Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Monday, December 28, 2009
Bomber Had No Passport, Helped To Board Plane By Sharp Dressed Man
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Sunday, December 27, 2009
A passenger who boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253 in Amsterdam with attempted plane bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab says the would-be terrorist had no passport and was aided by a sharp-dressed man who claimed Mutallab was a Sudanese refugee, just one of a plethora of startling inconsistencies surrounding an incident that has led to ramped up security and increased levels of harassment in airports.
Every single fact that has come to light since the attempted bombing on Christmas Day directly indicates that the bomber was deliberately allowed to board the plane and that his attack would have succeeded if not for the alert and brave reactions of the passengers and flight crew.
According to Kurt Haskell, an attorney with the Haskell Law Firm in Taylor, Michigan, “He and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.”
Mutallab was a poorly dressed, young looking individual, but he was accompanied by a man in an expensive suit, Haskell told MLive.com.
“He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’”
Although Mutallab is Nigerian, Haskell said the well-dressed man portrayed him as a desperate Sudanese refugee in an attempt to elicit sympathy and as a way of bypassing his lack of documents.
“The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn’t see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane,” states the report.
Crucially, Haskell said that after the plane landed he saw another man being taken into custody by the FBI along with Mutallab. However, the FBI later said that Mutallab was the only individual taken into custody.
Were the feds retrieving their own agent, the sharp dressed man who ensured that Mutallab boarded the plane despite his overwhelmingly suspicious circumstances?
Mutallab was a known security threat who was on the terror watch list. He is barred from entering Britain after being refused a new visa due to applying for a fake university course. Separate reports said that he did hold a valid visa, which begs the question, how can someone on a terror watch list be allowed to fly?
“On the one hand, it seems he’s been on the terror watch list but not on the no-fly list,” he said. “That doesn’t square because the American Department for Homeland Security has pretty stringent data-mining capability. I don’t understand how he had a valid visa if he was known on the terror watch list,” Dr Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies told the London Independent.
It has also been revealed that Mutallab’s father contacted U.S. intelligence officials a month ago and warned them that his son was a threat, but nothing was done.
The bomber’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, was a a former minister and chairman of First Bank in Nigeria. The bomber does not fit the image of a disgruntled, rag-tag terrorist. His considerable wealth allowed him to live in luxury at an imposing London mansion.
As a result of the failed attack, new security directives have been introduced for anyone traveling into America. Intense body and hand-luggage searches and sniffer dogs have been beefed up at departure gates and passengers have been ordered not to stand during the final hour of the flight and are not allowed access to any of their hand luggage during the final hour.
However, if you’re a suspicious looking man on a terror watch list with no passport carrying explosives, you should breeze through security with no questions asked, just be sure to have a sharp-dressed man with you at all times.
Prison Planet.com
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Every single fact that has come to light since the attempted bombing on Christmas Day directly indicates that the bomber was deliberately allowed to board the plane and that his attack would have succeeded if not for the alert and brave reactions of the passengers and flight crew.
According to Kurt Haskell, an attorney with the Haskell Law Firm in Taylor, Michigan, “He and his wife were sitting on the ground near their boarding gate in Amsterdam, which is when they saw Mutallab approach the gate with an unidentified man.”
Mutallab was a poorly dressed, young looking individual, but he was accompanied by a man in an expensive suit, Haskell told MLive.com.
“He says the suited man asked ticket agents whether Mutallab could board without a passport. “The guy said, ‘He’s from Sudan and we do this all the time.’”
Although Mutallab is Nigerian, Haskell said the well-dressed man portrayed him as a desperate Sudanese refugee in an attempt to elicit sympathy and as a way of bypassing his lack of documents.
“The ticket agent referred Mutallab and his companion to her manager down the hall, and Haskell didn’t see Mutallab again until after he allegedly tried to detonate an explosive on the plane,” states the report.
Crucially, Haskell said that after the plane landed he saw another man being taken into custody by the FBI along with Mutallab. However, the FBI later said that Mutallab was the only individual taken into custody.
Were the feds retrieving their own agent, the sharp dressed man who ensured that Mutallab boarded the plane despite his overwhelmingly suspicious circumstances?
Mutallab was a known security threat who was on the terror watch list. He is barred from entering Britain after being refused a new visa due to applying for a fake university course. Separate reports said that he did hold a valid visa, which begs the question, how can someone on a terror watch list be allowed to fly?
“On the one hand, it seems he’s been on the terror watch list but not on the no-fly list,” he said. “That doesn’t square because the American Department for Homeland Security has pretty stringent data-mining capability. I don’t understand how he had a valid visa if he was known on the terror watch list,” Dr Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies told the London Independent.
It has also been revealed that Mutallab’s father contacted U.S. intelligence officials a month ago and warned them that his son was a threat, but nothing was done.
The bomber’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, was a a former minister and chairman of First Bank in Nigeria. The bomber does not fit the image of a disgruntled, rag-tag terrorist. His considerable wealth allowed him to live in luxury at an imposing London mansion.
As a result of the failed attack, new security directives have been introduced for anyone traveling into America. Intense body and hand-luggage searches and sniffer dogs have been beefed up at departure gates and passengers have been ordered not to stand during the final hour of the flight and are not allowed access to any of their hand luggage during the final hour.
However, if you’re a suspicious looking man on a terror watch list with no passport carrying explosives, you should breeze through security with no questions asked, just be sure to have a sharp-dressed man with you at all times.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Obama Declares War On Pakistan
By Webster G. Tarpley
rockcreekfreepress.com
By Webster G. Tarpley
Washington DC, Dec. 11 — Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush/Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.
US Deterred From Open War By Pakistan’s Nukes
The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly. But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power, possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them. What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.
The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture chambers in Iraq. McChrystal’s specific credential for the Pakistani civil war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites by creating “al Qaeda in Iraq” under the infamous and now departed double agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang known as “al Qaeda in Iraq” avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General McChrystal, Obama’s hand-picked choice. McChrystal’s superior, Gen Petraeus, wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg — in other words, he wants to be the next US president.
The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent ethnic groups of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India. Most maps show only political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups. First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran. The Punjabis inhabit Pakistan, as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from Sind. (see map)
Pashtunistan
The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan, but here they are alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul, even though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the 2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the Pashtuns feel shut out.
The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan, where they can wage war against the central government in Islamabad. US aid will flow directly to war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.
On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices, which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both Kabul and Islamabad.
Baluchistan
The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran, which they see as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination drones into Baluchistan. One pretext for this is the report, peddled for example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate as the kingpins of the so-called “Quetta Shura.” Blackwater teams cannot be far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Tehran for the murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both Pakistan and Iran, thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US policy.
Obama’s Rube Goldberg Strategy
Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, “al Qaeda” is of course the CIA’s own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the enemy is supposed to be “al Qaeda.” But, even according to the US government, there are precious few “al Qaeda” fighters left in Afghanistan. Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where “al Qaeda” is not, rather than in Pakistan where “al Qaeda” is now alleged to be?
