Dominos falling in the Middle East

[Ian Beales Gut]

i can't imagine many people are unhappy Gadaffi is gone. i imagine..

 

some people are concerned about the illegality of this whole venture and the precedent it sets.

some people will be concerned at the number lives lost and to be lost

some will be specualting if the Libyan people will actually be better off; like after those other recent efforts of regime change

some people maybe wondering who this heavily financed rag tag band of rebels actually are and what their next move is

some people may not be pleased as one murdering fascist dictator is gone but we choose support several all over the world as it pleases us

some people might be concerned a massive imperial power base in Libya may not be the best development for the true development of democracy across Africa and the Middleeast

 

some people just don't get much pleasure out of wars.

 

i don't know - i personally find scant reason to celebrate.

 

Maybe so but I recon there's a few people in Lockerbie will be dancing a jig of delight once this murdering coward is dragged from his liar and strung up like the murdering criminal that he is. Just saying

Like.

[zigackly]

Maybe so but I recon there's a few people in Lockerbie will be dancing a jig of delight once this murdering coward is dragged from his liar and strung up like the murdering criminal that he is. Just saying

Like.

 

Along with the people he's been oppressing, torturing and murdering for forty two years.

[Mr. Beast]

Maybe it would just be better to leave dictators in place then. So much simpler for everyone not actually living under their control.

 

A civilian army takes up arms and succeeds in overthrowing a dictator backed by the military, mercenaries and plundered billions. A fantastic achievement. Maybe it will all turn sour but they've earned the right to their freedom and I'm not begrudging it just because they had to have a bit of help from NATO.

 

not a bit of help, billions of dollars and 20 000 air sorties amongst other things.

 

i agree with the spirit of your argument. i'm not begrudging any of these people who've risen any moment of freedom, be it even a taste or something more permanent and universal. But given the imperialist powers they are in bed with and the existing fractious nature of the country, i don't think it's too early to worry about what might come next. i don't think that should be equated with any lack of sadness for the passing of Gaddaffi.

[VladimirIlyich]

i can't imagine many people are unhappy Gadaffi is gone. i imagine..

 

some people are concerned about the illegality of this whole venture and the precedent it sets.

some people will be concerned at the number lives lost and to be lost

some will be specualting if the Libyan people will actually be better off; like after those other recent efforts of regime change

some people maybe wondering who this heavily financed rag tag band of rebels actually are and what their next move is

some people may not be pleased as one murdering fascist dictator is gone but we choose support several all over the world as it pleases us

some people might be concerned a massive imperial power base in Libya may not be the best development for the true development of democracy across Africa and the Middleeast

 

some people just don't get much pleasure out of wars.

 

i don't know - i personally find scant reason to celebrate.

 

And yet none of those lives lost belongs to said fascist dictator.

 

I dont much satisfaction out of hundreds/thousands of libyan citizens losing their lives because dictator lost his usefulness to the west.

 

Mostly,I'd love to think his removal was due to some kind of moral and ethical cause rather than purely a move to control one of the largest oil producing countries on the planet.

[taliesin08]

Maybe so but I recon there's a few people in Lockerbie will be dancing a jig of delight once this murdering coward is dragged from his liar and strung up like the murdering criminal that he is. Just saying

Like.

Some of the families don't believe Libya bombed the plane.

[Ian Beales Gut]

Some of the families don't believe Libya bombed the plane.

 

I can imagine. Some of the families of 9-11 think it was a Zionist instigated plot to destabilise the Arab world. Chances are though it was aq same as it was Libya more likely than not who bombed that pan am flight

[Jose Jones]

I thought it was reasonably accepted that it was most likely a Palestinian Islamic group that did the Lockerbie bombing?

[Stu Monty]

Another murdering, fascist dictator bites the dust and people don't seem pleased about it. Curious.

 

I think it makes sense to see what comes to replace him. Just like with Egypt I think it would be sensible to listen to the wise words of Winston Wolf and not start sucking each other's dicks just yet. You can bet that most western governments will be, at this very moment, doing all they can to put in place a government that represents the interests of their top 1% and not the people of Libya. Any Libyan who wishes to represent their people will be seen as the enemy.

