve heard from sources at the Pentagon that their impression is that the White House has made a decision that war is going to happen.”
According to Sam Gardiner, the most telling sign that a decision to bomb has already been made was the October deployment order of minesweepers to the Persian Gulf, presumably to counter any attempt by Iran to blockade the Strait of Hormuz. “These have to be towed to the Gulf,” Gardiner explains. “They are really small ships, the size of cabin cruisers, made of fiberglass and wood. And towing them to the Gulf can take three to four weeks.”
Another serious development is the growing role of the U.S. Strategic Command (StratCom), which oversees nuclear weapons, missile defense, and protection against weapons of mass destruction. Bush has directed StratCom to draw up plans for a massive strike against Iran, at a time when CentCom has had its hands full overseeing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Shifting to StratCom indicates that they are talking about a really punishing air-force and naval air attack [on Iran],” says Lang.
Moreover, he continues, Bush can count on the military to carry out such a mission even without congressional authorization. “If they write a plan like that and the president issues an execute order, the forces will execute it. He’s got the power to do that as commander-in-chief. We set that up during the Cold War. It may, after the fact, be considered illegal, or an impeachable offense, but if he orders them to do it, they will do it.”
Lang also notes that the recent appointment of a naval officer, Admiral William Fallon, to the top post at CentCom may be another indication that Bush intends to bomb Iran. “It makes very little sense that a person with this background should be appointed to be theater commander in a theater in which two essentially ‘ground’ wars are being fought, unless it is intended to conduct yet another war which will be different in character,” he wrote in his blog. “The employment of Admiral Fallon suggests that they are thinking about something that is not a ground campaign.”
Lang predicts that tensions will escalate once the administration grasps the truth about Prime Minister Maliki. “They want him to be George Washington, to bind together the new country of Iraq,” says Lang. “And he’s not that. He is a Shia, a factional political leader, whose goal is to solidify the position of Shia Arabs in Iraq. That’s his goal. So he won’t let them do anything effective against [Muqtada al-Sadr’s] Mahdi army.” Recently, a complicated cat-and-mouse game has begun, with Maliki’s forces arresting hundreds of Mahdi militiamen, including a key aide to Muqtada al-Sadr. But there are many unanswered questions about the operations, which could amount to little more than a short-term effort to appease the U.S.
Gary Sick is slightly more optimistic that the Bush administration’s Iran strategy entails more than brute force. “What has happened is that the United States, in installing a Shiite government in Iraq, has really upset the balance of power [in the Middle East],” Sick says. “Along with our Sunni allies—Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—[the administration is] terribly concerned about Iran emerging as the new colossus. Having created this problem, the U.S. is now in effect using it as a means of uniting forces who are sympathetic [to us].”
In order to do that, Sick says, the administration must reassure America’s allies that it is serious about protecting them if the conflict spreads throughout the region—drawing in Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, which would resist any attempt by the Kurds to create an independent state. “That means providing Patriot missiles, if Iran goes after the Saudi oil ports,” he says. “One of the prices we will have to pay is a more active role in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Then there is fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon. The president has signed a covert-action finding that allows the C.I.A. to confront and counter Hezbollah in Lebanon. So this is a very broad strategy. It has a clear enemy and an appeal to Saudis, to Israelis, and has a potential of putting together a fairly significant coalition.”
For all that, Sick acknowledges, this policy carries a significant risk of provoking war with Iran: “Basically, this is a signal to Maliki that we are not going to tolerate Shiite cooperation with Iran. This could lead to the ultimate break with Maliki. But once you start sending these signals, you end up in a corner and you can’t get out of it.”
Whatever the administration’s master plan may be, parts of it are already under way. In mid-January, the U.S. sent a second aircraft-carrier strike group to the Persian Gulf. According to Gardiner, by the end of February the United States will have enough forces in place to mount an assault on Iran. That, in the words of former national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, would be “an act of political folly” so severe that “the era of American preponderance could come to a premature end.”
The Bush White House has already built the fire. Whether it will light the match remains to be seen.
Bush Violation of FISA Law a Felony
February 2nd, 2007I’m sick of all of the bullshit talk about “the law” and this regime. We’re WAY beyond “the law” now, and any possible remedies it affords us.
Since when did tyrants start paying attention to any laws but their own psychotic whims?
Lots of smart people flapping their gums and tickling their keyboards re: “the law” don’t seem to have much of a grasp on the history of tyranny.
Part of what makes Cryptogon interesting to people is how I seem to be weeks, months or years ahead of events. Want to know a secret? I’m able to do it because none of this is new. It has all happened before. It’s not difficult to see where we’re going when you know where we’ve been.