One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television interview that ‘Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaeda is operating all over the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in Helmand Province. That’s not next door to Waziristan. So I’m wondering, what exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a minimal presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Indeed. ‘The Wisconsin Democrat also warned that US policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the region: “You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will push more extremists into Pakistan?” he told ABC. “They couldn’t deny it, and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into Pakistan, so I think it’s just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of our national security interest.”’ Of course, this is all intentional and motivated by US imperialist raison d’état.
Malick: “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”
Obama’s speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are after all two sovereign states and both members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks, called attention to this ploy: ‘Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he might be declaring war on Pakistan. Every time he mentioned Afghanistan, Pakistan preceded mention…. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: “the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.” I was shocked because a succession of American officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.’ This article is entitled “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”, and we can chalk the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as “Afpak” or even “Afpakia.”
In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan. This assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop strength: “Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training…. The White House has authorized an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision…to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.” The US is now training more Predator operators than combat pilots.
Blackwater Accused In Peshawar Massacre Of Women And Children
The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan, attacking peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved: ‘At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.’
As shocking as Scahill’s report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: “ISLAMABAD Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported Thursday.” This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter, especially among women and children.
US Also At War With Uzbekistan?
Scahill’s report also suggests that US black ops have reached into Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to the north: ‘In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?”’ Such are the ways of hope and change.
The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor Chossudovsky: ‘Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a “Yugoslav-like fate” for Pakistan “in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan.” (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a “failed state” by 2015, “as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons”. (Quoted by former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February 2005)…. Washington favors the creation of a “Greater Baluchistan” which would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.’ The Iranians, for their part, are adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in Baluchistan: “TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said …that there are some concrete evidences showing US involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. …. The deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God’s soldiers) occurred on October 18 in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
US Goal: Cut The Pakistan Energy Corridor Between Iran, China
Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan? One reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic partner of China, a country which the US and British are determined to oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the Himalayas above Kashmir. This is the so-called “Pipelinestan” issue. This would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile tanker route around the southern rim of Asia. As a recent news report points out: ‘Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China’s participation in the pipeline project and Islamabad, while willing to sign a bilateral agreement with Iran, has also welcomed China’s participation. According to an estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to $500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle Eastern crude oil to western China. Pakistan provides China the shortest possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries…. The pipeline, which would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram highway, would be partly financed by Beijing. The Chinese are also building a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait of Malacca, which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar, and from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed Fazl-e-Haider, “Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal,” Asia Times, 27 May 2009. This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.
Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East. This would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as part of their overall strategy of world domination.
US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested near Lahore in Pakistan.
India And Iran
As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be no peace on the subcontinent.
Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama’s war and escalation policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.
Webster G. Tarpley is an economic historian, radio host and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Obama, The Postmodern Coup and Surviving The Cataclysm and other books.
rockcreekfreepress.com
By Webster G. Tarpley Washington DC, Dec. 11 — Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush/Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.
US Deterred From Open War By Pakistan’s Nukes
The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly. But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power, possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them. What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.
The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture chambers in Iraq. McChrystal’s specific credential for the Pakistani civil war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites by creating “al Qaeda in Iraq” under the infamous and now departed double agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang known as “al Qaeda in Iraq” avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General McChrystal, Obama’s hand-picked choice. McChrystal’s superior, Gen Petraeus, wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg — in other words, he wants to be the next US president.
The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent ethnic groups of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India. Most maps show only political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups. First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran. The Punjabis inhabit Pakistan, as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from Sind. (see map)
Pashtunistan
The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan, but here they are alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul, even though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the 2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the Pashtuns feel shut out.
The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan, where they can wage war against the central government in Islamabad. US aid will flow directly to war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.
On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices, which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both Kabul and Islamabad.
Baluchistan
The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran, which they see as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination drones into Baluchistan. One pretext for this is the report, peddled for example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate as the kingpins of the so-called “Quetta Shura.” Blackwater teams cannot be far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Tehran for the murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both Pakistan and Iran, thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US policy.
Obama’s Rube Goldberg Strategy
Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, “al Qaeda” is of course the CIA’s own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the enemy is supposed to be “al Qaeda.” But, even according to the US government, there are precious few “al Qaeda” fighters left in Afghanistan. Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where “al Qaeda” is not, rather than in Pakistan where “al Qaeda” is now alleged to be?
One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television interview that ‘Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaeda is operating all over the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in Helmand Province. That’s not next door to Waziristan. So I’m wondering, what exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a minimal presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Indeed. ‘The Wisconsin Democrat also warned that US policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the region: “You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will push more extremists into Pakistan?” he told ABC. “They couldn’t deny it, and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into Pakistan, so I think it’s just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of our national security interest.”’ Of course, this is all intentional and motivated by US imperialist raison d’état.
Malick: “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”
Obama’s speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are after all two sovereign states and both members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks, called attention to this ploy: ‘Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he might be declaring war on Pakistan. Every time he mentioned Afghanistan, Pakistan preceded mention…. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: “the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.” I was shocked because a succession of American officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.’ This article is entitled “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”, and we can chalk the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as “Afpak” or even “Afpakia.”
In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan. This assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop strength: “Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training…. The White House has authorized an expansion of the CIA’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision…to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.” The US is now training more Predator operators than combat pilots.
Blackwater Accused In Peshawar Massacre Of Women And Children
The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan, attacking peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved: ‘At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.’
As shocking as Scahill’s report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: “ISLAMABAD Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported Thursday.” This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter, especially among women and children.
US Also At War With Uzbekistan?
Scahill’s report also suggests that US black ops have reached into Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to the north: ‘In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?”’ Such are the ways of hope and change.
The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor Chossudovsky: ‘Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a “Yugoslav-like fate” for Pakistan “in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan.” (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a “failed state” by 2015, “as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons”. (Quoted by former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February 2005)…. Washington favors the creation of a “Greater Baluchistan” which would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.’ The Iranians, for their part, are adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in Baluchistan: “TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said …that there are some concrete evidences showing US involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. …. The deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God’s soldiers) occurred on October 18 in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
US Goal: Cut The Pakistan Energy Corridor Between Iran, China
Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan? One reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic partner of China, a country which the US and British are determined to oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the Himalayas above Kashmir. This is the so-called “Pipelinestan” issue. This would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile tanker route around the southern rim of Asia. As a recent news report points out: ‘Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China’s participation in the pipeline project and Islamabad, while willing to sign a bilateral agreement with Iran, has also welcomed China’s participation. According to an estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to $500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle Eastern crude oil to western China. Pakistan provides China the shortest possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries…. The pipeline, which would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram highway, would be partly financed by Beijing. The Chinese are also building a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait of Malacca, which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar, and from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed Fazl-e-Haider, “Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal,” Asia Times, 27 May 2009. This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.
Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East. This would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as part of their overall strategy of world domination.
US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested near Lahore in Pakistan.
India And Iran
As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be no peace on the subcontinent.
Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama’s war and escalation policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.
Webster G. Tarpley is an economic historian, radio host and author of 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Obama, The Postmodern Coup and Surviving The Cataclysm and other books.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Unemployment Programs In 40 States About To Go Broke
Washington Post:
The recession's jobless toll is draining unemployment-compensation funds so fast that according to federal projections, 40 state programs will go broke within two years and need $90 billion in loans to keep issuing the benefit checks.
