Tag: CIA

The Obama administration has lowered another legal barrier shielding  Americans from extrajudicial punitive action by their own  government, in this case authorizing the CIA to kill a US citizen suspected of  having ties to al-Qaeda in Yemen and links to two attacks inside the United  States last year.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric born in New Mexico but now living in Yemen, may  be the first US citizen targeted for  assassination by the CIA under a counter-terror policy established by  President George W. Bush and since embraced by President Barack Obama.

Awlaki was previously  viewed simply as an Islamic preacher  espousing a radical religious viewpoint, but the reassessment of his status  began last year when it was disclosed that Army Maj. Nidal Hassan had been communicating with  Awlaki via e-mail before the Army psychiatrist allegedly shot and  killed 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood in Texas last November.

A month later, on Christmas Day, a  young Nigerian man, Umar  Farouk Abdulmutallab, tried to blow up a  Northwest Airlines jetliner over  Detroit, and US intelligence  officials revealed that Abdulmutallab  had been a student of Awlaki’s in Yemen. Though Awlaki denied ordering the attack, word began to spread that the CIA was adding Awlaki to a list of about  two dozen  people targeted for assassination.

Multiple press reports now indicate  that Awlaki has been put  on the death list, a move that the Obama  administration justifies by claiming  to have information that Awlaki  has shifted from denouncing the United  States to plotting violent acts against Americans.

Read all of it here:

Obama Administration Authorizes CIA to Kill US Citizen

by Jason Leopold, April 7, 2010

Congressman Dr. Ron Paul educates the Orwellian U.S. News Media about War and Foreign Policy.

Valentine’s Day, Feb 14, 2010.  Gen. McCrystal issued his first apology today for the deaths of 12 Afghan civilians who were cowering in their homes when 2 HMARS (High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems) rockets went about 300 meters off target in Helmand, Afghanistan, and hit their house.  The largest surge in the 9th year of the Afghanistan War started Friday.

Of course, he couldn’t help but throw in an attempt to make this a bipartisanshipthingee:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl…

Two Nato rockets aimed at Taliban insurgents in Helmand missed their target today, killing 12 civilians sheltering in their home and dealing a sharp blow to hopes that civilian casualties would be avoided in the largest western-led operation of the nine-year Afghan war.

Operation Moshtarak (meaning “together”) involves 15,000 troops, mostly US, British and Afghan. The first US marines arrived in Marjah by helicopter before dawn on Saturday morning, while British forces are sweeping through Nad Ali.

“We deeply regret this tragic loss of life,” said General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan. “It’s regrettable that in the course of our joint efforts, innocent lives were lost.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered an investigation.

Afghan Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak, at a press conference in Kabul, said that the aim of  operation Moshtarak was :

” not to kill insurgents” but to “expand the government’s influence and protect the civilian population”.

Afghan officials are claiming 27 insurgents have been killed so far.

On the second full day of fighting, the Taliban and other insurgent foot soldiers remained a shadowy enemy: Western commanders still do not have a solid estimate of how many Islamist militants remain in the farming town and its environs, which for years had served as a Taliban sanctuary.

Estimates prior to the assault ranged from 400 to around 1,000 Taliban and other fighters in the town. Perhaps 150 of those were believed to be “hard-core” militants, including Central Asian fighters with possible links to Al Qaeda who would likely fight to the death rather than slip away.

Some Taliban fled before the battle.  The Marines had widely publicized their plans to take the town in hopes of driving off less committed fighters and thus limiting close quarters combat that could end up harming civilians.

http://www.latimes.com/news/na…

Instead, before leaving, they left a lot of land mines and other bombs buried all over the terrain, which will have to be cleared.  Which is expected to take weeks.

2 British soldiers and 1 American Marine have also suffered loss of life, altho one of the British was not in this area of the latest surge. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2…

No word yet, as the effect of the latest stimulus spending spread,  on whether or not the bonuses earned by the CEOs of the Afghan banks were having a negative polling effect on the Karzai administration.  

It was 5:30 pm in Washington, DC, on Friday, Feb 12.  The city had been shut down all week because of back to back record breaking snowfalls.  On Friday morning, the TV pundits standing in front of a charming, snow shrouded scene at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, announced that the White House was open, and “back to business as usual.”  