And this is what I know about tyrannical regimes: They don’t back down because of laws. They create an internal logic that drives policy, while excluding contrary perspectives. In other words, there are no alternatives, for them, because they don’t cognitively allow for the possibility of alternatives.
The latest iteration of this familiar scenario will involve mushroom clouds unless drastic and heroic action is taken right now.
Indeed, the chances of America altering course are slim to none. And the slim part of that grim equation would involve another military coup (I count JFK’s assassination as the most recent military coup in the U.S. The one before that failed initially). No, I’m not talking about a bunch of overweight Bubbas with their pickup trucks and militia patches massing at the local Dairy Queen. I mean an honest to god coup d’état, with a U.S. general showing up to the White House along with a bunch of guys in ninja outfits and Apache gunships, announcing to everyone inside, “COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR.” Navy SEAL teams taking over the aircraft carriers in or on their way to the Persian Gulf… The Air Force making sure China and Russia don’t get any funny ideas while America cleans house…
Now, once that ball starts rolling, there’s no way to know where it will wind up. It’s a gamble. Things could get better. Things could get worse. What’s for sure, though, is that this regime represents a clear and present danger to everyone, everywhere. What’s for sure is that there’s no way to alter the course of this regime within the political system.
THE WAR WITH IRAN MUST BE STOPPED BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY.
Where does that leave us?
The full weight of this burden now rests squarely on the shoulders of the men and women of the U.S. military. Attempt to save America and the world from the diabolical lunatics who have subverted power, or parish in oblivion with the rest of us: Those are the options that every member of the U.S. armed forces must now consider.
I can hear the collective * gasp * going up from many of you. I know you don’t like this kind of talk. You’re nuts if you think I do. But if this thing goes down with Iran, there’s a VERY good chance that you, me and a millions of other people are going to die in the immediate and follow-on effects of a nuclear war. For those of you who pride yourselves on holding hands in a circle and proudly wearing your Birkenstocks, does that compute?
We are in deep, deep shit. All of us. Nobody wants to admit this less than me, but either the U.S. military cleans house, now, or we’re dead.
Via: New York Times:
LAST August, a federal judge found that the president of the United States broke the law, committed a serious felony and violated the Constitution. Had the president been an ordinary citizen — someone charged with bank robbery or income tax evasion — the wheels of justice would have immediately begun to turn. The F.B.I. would have conducted an investigation, a United States attorney’s office would have impaneled a grand jury and charges would have been brought.
But under the Bush Justice Department, no F.B.I. agents were ever dispatched to padlock White House files or knock on doors and no federal prosecutors ever opened a case.
The ruling was the result of a suit, in which I am one of the plaintiffs, brought against the National Security Agency by the American Civil Liberties Union. It was a response to revelations by this newspaper in December 2005 that the agency had been monitoring the phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans for more than four years without first obtaining warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
In the past, even presidents were not above the law. When the F.B.I. turned up evidence during Watergate that Richard Nixon had obstructed justice by trying to cover up his involvement, a special prosecutor was named and a House committee recommended that the president be impeached.
And when an independent counsel found evidence that President Bill Clinton had committed perjury in the Monica Lewinsky case, the impeachment machinery again cranked into gear, with the spectacle of a Senate trial (which ended in acquittal).
Laws are broken, the federal government investigates, and the individuals involved — even if they’re presidents — are tried and, if found guilty, punished. That is the way it is supposed to work under our system of government. But not this time.
Last Aug. 17, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of the United States District Court in Detroit issued her ruling in the A.C.L.U. case. The president, she wrote, had “undisputedly violated†not only the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, but also statutory law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Enacted by a bipartisan Congress in 1978, the FISA statute was a response to revelations that the National Security Agency had conducted warrantless eavesdropping on Americans. To deter future administrations from similar actions, the law made a violation a felony punishable by a $10,000 fine and five years in prison.
Chinese Army ‘Harvesting Body Parts’
February 1st, 2007Old news that won’t go away…
In any event, wave that plastic Made in China American flag proudly!
Via: news.co.au:
CHINA’S military is harvesting organs from unwilling live prison inmates, mostly Falungong practitioners, for transplants on a large scale – including to foreign recipients- according to a study.
The report’s authors – Canada’s former secretary of state for the Asia Pacific region David Kilgour and human rights lawyer David Matas – implicated dozens of hospitals and jails throughout China in July, after a two-month investigation.
Chinese officials denied those allegations.