The shortfalls are putting pressure on governments to either raise taxes or shrink the aid payments.
Read the whole story: Washington Post
The recession's jobless toll is draining unemployment-compensation funds so fast that according to federal projections, 40 state programs will go broke within two years and need $90 billion in loans to keep issuing the benefit checks.
The shortfalls are putting pressure on governments to either raise taxes or shrink the aid payments.
Read the whole story: Washington Post
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Genocide! Who Are The 3 Billion Individuals, Who Are To Be Eliminated?
by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, president of The International Schiller Institute, December 13, 2009
The policies of Prince Philip, who, in his own words, wants to be reborn as a deadly virus, in order to be better able to assist in reducing the world’s population by 80%, have now practically been placed on the agenda in Copenhagen. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in its "State of World Population Report 2009," presented at a seminar in Copenhagen on Nov. 18, 2009, makes the same anti-human argument, that global warming can only be reined in by means of a massive reduction of the world population.
Read more
The policies of Prince Philip, who, in his own words, wants to be reborn as a deadly virus, in order to be better able to assist in reducing the world’s population by 80%, have now practically been placed on the agenda in Copenhagen. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in its "State of World Population Report 2009," presented at a seminar in Copenhagen on Nov. 18, 2009, makes the same anti-human argument, that global warming can only be reined in by means of a massive reduction of the world population.
Read more
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Fed is a Fascist Cartel
12/22/2009 - by Nelson Hultberg
No one in the freedom movement today disputes that the Federal Reserve is the source of many of our economic woes. Where disagreement arises is in defining the precise nature of the Fed and the source of its capacity to create the harm it does. Many who support gold money and free enterprise claim that the Federal Reserve is a "private corporation" run by capitalist mega-financiers. This I believe to be mistaken.
The Federal Reserve, in my opinion, should not be classified as a private corporation. It should be termed a government-run fascist cartel. There are several important reasons for this. For example, all nationally chartered banks in the Federal Reserve system are forced by the government to join the cartel. Bernanke and his board of governors are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. The Federal Reserve came into being because of an act of Congress, and it can be altered or legislated out of being at anytime by Congress. These factors are not how private corporations are created or operated. The Fed entails government involvement in a massive way. Without the special monopoly privileges legislated by Congress that sustain the Fed, it disappears.
Moreover, the great bulk of the profits of the Reserve Banks are turned over to the federal treasury. As John McCormack explains in a Liberty magazine article: "[H]olding shares in the Fed is not a very profitable activity. Dividends to member shareholders are limited to 6% of nominal capital (hardly a great rate of return) and all Fed revenues above this amount (invariably vastly greater sums) are returned to the U.S. Treasury. In 1994, for example, total dividends to member banks amounted to $212 million while the Treasury received $20.5 billion, 97 times as much." [Liberty, March 1996.]
Government is thus a full partner in the Federal Reserve System. And a business entity with the government as a full partner is not a private corporation.
Read more
Monday, December 21, 2009
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange—the rest of the story
By Judi McLeod Wednesday, March 25, 2009 
Good news to know that the truth will always out—even when you’re Barack Obama
.
“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, BarackObama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”
The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”
And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.
The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made globalwarming .
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.
Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.
“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”
(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).
“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.
“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.
“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share. By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors. Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.
In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.
These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to become President of the United States of America.
If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.
It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives. John is the brother of William Ayers.
What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.
Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.
But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.
The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by Obama before he was POTUS.
Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.
Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”. He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.
The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming fraud, and to borrow a line from children playing Hide and Seek, Here they come, ready or not!
Good news to know that the truth will always out—even when you’re Barack “Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack
The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”
And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.
The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself—the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.
Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.
“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR. “First, the firm was run by Strong and a group of Gore intimates, including Peter Knight, the firm’s registered lobbyist, and Gore’s former top Senate aide.”
(Fast-forward to the present day and ask yourself why it is that every time someone picks up another Senate rock, another serpent comes slithering out).
“Second, the company had received more than $25 million in U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research and development grants, but had failed to prove that the technology worked on a commercial scale. The company would go on to receive another $8 million in federal taxpayers’ cash, at that point, its only source of revenue.
“With Al Gore’s Earth Day as a Wall Street calling card, Molten Metal’s stock value soared to $35 a share, a range it maintained through October 1996. But along the way, DOE scientists had balked at further funding. When in March 1996, corporate officers concluded that the federal cash cow was about to run dry, they took action: Between that date and October 1996, seven corporate officers—including Maurice strong—sold off $15.3 million in personal shares in the company, at top market value. On Oct. 20, 1996—a Sunday—the company issued a press release, announcing for the first time, that DOE funding would be vastly scaled back, and reported the bad news on a conference call with stockbrokers.
“On Monday, the stock plunged by 49%, soon landing at $5 a share. By early 1997, furious stockholders had filed a class action suit against the company and its directors. Ironically, one of the class action lawyers had tangled with Maurice strong in another insider trading case, involving a Swiss company called AZL Resources, chaired by Strong, who was also a lead shareholder. The AZL case closely mirrored Molten Metal, and in the end, Strong and the other AZL partners agreed to pay $5 million to dodge a jury verdict, when eyewitness evidence surfaced of Strong’s role in scamming the value of the company stock up into the stratosphere, before selling it off.
In 1997, Strong went on to accept from Tongsun Park, who was found guilty of illegally acting as an Iraqi agent, $1 million from Saddam Hussein, which was invested in Cordex Petroleum Inc., a company he owned with his son, Fred.
These are the leaders in the Man-made Global Warming Movement, who three years later were to be funded by the man who was to become President of the United States of America.
If we follow the time line on where Obama was during the funding of the Chicago Climate Exchange, he was still a professor at the University of Chicago Law School teaching constitutional law, with his law license becoming inactive a year later in 2002.
It may be interesting to note that the Chicago Climate Exchange in spite of its hype, is a veritable rat’s nest of cronyism. The largest shareholder in the Exchange is Goldman Sachs. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is its honorary chairman, The Joyce Foundation, which funded the Exchange also funded money for John Ayers’ Chicago School Initiatives. John is the brother of William Ayers.
What a flap when it was discovered that the senator from Chicago had nursed on Saul Alinsky’s milk, had his political career launched at a coffee party held by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, and sat for 20 years, uncomplaining in front of the “God-dam-America pulpit of resentment-challenged Jeremiah Wright.
Folk were naturally outraged that the empty suit who would go on to become TOTUS was spawned from such anti-American activism.
But the media should have been hollering, “Stop Thief!” instead.
The same Chicago Climate Exchange promoting public rip-off was funded by Obama before he was POTUS.
Even as man-made global warming is being exposed as a money-generating hoax, Obama is working feverishly to push the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme through Congress.
Obama was never the character he created for himself in the fairy-tale version in “Dreams of My Father”. He’s the agent of Change and Hope for cohorts making money down at the Chicago Climate Exchange.
The Barbarians are pushing at the gate of the Global Warming fraud, and to borrow a line from children playing Hide and Seek, Here they come, ready or not!