By the evening, during Hardball’s televised cable show with Chris Mathews, it was back to casually inserting the news via an interview with Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklazewski that the United States and “Afghan forces”  had just launched the largest Afghanistan offensive of the war, in southern Afghanistan, near the city of Marjah.

25,000 to 30,000 troops (US, Nato, and “Afghan forces” per Miklazewski, without elaborating that number means it’s all the US and some intrepreters…..) were to chase out the Taliban from Afghanistan’s largest opium poppy area.   And now, Miklazewski said, there was something different, the US had “walking around money” for the “recovery effort” after the offensive, when they had “settled in.”  “They have money that has been appropriated by Congress to hand out in the south, to pretty much help them.”  Oh, and to buy their allegiance.  

Yes, he said that. “oh, and Chris, as you know, to buy their allegiance.”

This area of Afghanistan produces 60% of the world’s opium.  4 billion dollars a year’s worth. 400 million for the Taliban.  And it’s poppy harvest season in Afghanistan.

Wait a minute. It’s effing FEBRUARY. You know, like, uhm, “winter.”  They’re harvesting this crap in February ?

http://www.paktribune.com/news…   New Headline: Global Climate Change Pops Poppy Harvest Up Entire Season From May To MidWinter !

“This is going to deny them some badly needed revenue, Chris.”  

Okay dokey.  Let me guess. This is going to provide some badly needed Revenue Enhancement for the CIA and Black Opts, isn’t it ?

Same old, same old. No wonder General McChystal recently said the Afghan situation was now “under control.”  

The contrast in WBZ mainstream tv and my daily news survey cycle is interesting.  I think of if a tree falls in the woods yet nobody hears the sound does the tree fall?  Or why people fail to see the elephants in the room.

What did I find on the internet while searching the CT circuit and what was playing on the cognitively dissonant TeeVee.  Mainstream propaganda delivery system channel WBZ.  Yeah I am multi-tasking, kind of like driving while texting.

SCOTT: Well, it certainly informs the vision of people around him. It was the neocon vision for the world. Brzezinski was certainly not a neocon, but on this point he sounds very much like them. You know, when [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Lewis “Scooter”] Libby were working for Cheney, when Cheney was secretary of defense back in 1992, they came up with this defense planning guidance draft which was later disowned, but it was the same thing, that we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role. And then there was a JCS [Joint Chiefs of Staff] strategic document, Joint Vision 2020, which for all I know is still in force, calling for “full spectrum dominance.” And this is a quote from the document: full spectrum dominance means the ability of US forces operating alone or with our allies to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations. I mean, this talk is just insane, but it is the language of geopolitics, and I think it’s the language that people learn in military schools. And that’s why it’s wrong to think it was just neocons. I’ve written something very recently and I’d like to quote it: all thought is socially conditioned, and at the center of large, highly developed societies, all bureaucratic thought is bureaucratically conditioned. But at the heart of dominant societies, this bureaucratic thinking slowly acquires the features of a dominance mindset, and those conditioned by this mindset come to participate in what I call the war machine. We saw it in Britain. And ironically, you know, when Britain started talking about global dominance, it was Sir Halford Mackinder, and the year was 1919, when Britain was already, after World War I, destined to no longer play the role that it played before. It’s a way, I think, of trying to keep the morale up. And I think that Brzezinski, when he wrote that book in 1997, he was worried that America would not be interested in playing the dominance role. And he, of course, is by background a Pole, for whom the great enemy in the world was Russia. And so he was trying to cheer America on to do things which it’s not capable of doing. His metaphor is The Grand Chessboard, which is, of course, a zero-sum model for world politics. The good sense of geopolitics is the way it’s been talked about by, say, Kissinger, when he says it’s seeking a mode of equilibrium in the world. And that, I think, is [inaudible] I think a better model than a chessboard for the world would be a canoe, an overloaded canoe with some very heavy players and it, and the art of geopolitics is to learn not to capsize the canoe.