 

Along with the people he's been oppressing, torturing and murdering for forty two years.

 

With our support and our weapons.

 

I thought it was reasonably accepted that it was most likely a Palestinian Islamic group that did the Lockerbie bombing?

 

Yes, it is.

[zigackly]

With our support and our weapons.

 

I'm fairly sure you can murder and torture people without the aid of political support and modern weaponry Stu. I get your point, but in terms of the guilt of the "democratic" western nations in supporting and arming loony dictators, Libya is the tip of the iceberg.

 

Does the fact that "we" supported his regime recently make it a bad thing for the people of Libya that he's gone? No, it's got fuck all to do with it, as does what regime replaces him. Getting rid of him is a good step for those people regardless. Which is presumably why they wanted to do it.

[Stu Monty]

I'm fairly sure you can murder and torture people without the aid of political support and modern weaponry Stu. I get your point, but in terms of the guilt of the "democratic" western nations in supporting and arming loony dictators, Libya is the tip of the iceberg.

 

Does the fact that "we" supported his regime recently make it a bad thing for the people of Libya that he's gone? No, it's got fuck all to do with it, as does what regime replaces him. Getting rid of him is a good step for those people regardless. Which is presumably why they wanted to do it.

 

I never said it was a bad thing, Zig, I was just answering AWS on why people might not be getting too excited about it. It's a window of opportunity for them but I'm not holding out much hope that the next man will be acting in their interests.

[aws]

I never said it was a bad thing, Zig, I was just answering AWS on why people might not be getting too excited about it. It's a window of opportunity for them but I'm not holding out much hope that the next man will be acting in their interests.

 

Maybe not but the last man definitely wasn't so that's a start. They've earned their freedom and the right to fuck it up if that's what happens.

[Beantown Red]

.

The CIA’s armed drones and paramilitary forces have killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and thousands of its foot soldiers. But there is another mysterious organization that has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

 

CIA operatives have imprisoned and interrogated nearly 100 suspected terrorists in their former secret prisons around the world, but troops from this other secret organization have imprisoned and interrogated 10 times as many, holding them in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, this secretive group of men (and a few women) has grown tenfold while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA managed. “We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.

 

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command, based in Fayetteville, N.C., even existed.

 

This article, adapted from a chapter of the newly released “Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State,” by Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, chronicles JSOC’s spectacular rise, much of which has not been publicly disclosed before. Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.

 

“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.

 

The president has also given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them. Critics charge that this individual man-hunting mission amounts to assassination, a practice prohibited by U.S. law. JSOC’s list is not usually coordinated with the CIA, which maintains a similar, but shorter roster of names.

 

Created in 1980 but reinvented in recent years, JSOC has grown from 1,800 troops prior to 9/11 to as many as 25,000, a number that fluctuates according to its mission. It has its own intelligence division, its own drones and reconnaissance planes, even its own dedicated satellites. It also has its own cyberwarriors, who, on Sept. 11, 2008, shut down every jihadist Web site they knew.

 

Obscurity has been one of the unit’s hallmarks. When JSOC officers are working in civilian government agencies or U.S. embassies abroad, which they do often, they dispense with uniforms, unlike their other military comrades. In combat, they wear no name or rank identifiers. They have hidden behind various nicknames: the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Task Force Green, Task Force 11, Task Force 121. JSOC leaders almost never speak in public. They have no unclassified Web site.

 

Despite the secrecy, JSOC is not permitted to carry out covert action like the CIA. Covert action, in which the U.S. role is to be kept hidden, requires a presidential finding and congressional notification. Many national security officials, however, say JSOC’s operations are so similar to the CIA’s that they amount to covert action. The unit takes its orders directly from the president or the secretary of defense and is managed and overseen by a military-only chain of command.