Copenhagen: The eco-Nazis’ attempt at global bureaucratic coup d’etat has failed
Parturient montes: nascetur ridiculus mus
From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in CopenhagenThe mountains shall labor, and what will be born? A stupid little mouse. Thanks to hundreds of thousands of US citizens who contacted their elected representatives to protest about the unelected, communistic world government with near-infinite powers of taxation, regulation and intervention that was proposed in early drafts of the Copenhagen Treaty, there is no Copenhagen Treaty. There is not even a Copenhagen Agreement. There is a “Copenhagen Accord”.
The White House spinmeisters spun, and their official press release proclaimed, with more than usual fatuity, that President Obama had “salvaged” a deal at Copenhagen in bilateral talks with China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, which had established a negotiating bloc.
The plainly-declared common position of these four developing nations had been the one beacon of clarity and common sense at the foggy fortnight of posturing and gibbering in the ghastly Copenhagen conference center.
This is what the Forthright Four asked for:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.
After President Obama’s dramatic intervention to save the deal, this is what the Forthright Four got:
Point 1. No compulsory limits on carbon emissions.
Point 2. No emissions reductions at all unless the West paid for them.
Point 3. No international monitoring of any emissions reductions not paid for by the West.
Point 4. No use of “global warming” as an excuse to impose protectionist trade restrictions on countries that did not cut their carbon emissions.
Here, in a nutshell – for fortunately nothing larger is needed – are the main points of the ”Copenhagen Accord”:
Main points: In the Copenhagen Accord, which is operational immediately, the parties“underline that climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time”; emphasize their “strong political will to urgently combat climate change”; recognize “the scientific view that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 C°” and perhaps below 1.5 C°; aspire to “cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible”; acknowledge that eradicating poverty is the “overriding priority of developing countries”; and accept the need to help vulnerable countries – especially the least developed nations, small-island states, and Africa – to adapt to climate change.
Self-imposed emissions targets: All parties will set for themselves, and comply with, emissions targets for 2020, to be submitted to the secretariat by 31 January 2010. Where developing countries are paid to cut their emissions, their compliance will be monitored. Developed countries will financially support less-developed countries to prevent deforestation. Carbon trading may be used.
New bureaucracies and funding: Under the supervision of a “High-Level Panel”, developed countries will give up to $30 billion for 2010-12, aiming for $100 billion by 2020, in “scaled up, new and additional, predictable and adequate funding” to developing countries via a “Copenhagen Green Fund”. A “Technology Mechanism” will “accelerate technology development and transfer” to developing countries.
And that’s it. Expensive, yes. Unnecessary, yes. But earth-shaking? No.
The disconnect between the gaseous halations of various grandstanding “world leaders” about the supposedly urgent need to “Save The Planet Now” and the puny outcome of the Copenhagen Non-Event is dazzling. And it is welcome.
For all the rhetoric – or the flatulence that passes for rhetoric these days – it has begun to dawn on the “leaders” of those nations that subject them to regular recall and re-election that the people no longer believe the mad scientists are telling them the truth. And the people are right.
What is more, after the failure of the mainstream news media to report what the malevolent and unpleasant scientists involved in the Climategate affair had written to one another about those with whom they disagreed, or about what they had done to invent, fabricate, contrive, fiddle, tweak, alter, massage, conceal, hide or even destroy scientific data for the sake of protecting and peddling the pseudo-science in which environment correspondents had so readily and so ignorantly believed, the people no longer trust the media.
And that is bad news for a governing class that has come to develop a far-too-cosy relationship with the mainstream media. It is also very bad news for the mainstream media themselves, which are now rapidly losing circulation and ad revenue as the people rightly desert them for the Internet, where - notwithstanding various expensive attempts by the over-funded international Left to interfere with Google and Yahoo searches - the truth is still available if you know where to look.
Copenhagen was the last-chance saloon not for the planet, which does not need saving, but for the UN’s world-government wannabes. They blew it, big-time, by believing their own overspun propaganda about planetary peril and thinking they had “world leaders” where they wanted them. They overreached themselves, and have paid the price.
Even though next year is an el Nino year accompanied by fast-recovering solar activity, 2010 may not, after all, set a new global-temperature record to overtop that which was set in 1998, the year of the Great el Nino. By the time the next yackfest takes place in Mexico City in December 2010, the steam will have gone out of the “global warming” scare. We should not let our guard down, but Copenhagen is more than the end of the beginning for Green fascism: it is the beginning of the end. The eco-Nazis’ attempt at global bureaucratic coup d’etat has failed, and no such attempt is likely to succeed again. Too many of you are watching.
http://sppiblog.org/news/parturient-montes-nascetur-ridiculus-mus#more-314
Friday, December 18, 2009
Emergency Jobless Insurance Claims Surge By Most Ever In Prior Week
The number you won't hear mentioned anywhere in the Mainstream Media: 327,729. That is how many people shifted to Emergency Unemployment Compensation programs in the last week alone, hitting an all time record high of 4.2 million! So as everyone is focused on the benign picture of initial claims in the last week which was "only" 474,000, the number of people rolling off continuing benefits has exploded and is now a stunning 592,579 only in the last two week. Look for this number to keep going into the stratosphere as the 6 month continuing claims cliff keeps getting hit by more and more people who are unemployed and keep looking not only for believable change, but actual jobs to go with it.
And here is the chart that the administration would love to keep under lock and seal: the cumulative number of people on Emergency Insurance. At this rate those collecting EUC will surpass those on continuing claims (5.5 million) within a month.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
U.S. National Debt Tops Debt Limit
The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.
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Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions.
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Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Time names Bernanke Person of the Year
Time magazine says Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke "led an effort to save the world economy"
SO WHAT ?
HITLER WAS THE PERSON OF THE YEAR TOO !
Read more
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Shadowstats' John Williams: Prepare For The Hyperinflationary Great Depression
John Williams, who runs the popular counter government data manipulation site Shadowstats, has thrown down the gauntlet to deflationists, and in an extensive report concludes that the probability of a hyperinflationary episode in America over the next year has reached critical levels. While the debate between deflationists and (hyper)inflationists has been a long and painful one, numerous events set off in motion by the Bernanke Fed (as a direct legacy of the Greenspan multi-decade period of cheap and boundless credit) may have well cast America as the unwilling protagonist in the sequel of the failed monetary policy economic experiment better known as Zimbabwe. Williams does not mince his words:
The U.S. economic and systemic solvency crises of the last two years are just precursors to a Great Collapse: a hyperinflationary great depression. Such will reflect a complete collapse in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar, a collapse in the normal stream of U.S. commercial and economic activity, a collapse in the U.S. financial system as we know it, and a likely realignment of the U.S. political environment. The current U.S. financial markets, financial system and economy remain highly unstable and vulnerable to unexpected shocks. The Federal Reserve is dedicated to preventing deflation, to debasing the U.S. dollar. The results of those efforts are being seen in tentative selling pressures against the U.S. currency and in the rallying price of gold.And even as Bernanke continues existing in a factless vacuum where he sees no asset bubbles, Williams takes aim at the one party almost exclusively responsible for the economic carnage that will soon transpire:
The crises have been generated out of and are centered on the United States financial system, triggered by the collapse of debt excesses actively encouraged by the Greenspan Federal Reserve. Recognizing that the U.S. economy was sagging under the weight of structural changes created by government trade, regulatory and social policies -- policies that limited real consumer income growth -- Mr. Greenspan played along with the political and banking systems. He made policy decisions to steal economic activity from the future, fueling economic growth of the last decade largely through debt expansion.Looking at the events over the past year demonstrates that Williams is not just being a drama queen.