JAY: And when you look at President Obama’s own statements during the election campaign when asked about foreign policy, he always rooted himself very clearly in what he said was the tradition of American pragmatic foreign policy, starting with Truman. He even included George Bush senior, Reagan. He never differentiated himself fundamentally, other than with George Bush junior. But the idea, even his opposition to the war in Iraq, had to do with that it was a stupid war that would weaken America’s ability to project power. So if you look at, in terms of Latin America, Afghanistan, his relationship with Russia, in terms of this either change of mindset or traditional, dominant theory of dominance, where do you put him after one year?

SCOTT: Well, as long as he’s trying to look forward to a second term, he’s going to fit into Washington. And I watched Brzezinski’s interview with you-a very good interview, I thought-and I can see how Brzezinski repeatedly said that he’s now no longer inside the system; he’s an outside adviser and remote from the way power decisions are made. I think that’s true. That allows him to be much wiser than he was when he wrote his book or when he had his famous interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998. He is a wise man now, and almost by definition that means he doesn’t have as much influence. The wise are not the people who prevail in Washington. So that Obama, now that he’s at the heart of things, he’s got to live with his joint chiefs, he’s got to live with his Democratic Party. I mean, a lot of us like to think that democracy is the answer, but if we mean by democracy the two-party system that we have, the two-party system is very definitely part of the problem, because he is going to get attacked. If he does anything to pull back from Afghanistan, if he does anything that looks like he’s knuckling under to those outside forces there, he will be jumped on by members of both parties, who are, of course, all elected with the same money from the same big donors. We used to emphasize how the big donors came from the military-industrial complex, but we have to add to that now, having seen what’s happened in the last couple of years, they’ve come also from Wall Street and the big banks. They’re all part of the same -.

Real News Network – February 1, 2010

Full Transcript here

New mindset for US foreign policy? Part 2

Peter Dale Scott: If you unleash the dogs of war it’s not easy to pull them back.

Part 1 of this interview is here.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. His most recent books are Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008) and Mosaic Orpheus (poetry, 2009).

This is part one of an interview in which Scott talks with Paul Jay of The Real News Network about the corrupted mindset in Washington that chooses who becomes president, and about the war machine that co-opted Obama into his escalation of a drug-corrupted war and is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington, but rather is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in society, and about the need for a new kind of American foreign policy.

SCOTT: I think I have talked about the deep state. I prefer now just to talk about deep politics, that there are things which we just don’t face in our society, things we’re not willing to talk about. With respect to Afghanistan, one of the things that we don’t want to face and talk about is the presence of drug trafficking in the plans of the CIA for controlling remote areas of this world. And when you have a number of facts which are not being talked about, our politics becomes more and more like an iceberg, in which the visible part, the public politics, or, if you like, what goes on in the public state, is only a small percentage of the totality of what’s going on, a lot of this is not subject to the restraints of the Constitution at all. And that’s the part that I call deep politics. The phrase “deep state” is a bit dangerous, ’cause it might make people think that there’s a secret Pentagon and a secret White House, it’s nothing like that. It’s more this matter of the mindset that I’m talking about.

JAY: When you described the war machine, you use the words “drug-corrupted war machine,” and everyone knows that Afghanistan is now the manufacturer of the majority of the world’s heroin, but it doesn’t ever get talked about as a policy issue or as an underlying driving force in this struggle for all sides. So talk about this.

SCOTT: Well, I would say, actually, it has become talked about in the last year, with the beginning of Obama’s campaign. You know, when Bush first went in in 2001, they had a list of the main refineries, and they were never touched, because America’s coalition for developing local support in Afghanistan was made up very largely of warlords who were involved in the drug traffic. Our principal ally was going to be [Ahmad Shah] Massoud, and there was a big debate in Washington, before we went into Afghanistan, whether to make him an ally or not, because they knew he was involved in the drug traffic. Well, he was in fact assassinated, just a day or two before 9/11. But the Northern Alliance, which was the only faction in Afghanistan in that year that was growing poppy, they were our allies. And if you look at almost any newspaper story about drugs in Afghanistan, it’s going to be talking about the Taliban. But the Taliban are getting at most about a tenth of the revenues that are being raised by opium and heroin in Afghanistan, and the vast majority of it is going to the big warlords who essentially make up, to this day, the coalition that are supporting [Hamid] Karzai in Kabul.

Real News Network – January 31, 2010

Full Transcript here

New mindset for US foreign policy?

Peter Dale Scott: The President does not choose the mindset, it chooses the people who become President