Mr Matas and Mr Kilgour’s second report, released today, includes interviews with organ recipients in 30 countries and Canadian hospital staff who cared for more than 100 patients who had undergone suspicious transplant surgeries in China.
“The involvement of the People’s Liberation Army in these transplants is widespread,” Mr Kilgour said at a press conference.
Like many civilian hospitals in rural China, military hospitals turned to selling organs to make up for government funding cuts in the 1980s, the report said.
But military personnel could operate with much more secrecy, it said.
“Recipients often tell us that even when they receive transplants at civilian hospitals, those conducting the operation are military personnel,” the report said.
Woman Becomes Quadruple Amputee After Giving Birth
February 1st, 2007Via: wftv.com:
A Sanford mother says she will never be able to hold her newborn because an Orlando hospital performed a life-altering surgery and, she claims, the hospital refuses to explain why they left her as a multiple amputee.
The woman filed a complaint against Orlando Regional Healthcare Systems, she said, because they won’t tell her exactly what happened. The hospital maintains the woman wants to know information that would violate other patients’ rights.
Claudia Mejia gave birth eight and a half months ago at Orlando Regional South Seminole. She was transported to Orlando Regional Medical Center in Orlando where her arms and legs were amputated. She was told she had streptococcus, a flesh eating bacteria, and toxic shock syndrome, but no further explanation was given.
The hospital, in a letter, wrote that if she wanted to find out exactly what happened, she would have to sue them.
Research Credit: MT
Blood Center to Collect DNA of Donors; Part of DoD Program; “Be Very Afraid”
February 1st, 2007Via: Seattle Times:
For the first time, the Puget Sound Blood Center will begin collecting, testing and storing the DNA of blood donors.
Donors may opt out of the program, part of a study funded by the Defense Department to develop better ways of identifying blood types. And the Blood Center is firm that the effort will be limited to that purpose and not shared with the government.
Even so, privacy watchdogs worry that this latest move is just part of an increasingly long list of governments and other agencies that are storing people’s DNA coding — with few laws overseeing its use.
“There are no real practical limits on what can be done with that DNA information,” said Barry Steinhardt, who heads the American Civil Liberties Union’s national Technology and Liberty Project in Washington, D.C. “People ought to be very afraid that these samples are going to be used for some other purpose.”
Germany Issues CIA Arrest Orders
February 1st, 2007Via: BBC:
Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of one of its citizens.
Munich prosecutors confirmed that the warrants were linked to the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent.
Mr Masri says he was seized in Macedonia, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan and mistreated there.
He says he was released in Albania five months later when the Americans realised they had the wrong man.
January Support Efforts
February 1st, 2007I’d like to take a moment to say a special “THANK YOU!” to Pookie and to all of you who rose to Pookie’s mid January challenge. January 2007 was on track to becoming one of the slowest months for support in about a year, but it didn’t end that way. You guys came through with over 3x the normal level of support.
The Amazon situation is a bit beyond belief as well. You broke the previous Amazon record by 3X. Also in January, someone ordered the highest commission item ever via Cryptogon. Someone out there takes their cooking very seriously. They went with the All-Clad Stainless 12-Inch Chef’s Pan.
You might have noticed that I occasionally make “rocket science” jokes. The funny thing is, I think there’s a real “rocket scientist” reading Cryptogon. This person ordered two of the most expensive books ever via Cryptogon:
along with…
Composite Airframe Structures by Michael Chun-Yu Niu
A total of six Xantrex power units were sold, along with ten Petzl Tikka Plus headlamps. In addition to books of every description, people bought software, soap, DVDs, CDs, diapers, vacuum cleaner bags, jewelry and lots of other stuff I didn’t even know you could buy on Amazon. The most popular book this month: Arrest-Proof Yourself by Dale C. Carson.
Thanks again to everyone who helped keep Cryptogon and Farmlet going in January.
For New Contributors: Summary of Ways to Help Out
If you like Cryptogon and you’re ready to put your money where your browser is, the following list tells you how you can help keep Cryptogon and Farmlet up and running with new and interesting content.
2) Buy anything I link to on Amazon.
3) Go to Amazon via any Amazon link on Cryptogon and shop as you normally would. Amazon pays me a commission on anything and everything you buy, as long as you enter Amazon via Cryptogon.
4) Purchase a webhosting package at Blue Host by clicking here, or the Blue Host ad banner on the right sidebar. Remarkably, this pays me $65 while you get an excellent hosting deal. There is absolutely no extra cost to you. Cryptogon and Farmlet are hosted on Blue Host. Read more about it here.