The Greenspan Fed pushed for ever-greater systemic leverage, including the happy acceptance of new financial products, which included instruments of mis-packaged lending risks, designed for consumption by global entities that openly did not understand the nature of the risks being taken. Complicit in this broad malfeasance was the U.S. government, including both major political parties in successive Administrations and Congresses.
As with consumers, the federal government could not make ends meet while appeasing that portion of the electorate that could be kept docile by ever-expanding government programs and increasing government spending. The solution was ever-expanding federal debt and deficits.
Purportedly, it was Arthur Burns, Fed Chairman under Richard Nixon, who first offered the advice that helped to guide Alan Greenspan and a number of Administrations. The gist of the wisdom imparted was that if you ran into problems, you could ignore the budget deficit and the dollar. Ignoring them did not matter, because doing so would not cost you any votes.
Back in 2005, I raised the issue of a then-inevitable U.S. hyperinflation with an advisor to both the Bush Administration and Fed Chairman Greenspan. I was told simply that "It's too far into the future to worry about."
Indeed, pushing the big problems into the future appears to have been the working strategy for both the Fed and recent Administrations. Yet, the U.S. dollar and the budget deficit do matter, and the future is at hand. The day of ultimate financial reckoning has arrived, and it is playing out.
Effective financial impairments and at least partial nationalizations or orchestrated bailouts/takeovers resulted for institutions such as Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Washington Mutual, AIG, General Motors, Chrysler, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with a number of further troubled financial institutions. The Fed moved to provide whatever systemic liquidity would be needed, while the federal government moved to finance corporate bailouts and to introduce significant stimulus spending.More on the impending timing of the complete economic collapse of the US financial system:
Curiously, though, the Fed and the Treasury let Lehman Brothers fail outright, which triggered a foreseeable run on the system and markedly intensified the systemic solvency crisis in September 2008. Whether someone was trying to play political games, with the public and Congress increasingly raising questions of moral hazard issues, or whether the U.S. financial wizards missed what would happen or simply moved to bring the crisis to a head, remains to be seen.
Before the systemic solvency crisis began to unfold in 2007, the U.S. government already had condemned the U.S. dollar to a hyperinflationary grave by taking on debt and obligations that never could be covered through raising taxes and/or by severely slashing government spending that had become politically untouchable. The U.S. economy also already had entered a severe structural downturn, which helped to trigger the systemic solvency crisis.What are the alternatives for the US? In a word, none. Presumably this means you should ignore what the axed "experts" from various bailed out sell side research chop shops try to tell you.
The intensifying economic and solvency crises, and the responses to both by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve in the last two years, have exacerbated the government's solvency issues and moved forward my timing estimation for the hyperinflation to the next five years, from the 2010 to 2018 timing range estimated in the prior report. The U.S. government and Federal Reserve already have committed the system to this course through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency. Accordingly, risks are particularly high of the hyperinflation crisis breaking within the next year.
The U.S. has no way of avoiding a financial Armageddon. Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover obligations. The alternative would be for the U.S. to renege on its existing debt and obligations, a solution for modern sovereign states rarely seen outside of governments overthrown in revolution, and a solution with no happier ending than simply printing the needed money. With the creation of massive amounts of new fiat dollars (not backed by gold or silver) will come the eventual destruction of the value of the U.S. dollar and related dollar-denominated paper assets.In other words, the economic cycle will come back with a vengeance. Having pulled America out of the abyss by the last hairs on its Rogaine infused head, the Fed and the Administration have merely purchased one-two years of excess time in which insiders can sell all their holdings (look at recent reports indicating the ratio of insider sellers to buyers) and banks can book one/two years of record bonuses before signing off.
What lies ahead will be extremely difficult, painful and unhappy times for many in the United States. The functioning and adaptation of the U.S. economy and financial markets to a hyperinflation likely would be particularly disruptive. Trouble could range from turmoil in the food distribution chain to electronic cash and credit systems unable to handle rapidly changing circumstances. The situation quickly would devolve from a deepening depression, to an intensifying hyperinflationary great depression.
While the economic difficulties would have global impact, the initial hyperinflation should be largely a U.S. problem, albeit with major implications for the global currency system. For those living in the United States, long-range strategies should look to assure safety and survival, which from a financial standpoint means preserving wealth and assets. Also directly impacted, of course, are those holding or dependent upon U.S. dollars or dollar-denominated assets, and those living in "dollarized" countries.
And whether one is a deflationist or inflationist, the take home message from Williams' thesis that everyone should be able to agree on, is what everyone knows yet is unwilling to admit: that the US economy (and its derivative, the undecoupled global economy, which that most certainly includes China) is that we are now caught in the greatest Ponzi bubble of all time. One small hiccup in which there is no incremental hollow value added on the margin courtesy of printing presses pushing fiat pieces of paper in overtime, would lead to precisely the same outcome as the world saw with Bernie Madoff: from $50 billion to 0 overnight. It is somehow fitting that world GDP is 1,000 time greater, at $50 trillion. Take away the fiat illusion, and the real value collapses to those concepts of tangible value that will remain in a post bubble implosion scenario: whether these be spam, gold, or lead.
And just so there is no confusion about the course of events, Williams presents the Zimbabwe hyperinflation episode as the case study that the historian Bernanke should have been focusing on, instead of spending long nights, "learning" from the Great Depression.
Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, was a quadrillion times worse than it was in Weimar Germany. Zimbabwe went through a number of years of high inflation, with an accelerating hyperinflation from 2006 to 2009, when the currency was abandoned. Through three devaluations, excess zeros repeatedly were lopped off notes as high as 100 trillion Zimbabwe dollars.Maybe in retrospect it is good that banks are not lending out. If the $1.2 trillion in excess reserves were to actually hit circulating currency overnight, or even in a much more gradual fashion, then hyperinflation would surely be unavoidable, not so much as function of the consumer becoming a dominant force once again, which is the deflationists' key point, but as a result of the excess liquidity of the capital markets, which is the only reason why the S&P is where it is, into Main Street. As it stands, banks' unwillingness to recreate the cheap credit bubble by lending to anyone who has a pulse and can walk is the only thing that is so far preventing America's name change to the United States of Zimbabwe.
The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would have be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth. Such a pile of bills literally would be light years high, stretching from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy.
In early-2009, the governor of the Zimbabwe Reserve Bank indicated he felt his actions in printing money were vindicated by the recent actions of the U.S. Federal Reserve. If the U.S. went through a hyperinflation like that of Zimbabwe’s, total U.S. federal debt and obligations (roughly $75 trillion with unfunded liabilities) could be paid off for much less than a current penny.