 

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

 

Lethal force

 

JSOC’s first mission in 1980, Operation Eagle Claw, an attempted rescue of diplomats held hostage by Iranian students at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, ended in a helicopter collision in the desert and the death of eight team members. The unit’s extreme secrecy also made conventional military commanders distrustful and, as a consequence, it was rarely used during conflicts.

 

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, smarting from the CIA’s ability to move first into Afghanistan and frustrated by the Army’s slowness, pumped new life into the organization. JSOC’s core includes the Army’s Delta Force, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, the Air Force’s 24th Special Tactics Squadron and the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

 

The lethality of JSOC was demonstrated in the December 2001 mountain battle at Tora Bora. Although bin Laden and many of his followers eventually escaped across the border into Pakistan, an Army history said that on the nights of Dec. 13 and 14, JSOC killed so many enemy forces that “dead bodies of al-Qaeda fighters were carted off the field the next day” by the truckload.

 

It also made mistakes. On July 1, 2002, in what the Rand Corp. labeled “the single most serious errant attack of the entire war,” a JSOC reconnaissance team hunting Taliban came under attack and an AC-130 gunship fired upon six sites in the village of Kakarak . The estimates of civilian deaths ranged from 48 to hundreds. The “wedding party incident,” as it became known because a wedding party was among the targets accidentally hit, convinced many Afghans that U.S. forces disregarded the lives of civilians.

 

Nevertheless, on Sept. 16, 2003, Rumsfeld signed an executive order cementing JSOC as the center of the counterterrorism universe. It listed 15 countries and the activities permitted under various scenarios, and it gave the preapprovals required to carry them out.

 

In Iraq and Afghanistan, lethal action against al-Qaeda was granted without additional approval. In the other countries — among them Algeria, Iran, Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia and Syria — JSOC forces needed the tacit approval from the country involved or at least a sign-off from higher up on the American chain of command. In the Philippines, for example, JSOC could undertake psychological operations to confuse or trap al-Qaeda operatives, but it needed approval from the White House for lethal action. To attack targets in Somalia required approval from at least the secretary of defense, while attacks in Pakistan and Syria needed presidential sign-off.

 

In the fall of 2003, JSOC got a new commander who would turn the organization into arguably the most effective weapon in the U.S. counterterrorism arsenal. From his perch as vice director of operations on the Joint Staff, Brig. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal had come to believe there was an aversion to decision making at the top of government. No one wanted to be wrong, so they either asked more questions or added more layers to the process. The new emphasis on interagency cooperation also meant meetings were bigger and longer. Any one of a multitude of agencies could stifle action until it was too late.

 

McChrystal believed he had “to slip out of the grip” of Washington’s suffocating bureaucracy, he told associates. He moved his headquarters to Balad Air Base, 45 miles northeast of Baghdad, and worked inside an old concrete airplane hangar with three connecting command centers: one to fight al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq, one for the fight against Shiite extremists in the country and a third for himself, so he could oversee all operations.

 

He coaxed the other intelligence agencies to help him out — the CIA presence grew to 100; the FBI and National Security Agency to a combined 80. He won their loyalty by exposing the guts of his operation to everyone involved. “The more people you shared your problem with, the better you’d do in solving it,” he would say.

 

McChrystal installed a simple, PC-based common desktop and portal where troops could post documents, conduct chats, tap into the intelligence available on any target — pictures, biometrics, transcripts, intelligence reports — and follow the message traffic of commanders in the midst of operations.

 

Then he gave access to it to JSOC’s bureaucratic rivals: the CIA, NSA, FBI and others. He also began salting every national security agency in Washington with his top commandos. In all, he deployed 75 officers to Washington agencies and 100 more around the world. They rotated every four months so none would become disconnected from combat.

 

Some thought of the liaisons as spies for an organization that was already too important. But those suspicions did little to derail JSOC or McChrystal.

 

Stories spread that he ate just one meal and ran 10 miles every day. He looked the part, with his taut face, intense eyes and thin physique. A sign inside the wire at Balad said it all: “17 5 2.” Seventeen hours for work, five hours for sleep, two hours for eating and exercise.