5) Buy a text ad on AdBrite to display on Cryptogon. The cost varies, but it’s extremely low right now.
Cartoon Marketing Scheme Provokes Counter Terror Response
February 1st, 2007HA! It would be easier to take this system down with smoke and mirrors than with an armed insurgency. Get the monster to chew its own limbs off, then calmly walk up to it and drive a spike through its skull. Yep, Military Deception is an interesting topic.
If this is what happens when a company goes to promote some stupid cartoon, why don’t “the terrorists” do this, and then make the lights go out—a simple matter—for a few days? If “the terrorists” hate us so badly, with their infinite funding and otherworldly capabilities that are hyped endlessly in the PSYOP delivery platform media, why the F don’t they do this when a 12-year-old can determine what undefended chokepoints to hit in a matter of minutes? Can someone please explain that to me?
Via: thebostonchannel:
Turner Broadcasting plans to take responsibility for the “hoax devices” that were found at several locations in and around Boston Wednesday that forced police bomb units to scramble throughout the area.
The incidents were part of a marketing campaign that involved a character from the cartoon show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”
“The ‘packages’ in question are magnetic lights that pose no danger. They are part of an outdoor marketing campaign in 10 cities in support of Adult Swim’s animated television show ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force,'” Turner Broadcasting, the parent company of Cartoon Network, said in a statement.
U.S. Plans to ‘Fight the Net’
January 31st, 2007Oh what a difference a decade makes. A little less that that, in this case.
In 1995, when I first suggested to a professor that net centric warfare would become a core military competency, right along with rockets, rifles and bombs, I got a bit of a laugh. He let me write my paper anyway. I got an “A” on the thing, but he asked me if he could keep it, because he wanted to show it to “some people.”
My experience pretty much sums up the “old guard” response to information warfare (they seem to be calling it full spectrum information operations now). You have a bunch of crusty old drunks who think the world works the way it did for the last fifty years. But lay it all out for them, and it’s like a good slap in the face. Information warfare was the stuff of think tank backwaters in the mid 1990s. Not anymore. They get it.
The DoD Information Operations Roadmap is definitely worth reading for those of you are interested in this topic. As usual, most of the operational information is heavily redacted. I used to be interested in the strategic nature of infrastructure, especially electricity and data networks. In the DoD document under “Computer Network Defense” you will find this sentence: “Unprotected networks surrender asymmetric advantage.” If you want to get a feel for what that means, my 2002 cyberwar essay sums it up. The situation I described in that essay hadn’t changed since I realized it back in the 1990s. The situation is the same now. My guess is that many of the redacted bits are related to physical infrastructure. That topic is off limits for public discussion. It always has been. It’s the stuff of nightmares for Them.
Via: BBC:
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military’s plans for “information operations” – from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer.
From influencing public opinion through new media to designing “computer network attack” weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.
Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.
Brookings: U.S. Must Abandon Iraqi Cities or Face Nightmare Scenario
January 31st, 2007Iraqoslavia.
Via: Independent:
The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.
This is the central recommendation of a study by the Brookings Institution here, based on the assumption that President Bush’s last-ditch troop increase fails to stabilise the country – but also on the reality that Washington cannot simply walk away from the growing disaster unleashed by the 2003 invasion.
Even the US staying to try to contain the fighting, said Kenneth Pollack, one of the report’s authors, “would consign Iraqis to a terrible fate. Even if it works, we will have failed to provide the Iraqis with the better future we promised.” But it was the “least bad option” open to the US to protect its national interests in the event of full-scale civil war.
US troops, says the study, should withdraw from Iraqi cities. This was “the only rational course of action, horrific though it will be”, as America refocused its efforts from preventing civil war to containing its effects.
The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq’s “spill-over” potential across the Persian Gulf region.
It warns of radicalisation and possible secession movements in adjacent countries, an upsurge in terrorism, and of intervention by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ending an all-out civil war, the report says, would require a force of 450,000 – three times the present US deployment even after the 21,500 “surge” ordered by President Bush this month.
Everywhere looms the shadow of Iran. In a “war game” testing US options, the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution found that, as the descent into civil war gathered pace, confrontation between the US and Iran intensified, and Washington’s leverage on Tehran diminished. Civil war in Iraq would turn Iran into “the unambiguous adversary” of the US.
Indeed, everything indicates that that is already happening. The study appeared on the same day as the Iranian ambassador in Iraq told The New York Times that Tehran intended to expand its influence in Iraq. US commanders now claim that thousands of Iranian advisers are arming and training Shia militias.
Video Research Credit: Life After the Oil Crash