What helped to enable the evolution of the Zimbabwe monetary excesses over the years, while still having something of a functioning economy, was the back-up of a well functioning black market in U.S. dollars. The United States has no such backup system, however, with implications for a more rapid and disruptive hyperinflation than seen in Zimbabwe, when it hits.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Obama Declares War On Pakistan
Webster G. Tarpley
Infowars.com
December 14, 2009
Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.
US DETERRED FROM OPEN WAR BY PAKISTAN’S NUKES
The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly. But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power, possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them. What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.
The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture chambers in Iraq. McChrystal’s specific credential for the Pakistani civil war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites by creating “al Qaeda in Iraq” under the infamous and now departed double agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang known as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General McChrystal, Obama’s hand-picked choice. McChrystal’s superior, Gen Petraeus, wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg – in other words, he wants to be the next US president.
The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent ethnic groups of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India. Most maps show only political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups. First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran. The Punjabis inhabit Pakistan, as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from Sind.
PASHTUNISTAN
The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan, but here they are alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul, even though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the 2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the Pashtuns feel shut out.
The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan, where they can wage war against the central government in Islamabad. US aid will flow directly to war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.
On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices, which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both Kabul and Islamabad.
BALUCHISTAN
The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran, which they see as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination drones into Baluchistan. One pretext for this is the report, peddled for example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate as the kingpins of the so-called “Quetta Shura.” Blackwater teams cannot be far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Teheran for the murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both Pakistan and Iran, thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US policy.
OBAMA’S RUBE GOLDBERG STRATEGY
Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, “al Qaeda” is of course the CIA’s own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the enemy is supposed to be “Al Qaeda.” But, even according to the US government, there are precious few “Al Qaeda” fighters left in Afghanistan. Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where “Al Qaeda” is not, rather than in Pakistan where “Al Qaeda” is now alleged to be?
One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television interview that ‘Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaida is operating all over the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in Helmand Province. That’s not next door to Waziristan. So I’m wondering, what exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a minimal presence of Al Qaida in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Indeed. ‘The Wisconsin Democrat also warned that U.S. policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the region: “You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will push more extremists into Pakistan?” he told ABC. “They couldn’t deny it, and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into Pakistan, so I think it’s just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of our national security interest.”’1 Of course, this is all intentional and motivated by US imperialist raison d’état. .
MALICK: “DID OBAMA DECLARE WAR ON PAKISTAN?”
Obama’s speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are after all two sovereign states and both members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks, called attention to this ploy: ‘Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he might be declaring war on Pakistan. Every time he mentioned Afghanistan, Pakistan preceded mention…. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: “the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.” I was shocked because a succession of American officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.’2 This article is entitled “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”, and we can chalk the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as “Afpak” or even “Afpakia.”In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan. This assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop strength: “Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training…. The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision…to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”3 The US is now training more Predator operators than combat pilots.
BLACKWATER ACCUSED IN PESHAWAR MASSACRE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN
The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan, attacking peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved: ‘At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.’ 4
As shocking as Scahill’s report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: “ISLAMABAD Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported Thursday.”5 This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter, especially among women and children.
US ALSO AT WAR WITH UZBEKISTAN?
Scahill’s report also suggests that US black ops have reached into Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to the north: ‘In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?”’ 6 Such are the ways of hope and change.
The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor Chossudovsky: ‘Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a “Yugoslav-like fate” for Pakistan “in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan.” (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a “failed state” by 2015, “as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons”. (Quoted by former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February 2005)…. Washington favors the creation of a “Greater Baluchistan” which would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.’7 The Iranians, for their part, are adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in Baluchistan: “TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said …that there are some concrete evidences showing U.S. involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. …. The deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God’s soldiers) occurred on Oct. 18 in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).8
US GOAL: CUT THE PAKISTAN ENERGY CORRIDOR BETWEEN IRAN, CHINA
Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan? One reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic partner of China, a country which the US and British are determined to oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the Himalayas above Kashmir. This is the so-called “Pipelinestan” issue. This would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile tanker route around the southern rim of Asia. As a recent news report points out: ‘Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China’s participation in the pipeline project and Islamabad, while willing to sign a bilateral agreement with Iran, has also welcomed China’s participation. According to an estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to $500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle Eastern crude oil to western China. Pakistan provides China the shortest possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries…. The pipeline, which would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram highway, would be partly financed by Beijing. The Chinese are also building a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait of Malacca, which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar, and from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed Fazl-e-Haider, “Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal,” Asia Times, 27 May 2009.9 This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.
Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East. This would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as part of their overall strategy of world domination.
US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested near Lahore in Pakistan.
INDIA AND IRAN
As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be no peace on the subcontinent.
Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama’s war and escalation policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.
1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/06/feingold-why-surge-where_n_381729.html
Infowars.com
December 14, 2009
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| Obama declared all-out war on Pakistan during his December 1, 2009, West Point speech. | |
US DETERRED FROM OPEN WAR BY PAKISTAN’S NUKES
The ongoing civil war in Afghanistan is merely a pretext, a cover story designed to provide the United States with a springboard for a geopolitical destabilization campaign in the entire region which cannot be publicly avowed. In the blunt cynical world of imperialist aggression à la Bush and Cheney, a pretext might have been manufactured to attack Pakistan directly. But Pakistan is far too large and the United States is far too weak and too bankrupt for such an undertaking. In addition, Pakistan is a nuclear power, possessing atomic bombs and medium range missiles needed to deliver them. What we are seeing is a novel case of nuclear deterrence in action. The US cannot send an invasion fleet or set up airbases nearby because Pakistani nuclear weapons might destroy them. To this extent, the efforts of Ali Bhutto and A.Q. Khan to provide Pakistan a deterrent capability have been vindicated. But the US answer is to find ways to attack Pakistan below the nuclear threshold, and even below the conventional threshold. This is where the tactic of exporting the Afghan civil war to Pakistan comes in.
The architect of the new Pakistani civil war is US Special Forces General Stanley McChrystal, who organized the infamous network of US torture chambers in Iraq. McChrystal’s specific credential for the Pakistani civil war is his role in unleashing the Iraqi civil war of Sunnis versus Shiites by creating “al Qaeda in Iraq” under the infamous and now departed double agent Zarkawi. If Iraqi society as a whole had lined up against the US invaders, the occupiers would have soon been driven out. The counter-gang known as “Al Qaeda in Iraq” avoided that possibility by killing Shiites, and thus calling forth massive retaliation in the form of a civil war. These tactics are drawn from the work of British General Frank Kitson, who wrote about them in his book Low Intensity Warfare. If the United States possesses a modern analog to Heinrich Himmler of the SS, it is surely General McChrystal, Obama’s hand-picked choice. McChrystal’s superior, Gen Petraeus, wants to be the new Field Marshal von Hindenburg – in other words, he wants to be the next US president.
The vulnerability of Pakistan which the US and its NATO associates are seeking to exploit can best be understood using a map of the prevalent ethnic groups of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and India. Most maps show only political borders which date back to the time of British imperialism, and therefore fail to reflect the principal ethnic groups of the region. For the purposes of this analysis, we must start by recognizing a number of groups. First is the Pashtun people, located mainly in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Then we have the Baluchis, located primarily in Pakistan and Iran. The Punjabis inhabit Pakistan, as do the Sindhis. The Bhutto family came from Sind.