 

McChrystal’s legendary work ethic mixed well with his Scotch Irish exuberance and common-man demeanor. He viewed beer calls with subordinates as an important bonding exercise. He made people call him by his first name. He seemed almost naively trusting. (This trait would become McChrystal’s undoing in 2010, after he was promoted to commander of forces in Afghanistan. He and members of his inner circle made inappropriate comments about their civilian leaders in the presence of a Rolling Stone reporter. McChrystal offered to resign, and Obama quickly accepted).

 

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

 

One innovation was called the Electronic Divining Rod, a sensor worn by commandos that could detect the location of a particular cellphone. The beeping grew louder as a soldier with the device got closer to the person carrying a targeted phone.

 

Killing the enemy was the easy part, JSOC commanders said; finding him was the hard part. But thanks to Roy Apseloff, director of the National Media Exploitation Center, the U.S. government’s agency for analyzing documents captured by the military and intelligence community, JSOC’s intelligence collection improved dramatically. Apseloff offered to lend McChrystal his small staff, based in Fairfax, to examine items captured in raids. Apseloff’s team downloaded the contents of thumb drives, cellphones and locked or damaged computers to extract names, phone numbers, messages and images. Then they processed and stored that data, linking it to other information that might help analysts find not just one more bad guy but an entire network of them.

 

The major challenge was how to find the gems in the trash quickly enough to be useful. The key was more bandwidth, the electronic pipeline that carried information like e-mail and telephone calls around the world. Luckily for the military and JSOC, the attacks of 2001 coincided with an unrelated development: the dot-com bust. It created a glut in commercial satellite capacity, and the military bought up much of it.

 

Within a year after McChrystal’s arrival, JSOC had linked 65 stations around the world to enable viewers to participate in the twice-daily, 45-minute video teleconferences that he held. By 2006, JSOC had increased its bandwidth capability by 100 times in three years, according to senior leaders.

 

The other challenge JSOC faced was a human one: Ill-trained interrogators had little information about individual detainees and didn’t know what questions to ask or how to effectively ask them. Worse, some members of the JSOC’s Task Force 121 were beating prisoners.

 

Even before the Army’s Abu Ghraib prison photos began circulating in 2004, a confidential report warned that some JSOC interrogators were assaulting prisoners and hiding them in secret facilities. JSOC troops also detained mothers, wives and daughters when the men in a house they were looking for were not at home. The report warned these detentions and other massive sweep operations were counterproductive to winning Iraqi support.

 

Another investigation of JSOC detention facilities in Iraq during a four-month period in 2004 found that interrogators gave some prisoners only bread and water, in one case for 17 days. Other prisoners were locked up in cells so cramped they could not stand up or lie down while their captors played loud music to disrupt sleep. Still others were stripped, drenched with cold water and then interrogated in air-conditioned rooms or outside in the cold.

 

Eventually, 34 JSOC task force soldiers were disciplined in five cases over a one-year period beginning in 2003.

 

McChrystal ordered his intelligence chief, Michael Flynn, to professionalize the interrogation system. By the summer of 2005, JSOC’s interrogation booths at Balad sat around the corner from the large warren of rooms where specialists mined thumb drives, computers, cellphones, documents to use during interrogations. Paper maps were torn down from the walls and replaced with flat-panel screens and sophisticated computerized maps. Detainees willing to cooperate were taught how to use a mouse to fly around their virtual neighborhoods to help identify potential targets.

 

JSOC had to use the rules laid out in the Army Field Manual to interrogate detainees. But its interrogators were — and still are — permitted to keep them segregated from other prisoners and to hold them, with the proper approvals from superiors and in some case from Defense Department lawyers, for up to 90 days before they had to be transferred into the regular military prison population.

 

The new interrogation system also included an FBI and judicial team that collected evidence needed for trial by the Iraqi Central Criminal Court in Baghdad. From early 2005 to early 2007, the teams sent more than 2,000 individuals to trial, said senior military officials.