PASHTUNISTAN
The US and NATO strategy begins with the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the so-called Taliban are largely drawn. The Pashtuns represent a substantial portion of the population of Afghanistan, but here they are alienated from the central government under President Karzai in Kabul, even though the US puppet Karzai passes for a Pashtun himself. The issue involves the Afghan National Army, which was created by the United States after the 2001 invasion. The Afghan officer corps are largely Tajiks drawn from the Northern Alliance that allied with the United States against the Pashtun Talibans. The Tajiks speak Dari, sometimes known as eastern Persian. Other Afghan officers come from the Hazara people. The important thing is that the Pashtuns feel shut out.
The US strategy can best be understood as a deliberate effort at persecuting, harassing, antagonizing, strafing, repressing, and murdering the Pashtuns. The additional 40,000 US and NATO forces which Obama demands for Afghanistan will concentrate in Helmand province and other areas where the Pashtuns are in the majority. The net effect will be to increase the rebellion of the fiercely independent Pashtuns against Kabul and the foreign occupation, and at the same time to push many of these newly radicalized mujaheddin fighters across the border into Pakistan, where they can wage war against the central government in Islamabad. US aid will flow directly to war lords and drug lords, increasing the centrifugal tendencies.
On the Pakistani side, the Pashtuns are also alienated from the central government. Islamabad and the army are seen by them as too much the creatures of the Punjabis, with some input from the Sindhis. On the Pakistani side of the Pashtun territory, US operations include wholesale assassinations from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones, murders by CIA and reportedly Blackwater snipers, plus blind terrorist massacres like the recent ones in Peshawar which the Pakistani Taliban are blaming on Blackwater, acting as a subcontractor of the CIA. These actions are intolerable and humiliating for a proud sovereign state. Every time the Pashtuns are clobbered, they blame the Punjabis in Islamabad for the dirty deals with the US that allow this to happen. The most immediate goal of Obama’s Afghan-Pakistan escalation is therefore to promote a general secessionist uprising of the entire Pashtun people under Taliban auspices, which would already have the effect of destroying the national unity of both Kabul and Islamabad.
BALUCHISTAN
The other ethnic group which the Obama strategy seeks to goad into insurrection and secession is the Baluchis. The Baluchis have their own grievances against the Iranian central government in Tehran, which they see as being dominated by Persians. An integral part of the new Obama policy is to expand the deadly flights of the CIA Predators and other assassination drones into Baluchistan. One pretext for this is the report, peddled for example by Michael Ware of CNN, that Osama bin Laden and his MI-6 sidekick Zawahiri are both holed up in the Baluchi city of Quetta, where they operate as the kingpins of the so-called “Quetta Shura.” Blackwater teams cannot be far behind. In Iranian Baluchistan, the CIA is funding the murderous Jundullah organization, which was recently denounced by Teheran for the murder of a number of top officials of the Iranian Pasdaran Revolutionary guards. The rebellion of Baluchistan would smash the national unity of both Pakistan and Iran, thus helping to destroy two of the leading targets of US policy.
OBAMA’S RUBE GOLDBERG STRATEGY
Even Chris Matthews of MSNBC, normally a devoted acolyte of Obama, pointed out that the US strategy as announced at West Point very much resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption. (In the real world, “al Qaeda” is of course the CIA’s own Arab and terrorist legion.) In the world of official US myth, the enemy is supposed to be “Al Qaeda.” But, even according to the US government, there are precious few “Al Qaeda” fighters left in Afghanistan. Why then, asked Matthews, concentrate US forces in Afghanistan where “Al Qaeda” is not, rather than in Pakistan where “Al Qaeda” is now alleged to be?
One elected official who has criticized this incongruous mismatch is Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who said in a television interview that ‘Pakistan, in the border region near Afghanistan, is perhaps the epicenter [of global terrorism], although al Qaida is operating all over the world, in Yemen, in Somalia, in northern Africa, affiliates in Southeast Asia. Why would we build up 100,000 or more troops in parts of Afghanistan included that are not even near the border? You know, this buildup is in Helmand Province. That’s not next door to Waziristan. So I’m wondering, what exactly is this strategy, given the fact that we have seen that there is a minimal presence of Al Qaida in Afghanistan, but a significant presence in Pakistan? It just defies common sense that a huge boots on the ground presence in a place where these people are not is the right strategy. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’ Indeed. ‘The Wisconsin Democrat also warned that U.S. policy in Afghanistan could actually push terrorists and extremists into Pakistan and, as a consequence, further destabilize the region: “You know, I asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, and Mr. Holbrooke, our envoy over there, a while ago, you know, is there a risk that if we build up troops in Afghanistan, that will push more extremists into Pakistan?” he told ABC. “They couldn’t deny it, and this week, Prime Minister Gilani of Pakistan specifically said that his concern about the buildup is that it will drive more extremists into Pakistan, so I think it’s just the opposite, that this boots-on-the-ground approach alienates the Afghan population and specifically encourages the Taliban to further coalesce with Al Qaida, which is the complete opposite of our national security interest.”’1 Of course, this is all intentional and motivated by US imperialist raison d’état. .
MALICK: “DID OBAMA DECLARE WAR ON PAKISTAN?”
Obama’s speech did everything possible to blur the distinction between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are after all two sovereign states and both members of the United Nations in their own right. Ibrahim Sajid Malick, US correspondent for Samaa TV, one of the largest Pakistan television networks, called attention to this ploy: ‘Speaking to a hall full of cadets at the US Military Academy of West Point, President Barack Obama almost seemed like he might be declaring war on Pakistan. Every time he mentioned Afghanistan, Pakistan preceded mention…. Sitting at the back benches of the hall at one point I almost jumped out of my chair when he said: “the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them.” I was shocked because a succession of American officials recently confirmed that the Pakistani arsenal is secure.’2 This article is entitled “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?”, and we can chalk the question mark up to diplomatic discretion. During congressional hearings involving General McChrystal and US Ambassador Eikenberry, Afghanistan and Pakistan were simply fused into one sinister entity known as “Afpak” or even “Afpakia.”In the summer of 2007, Obama, coached by Zbigniew Brzezinski and other controllers, was the originator of the unilateral US policy of using Predator drones for political assassinations inside Pakistan. This assassination policy is now being massively escalated along with the troop strength: “Two weeks ago in Pakistan, Central Intelligence Agency sharpshooters killed eight people suspected of being militants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and wounded two others in a compound that was said to be used for terrorist training…. The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said this week, to parallel the president’s decision…to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time — a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas — because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”3 The US is now training more Predator operators than combat pilots.
BLACKWATER ACCUSED IN PESHAWAR MASSACRE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN
The CIA, the Pentagon, and their various contractors among the private military firms are now on a murder spree across Pakistan, attacking peaceful villages and wedding parties, among other targets. Blackwater, now calling itself Xe Services and Total Intelligence Solutions, is heavily involved: ‘At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.’ 4
As shocking as Scahill’s report is, it must nevertheless be viewed as a limited hangout, since there is no mention of the persistent charges that a large part of the deadly bombings in Peshawar and other Pakistani cities are being carried out by Blackwater, as this news item suggests: “ISLAMABAD Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Chief of Taliban movement in Pakistan Hakimullah Mehsud has blamed the controversial American private firm Blackwater for the bomb blast in Peshawar which killed 108 people, local news agency NNI reported Thursday.”5 This was blind terrorism designed for maximum slaughter, especially among women and children.
US ALSO AT WAR WITH UZBEKISTAN?
Scahill’s report also suggests that US black ops have reached into Uzbekistan, a post-Soviet country of 25 million which borders Afghanistan to the north: ‘In addition to planning drone strikes and operations against suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Pakistan for both JSOC and the CIA, the Blackwater team in Karachi also helps plan missions for JSOC inside Uzbekistan against the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, according to the military intelligence source. Blackwater does not actually carry out the operations, he said, which are executed on the ground by JSOC forces. “That piqued my curiosity and really worries me because I don’t know if you noticed but I was never told we are at war with Uzbekistan,” he said. “So, did I miss something, did Rumsfeld come back into power?”’ 6 Such are the ways of hope and change.
The role of US intelligence in fomenting the Baluchistan rebellion for the purpose of breaking Pakistan apart is also confirmed by Professor Chossudovsky: ‘Already in 2005, a report by the US National Intelligence Council and the CIA forecast a “Yugoslav-like fate” for Pakistan “in a decade with the country riven by civil war, bloodshed and inter-provincial rivalries, as seen recently in Baluchistan.” (Energy Compass, 2 March 2005). According to the NIC-CIA, Pakistan is slated to become a “failed state” by 2015, “as it would be affected by civil war, complete Talibanization and struggle for control of its nuclear weapons”. (Quoted by former Pakistan High Commissioner to UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Times of India, 13 February 2005)…. Washington favors the creation of a “Greater Baluchistan” which would integrate the Baluch areas of Pakistan with those of Iran and possibly the Southern tip of Afghanistan, thereby leading to a process of political fracturing in both Iran and Pakistan.’7 The Iranians, for their part, are adamant that the US is committing acts of war on their territory in Baluchistan: “TEHRAN, Oct. 29 (Xinhua) — Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said …that there are some concrete evidences showing U.S. involvement in recent deadly bomb explosions in the country’s Sistan-Baluchistan province, the official IRNA news agency reported. …. The deadly suicide attack by Sunni rebel group Jundallah (God’s soldiers) occurred on Oct. 18 in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province near the border with Pakistan when the local officials were preparing a ceremony in which the local tribal leaders were to meet the military commanders of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).8
US GOAL: CUT THE PAKISTAN ENERGY CORRIDOR BETWEEN IRAN, CHINA
Why would the United States be so obsessed with the breakup of Pakistan? One reason is that Pakistan is traditionally a strategic ally and economic partner of China, a country which the US and British are determined to oppose and contain on the world stage. Specifically, Pakistan could function as an energy corridor linking the oil fields of Iran and possibly even Iraq with the Chinese market by means of a pipeline that would cross the Himalayas above Kashmir. This is the so-called “Pipelinestan” issue. This would give China a guaranteed land-based oil supply not subject to Anglo-American naval superiority, while also cutting out the 12,000 mile tanker route around the southern rim of Asia. As a recent news report points out: ‘Beijing has been pressuring Tehran for China’s participation in the pipeline project and Islamabad, while willing to sign a bilateral agreement with Iran, has also welcomed China’s participation. According to an estimate, such a pipeline would result in Pakistan getting $200 million to $500 million annually in transit fees alone. China and Pakistan are already working on a proposal for laying a trans-Himalayan pipeline to carry Middle Eastern crude oil to western China. Pakistan provides China the shortest possible route to import oil from the Gulf countries…. The pipeline, which would run from the southern Pakistan port of Gwadar and follow the Karakoram highway, would be partly financed by Beijing. The Chinese are also building a refinery at Gwadar. Imports using the pipeline would allow Beijing to reduce the portion of its oil shipped through the narrow and unsafe Strait of Malacca, which at present carries up to 80% of its oil imports. Islamabad also plans to extend a railway track to China to connect it to Gwadar. The port is also considered the likely terminus of proposed multibillion-dollar gas pipelines reaching from the South Pars fields in Iran or from Qatar, and from the Daulatabad fields in Turkmenistan for export to world markets. Syed Fazl-e-Haider, “Pakistan, Iran sign gas pipeline deal,” Asia Times, 27 May 2009.9 This is the normal, peaceful economic progress and cooperation which the Anglo-Americans are hell-bent on stopping.
Oil and natural gas pipelines from Iran across Pakistan and into China would carry energy resources into the Middle Kingdom, and would also serve as conveyor belts for Chinese economic influence into the Middle East. This would make Anglo-American dominion increasingly tenuous in a part of the world which London and Washington have traditionally sought to control as part of their overall strategy of world domination.
US domestic propaganda is already portraying Pakistan as the new home base of terrorism. The four pathetic patsies going on trial for an alleged plot to bomb a synagogue in the Riverdale neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City had been carefully sheep-dipped to associate them with the shadowy and suspicious Jaish-e-Mohammad, allegedly a Pakistani terrorist group. The same goes for the five Moslems from Northern Virginia who have just been arrested near Lahore in Pakistan.
INDIA AND IRAN
As far as the neighboring states are concerned, India under the unfortunate Manmohan Singh seems to be accepting the role of continental dagger against Pakistan and China on behalf of the US and the British. This is a recipe for a colossal tragedy. India should rather make permanent peace with Pakistan by vacating the Vale of Kashmir, where 95% of the population is Moslem and would like to join Pakistan. Without a solution to this issue, there will be no peace on the subcontinent.
Regarding Iran, George Friedman, the head of the Stratfor outlet of the US intelligence community recently told Russia Today that the great novelty of the next decade will be an alliance of the United States with Iran directed against Russia. In that scenario, Iran would cut off oil to China altogether. That is the essence of the Brzezinski strategy. It is urgent that the antiwar movement in the United States regroup and begin a new mobilization against the cynical hypocrisy of Obama’s war and escalation policy, which suprasses even the war crimes of the Bush-Cheny neocons. In this new phase of the Great Game, the stakes are incalculable.
1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/06/feingold-why-surge-where_n_381729.html
2 Ibrahim Sajid Malick, “Did Obama Declare War On Pakistan?,” Pakistan for Pakistanis Blog, 2 December 2009. http://ibrahimsajidmalick.com/did-Obama-declare-war-on-pakistan/484/
3 Scott Shane, “C.I.A. to Expand Use of Drones in Pakistan,” New York Times, December 3, 2009. See also David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, “Between the Lines, an Expansion in Pakistan,” New York Times, 1 December 2009.
5 “Taliban in Pakistan blame U.S. Blackwater for deadly blast,” Xinhua News Agency, 29 October 2009, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-10/29/content_12358907.htm
8 “Iran says having evidences of U.S. involvement in suicide bomb attacks,” Xinhua, 29 October 2009.
9 http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KE27Df03.html
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