 

Body counts

 

Al-Qaeda used the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a call to arms to terrorists and recruits throughout the Middle East who flooded in from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — as many as 200 of them a month at the high point. By the end of 2005, a shocking picture emerged: Iraq was rife with semiautonomous al-Qaeda networks.

 

Al-Qaeda had divided Iraq into sections and put a provincial commander in charge of each. These commanders further divided their territory into districts and put someone in charge of each of those, too, according to military officials. There were city leaders within those areas and cells within each city. There were leaders for foreign fighters, for finance and for communications, too.

 

By the spring of 2006, using the expanded bandwidth and constant surveillance by unmanned aircraft, JSOC executed a series of raids, known as Operation Arcadia, in which it collected and analyzed 662 hours of full-motion video shot over 17 days. The raid netted 92 compact discs and barrels full of documents, leading to another round of raids at 14 locations. Those hits yielded hard drives, thumb drives and a basement stacked with 704 compact discs, including copies of a sophisticated al-Qaeda marketing campaign. Operation Arcadia led, on June 7, 2006, to the death of the al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, when JSOC directed an airstrike that killed him.

 

JSOC’s lethality was evident in its body counts: In 2008, in Afghanistan alone, JSOC commandos struck 550 targets and killed roughly a thousand people, officials said. In 2009, they executed 464 operations and killed 400 to 500 enemy forces. As Iraq descended into chaos in the summer of 2005, JSOC conducted 300 raids a month. Over 50 percent of JSOC Army Delta Force commandos now have Purple Hearts.

 

The most intense Iraqi raids reminded McChrystal of Lawrence of Arabia’s description of “rings of sorrow,” the emotional toll casualties take on small groups of warriors. Greatly influenced by Lawrence’s life story, McChrystal thought of his JSOC troops as modern-day tribal forces: dependent upon one another for kinship and survival.

 

If killing were all that winning wars was about, the book on JSOC would be written. But no war in modern times is ever won simply by killing enough of the enemy. Even in an era of precision weaponry, accidents happen that create huge political setbacks.

 

Every JSOC raid that also wounded or killed civilians, or destroyed a home or someone’s livelihood, became a source of grievance so deep that the counterproductive effects, still unfolding, are difficult to calculate. JSOC’s success in targeting the right homes, businesses and individuals was only ever about 50 percent, according to two senior commanders. They considered this rate a good one.

 

“Sometimes our actions were counterproductive,” McChrystal said in an interview. “We would say, ‘We need to go in and kill this guy,’ but just the effects of our kinetic action did something negative and they [the conventional army forces that occupied much of the country] were left to clean up the mess.”

 

In 2008, Bush also briefly sent JSOC into Pakistan. To soothe the worries of U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson about the mounting civilian deaths from JSOC raids in other countries, commandos brought her a Predator console so she could witness a raid in real time. Because of public outcry in Pakistan, U.S. officials canceled the mission after only three raids. The CIA has continued to conduct drone strikes there.

 

Targeting bureaucracy

 

The Defense Department has given JSOC a bigger role in nonmilitary assignments as well, including tracing the flow of money from international banks to finance terrorist networks. It also has become deeply involved in “psychological operations,” which it renamed “military information operations” to sound less intimidating. JSOC routinely sends small teams in civilian clothes to U.S. embassies to help with what it calls media and messaging campaigns.

 

When Obama came into office, he cottoned to the organization immediately. (It didn’t hurt that his CIA director, Leon Panetta, has a son who, as a naval reservist, had deployed with JSOC.) Soon Obama was using JSOC even more than his predecessor. In 2010, for example, he secretly directed JSOC troops to Yemen to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

 

The Arab Spring forced the White House to delay some JSOC missions. In the meantime, the organization is busy with its new 30,000-square-foot office building turned command center. Unlike previous offices, it is not located in some obscure part of the world. It sits across the highway from the Pentagon in pristine suburban splendor, just a five-minute drive from McChrystal’s civilian office and the former general’s favorite beer call restaurants.

 

As its name implies, the focus of Joint Special Operations Task Force-National Capital Region is not the next terrorist network but another of its lifelong enemies: the Washington bureaucracy. Some 50 battle-hardened JSOC warriors and a handful of other federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies work there.

 

Mexico is at the top of its wish list. So far the Mexican government, whose constitution limits contact with the U.S. military, is relying on the other federal agencies — the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — for intelligence collection and other help.

 

But JSOC’s National Capital task force is not just sitting idly by, waiting to be useful to its southern neighbors. It is creating targeting packages for U.S. domestic agencies that have sought its help, including the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the second-largest federal law enforcement agency and the latest to make a big play for a larger U.S. counterterrorism role.

 

From the book “Top Secret America” Copyright 2011 by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. Reprinted by permission of Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

.

Washington Post

[Section_31]

..

Washington Post

 

Awesome.

 

Found this on wiki.

 

Sometime in 2007, JSOC started conducting cross-border operations into Iran from southern Iraq with the CIA. These operations included seizing members of Al-Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, as well as the pursuit, capture, and/or execution of high-value targets in the war on terror. The Bush administration allegedly combined the CIA's intelligence operations with JSOC covert military operations so that Congress would only partially see how the money was spent

 

Sounds like Section 31

[Beantown Red]

Newsweek

 

While publicly pressuring Israel to make deeper concessions to the Palestinians, President Obama has secretly authorized significant new aid to the Israeli military that includes the sale of 55 deep-penetrating bombs known as bunker busters, Newsweek has learned.

 

In an exclusive story to be published Monday on growing military cooperation between the two allies, U.S. and Israeli officials tell Newsweek that the GBU-28 Hard Target Penetrators—potentially useful in any future military strike against Iranian nuclear sites—were delivered to Israel in 2009, just several months after Obama took office.

 

The military sale was arranged behind the scenes as Obama’s demands for Israel to stop building settlements in disputed territories were fraying political relations between the two countries in public.

 

The Israelis first requested the bunker busters in 2005, only to be rebuffed by the Bush administration. At the time, the Pentagon had frozen almost all U.S.-Israeli joint defense projects out of concern that Israel was transferring advanced military technology to China.

 

In 2007, Bush informed Ehud Olmert, then prime minister, that he would order the bunker busters for delivery in 2009 or 2010. The Israelis wanted them in 2007. Obama finally released the weapons in 2009, according to officials familiar with the still-secret decision.

 

James Cartwright, the Marine Corps general who served until August as the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Newsweek the military chiefs had no objections to the sale. Rather, Cartwright said, there was a concern about “how the Iranians would perceive it,” and “how the Israelis might perceive it.” In other words, would the sale be seen as a green light for Israel to attack Iran’s secret nuclear sites one day?

 

“If we say yes, have we somehow given someone a green light without intending to? Whether that green light was an Israeli green light to go do something or whether it was a message to the Iranians, OK these guys aren’t serious about talking, they are starting to arm themselves,” Cartwright explains.

 

U.S. and Israeli officials told Newsweek that Israel had developed its own bunker-buster technology between 2005 and 2009, but the purchase from the U.S. was cheaper.

 

Uzi Rubin, the first director of the Israel Missile Defense Organization, between 1991 and 1999, and currently a military technology consultant to Israel’s Ministry of Defense, says U.S. officials originally had concerns about “how you use the bomb, where you use the bomb. These could be used in civilian areas because Hamas and Hezbollah intentionally bury their rockets in villages and towns,” he explained.

 

Obama’s security cooperation extended beyond bunker busters. According to Rep. Steve Rothman (D-NJ), who serves on the committees that fund both the U.S. military and foreign aid, Obama gave “orders to the military to ratchet up the cooperation at every level with Israel.”

 

While the Obama administration has touted some public cooperation with the Israeli military, Newsweek’s article Monday will reveal other covert efforts by the U.S. military to aid Israel in the volatile Middle East region, and the impact the improving military cooperation has had on the sometimes chilly relations between Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the president’s popularity in the American Jewish community.

 

 

[YOUTUBE]FVkYe8tNZX4[/YOUTUBE]

[Beantown Red]

FBI and DEA agents have disrupted a plot to commit a "significant terrorist act in the United States" tied to Iran, federal officials told ABC News today.

 

The officials said the plot included the assassination of the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Adel Al-Jubeir, with a bomb and subsequent bomb attacks on the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington, D.C.

 

Bombings of the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, were also discussed, according to the U.S. officials.

 

The stunning allegations come against a backdrop of longstanding tensions between Iran and the United States and Saudi Arabia. In the last year, Saudi Arabia has attempted to build an anti-Iran alliance to push back against perceived aggression by Iran in the region.

 

The new case, called Operation Red Coalition, began in May when an Iranian-American from Corpus Christi, Texas, approached a DEA informant seeking the help of a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, according to counter-terrorism officials.

 

The Iranian-American thought he was dealing with a member of the feared Zetas Mexican drug organization, according to agents.

 

The DEA office in Houston brought in FBI agents as the international terror implications of the case became apparent.

 

The Iranian-American, identified by federal officials as Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, reportedly claimed he was being "directed by high-ranking members of the Iranian government," including a cousin who was "a member of the Iranian army but did not wear a uniform," according to a person briefed on the details of the case. Counter-terrorism officials said they believe the cousin may be part of the special operations unit of the Revolutionary Guard, the Quds force.

 

Arbabsiar and a second man, Gohlam Shakuri, an Iranian official, were named in a five-count criminal complaint filed Tuesday afternoon in federal court in New York. They were charged with conspiracy to kill a foreign official and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, a bomb, among other counts.

 

The complaint also refers to another Iranian official but does not name him.

 

U.S. officials said Arbabsiar met twice in July with the DEA informant in the northern Mexico city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, and negotiated a $1.5 million payment for the assassination of the Saudi ambassador. As a down payment, officials said Arbabsiar wired two payments of $49,960 on Aug. 1 and Aug. 9 to an FBI undercover bank account after he had returned to Iran.

 

Federal agents said the DEA and the FBI recorded a number of meetings and phone calls between the informant and Arbabsiar, some of them from Iran.

[Section_31]

Quality. A few Iranian scientists have been getting the Mossad treatment in Tehran lately apparently.

[dennis tooth]

Isreal's been killing Iranians, scientists, officials for some time behind the scenes. If it is true and the story is tenuous at best given the shady sources as well as the 'tied to iran' like Tim McVeigh was tied to the USA, then its hardly 'stunning' that someone has decided to retaliate.

[Mustangt125]

Yeah Israel are the bad guys right? Not the Iranians who openly say their goal is to eliminate all Jews.

 

Mind blowing this place sometimes.

[Jose Jones]

Yeah Israel are the bad guys right? Not the Iranians who openly say their goal is to eliminate all Jews.

 

Mind blowing this place sometimes.

 

Which Iranian has said their goal is to eliminate all Jews?

[The Bugged Out]

Not recognising the state of Israel does not amount to wishing to commit genocide against the Jewish people, even if Zionists would lead you to believe that is the case.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Which Iranian has said their goal is to eliminate all Jews?

 

I'd like an answer to that, too. Unfortunately, we'll just get the mistranslated 'wipe Israel off the map' nonsense that people like him always provide.

[KopOut]

The Libyan 'uprising' is straightforward. Gaddafi threatened to trade much oil with China, so the current recipients of the oil (France/ Italy / small amounts to US and Britain) decided to secure it. Enter NATO (of which those countries are members) Why was it necessary to secure it? Because we had planetary 'Peak Oil' in 2005, and now that production is falling off ever so slowly, and demand is on the up (especially China trying to secure more reserves) every oil producer (mainly the arab states) will see pressure on their regime. It's only gonna get worse.

 

With Oil as the back up 'commodity' for the global financial system running out, we can also expect the continuing collapse of the system.

[Section_31]

Yeah Israel are the bad guys right? Not the Iranians who openly say their goal is to eliminate all Jews.

 

Mind blowing this place sometimes.

 

I think they're both arseholes, I'm an equal opportunities hater.

[Mr. Beast]

The Libyan 'uprising' is straightforward. Gaddafi threatened to trade much oil with China, so the current recipients of the oil (France/ Italy / small amounts to US and Britain) decided to secure it. Enter NATO (of which those countries are members) Why was it necessary to secure it? Because we had planetary 'Peak Oil' in 2005, and now that production is falling off ever so slowly, and demand is on the up (especially China trying to secure more reserves) every oil producer (mainly the arab states) will see pressure on their regime. It's only gonna get worse.

 

With Oil as the back up 'commodity' for the global financial system running out, we can also expect the continuing collapse of the system.

 

not just Oil either, thought that's probably the main driver, complete bonanza for the American Empire, from William Blum:

 

* Gaddafi's plans to conduct Libya's trading in Africa in raw materials and oil in a new currency — the gold African dinar, a change that could have delivered a serious blow to the US's dominant position in the world economy. (In 2000, Saddam Hussein announced Iraqi oil would be traded in euros, not dollars; sanctions and an invasion followed.) For further discussion see here.

 

* A host-country site for Africom, the US Africa Command, one of six regional commands the Pentagon has divided the world into. Many African countries approached to be the host have declined, at times in relatively strong terms. Africom at present is headquartered in Stuttgart, Germany. According to a State Department official: "We've got a big image problem down there. ... Public opinion is really against getting into bed with the US. They just don't trust the US."5

 

* An American military base to replace the one closed down by Gaddafi after he took power in 1969. There's only one such base in Africa, in Djibouti. Watch for one in Libya sometime after the dust has settled. It'll perhaps be situated close to the American oil wells. Or perhaps the people of Libya will be given a choice — an American base or a NATO base.

 

* Another example of NATO desperate to find a raison d'être for its existence since the end of the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact.

 

* Gaddafi's role in creating the African Union. The corporate bosses never like it when their wage slaves set up a union. The Libyan leader has also supported a United States of Africa for he knows that an Africa of 54 independent states will continue to be picked off one by one and abused and exploited by the members of the Triumvirate. Gaddafi has moreover demanded greater power for smaller countries in the United Nations.

 

* The claim by Gaddafi's son, Saif el Islam, that Libya had helped to fund Nicolas Sarkozy's election campaign6 could have humiliated the French president and explain his obsessiveness and haste in wanting to be seen as playing the major role in implementing the "no fly zone" and other measures against Gaddafi. A contributing factor may have been the fact that France has been weakened in its former colonies and neo-colonies in Africa and the Middle East, due in part to Gaddafi's influence.

 

* Gaddafi has been an outstanding supporter of the Palestinian cause and critic of Israeli policies; and on occasion has taken other African and Arab countries, as well as the West, to task for their not matching his policies or rhetoric; one more reason for his lack of popularity amongst world leaders of all stripes.

 

* In January, 2009, Gaddafi made known that he was considering nationalizing the foreign oil companies in Libya.7 He also has another bargaining chip: the prospect of utilizing Russian, Chinese and Indian oil companies. During the current period of hostilities, he invited these countries to make up for lost production. But such scenarios will now not take place. The Triumvirate will instead seek to privatize the National Oil Corporation, transferring Libya's oil wealth into foreign hands.

 

* The American Empire is troubled by any threat to its hegemony. In the present historical period the empire is concerned mainly with Russia and China. China has extensive energy investments and construction investments in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The average American neither knows nor cares about this. The average American imperialist cares greatly, if for no other reason than in this time of rising demands for cuts to the military budget it's vital that powerful "enemies" be named and maintained.

 

* For yet more reasons, see the article "Why Regime Change in Libya?" by Ismael Hossein-zadeh, and the US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks — Wikileaks reference 07TRIPOLI967 11-15-07 (includes a complaint about Libyan "resource nationalism")

[Mr. Beast]

this Iranian terror plot stinks to high heaven as well

 

Iranian Terror Plot: Fake, Fake, Fake by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com