right-of-way

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/02/08/world/main6185167.shtml

The U.S. military has not given a start date for the operation to clear insurgents from the Helmand province town of Marjah, about 380 miles southwest of Kabul.

American troops are ready, however, taking up positions surrounding the town and well aware of the dangers that await. CBS News correspondent Mandy Clark, embedded with U.S. Marines about five miles from Marjah, reports that the American Special Forces are already entering the town at night in advance of the operation.

The biggest fear, and one which is well founded based on what Taliban sources tell CBS News, is improvised explosive devices, or IEDs – the militant’s weapon of choice.

U.S. commanders tell Clark they will enter Marjah using a staged approach to try and minimize casualties from the IEDs, which they believe the area to be “seeded” with.

“Assault Breacher Vehicles” – hulking tank-like, blast resistant machines with digging equipment on the front, will be first to enter Marjah, trying to clear as many IEDs as possible. They’ll be followed by progressively larger groups of troops.

CBS News producer Ben Plesser reports that Marjah is the last town in the restive Helmand River Valley – once firm Taliban territory – to remain under control of the militants in the wake of a massive coalition offensive in December.

The military has said fighting will start soon, though no exact date has been given, and many residents weren’t taking any chances.

In addition to the bombs planted across the town, commanders tell Clark they expect to encounter between 400 and 1,000 Taliban fighters in Marjah.

American aircraft dropped leaflets over Marjah on Sunday warning people of the coming offensive, officers said, and the U.S. fired illumination rounds after sundown, apparently to help spot Taliban positions.

Villagers said the leaflets were aimed primarily at the militants, listing several of their commanders by name and warning fighters to leave the area or be killed.

Since being pushed out of surrounding areas by U.S. Marines, Taliban forces have had months to bury roadside bombs in anticipation of the assault, reports Plesser. Increasing the difficulty, the land is broken up by irrigation canals, built by the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, that could stop the advance of tanks and other assault vehicles and shelter militant snipers.

U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, said the success of the operation depends on convincing civilians that the government will improve services once the militants are gone.

The offensive in Marjah – a farming community and major opium-production centre with a population of 80,000 – will be the first since President Obama announced he was sending 30,000 additional troops.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai discussed the on-going operations in Helmand province in a telephone conversation Sunday with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a spokesperson for Brown said.

The spokesperson said they “welcomed the leading role” played by Afghan Security Forces in preparing for the offensive, stressing that “Afghan leadership was fundamental to the success of the operation.”

U.S. officials have long telegraphed their intention to seize Marjah. McChrystal said the element of surprise was not as important as letting citizens know that an Afghan government will be there to replace Taliban overlords and drug traffickers.

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“Long telegraphed” indeed:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080730.wmackay0730/BNStory/National/home

Why not just drop leaflets soliciting pipefitters, General?

a naming of parts

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

- Milan Kundera

http://americanswhotellthetruth.org/journal/blogs/index.php/2010/01/09/my-grandson-aamp-saying-what-s-real

My Grandson & Saying What’s Real

by Robert Shetterly

Having looked the beast in the eye,
Having asked & received forgiveness,
Let us shut the door on the past,
Not to forget it,
But to allow it not to imprison us.

- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

we have slain innocence
let history begin

- Alicia Ostriker

Before my grandson was one year old and before he had learned to speak any words, he was fascinated with the identification of things. He pointed his tapering little right forefinger at the dog until someone said dog, and then at his mother, his father, his sippy cup, my nose, the window, his bowl & spoon, his nose, the chair, a tree. He wanted everything named. Over and over. I would hold him against my chest and we would walk around his parents’ apartment inventorying item after item. He was new in the world & needed to know the names of his fellow travelers even though he could not say the names himself. Hearing them spoken seemed reassuring. One could sense the whirring of his new brain as it sorted and filed, constructed the synapse scaffolding for speech. He would look at me, point, watch my mouth say the name. He needed to know that if we called it a flower this morning, it was still a flower this afternoon and tomorrow.

Photographs and paintings on the wall seemed particularly perplexing to him. He wanted to touch the surface of each. If it looked like a dog, why was it flat, slick-surfaced and cool? Why didn’t it lick, scratch or change expression? What’s real and what isn’t?

Introducing a pre-verbal child to the world of things engages the basics of trust. Knowing the name of a thing and the difference between it and its representation is a fundamental survival skill. Parents, grandparents, and caregivers would never think of answering the curiosity of a 10 month old with a false name — Oh, that chickadee at the feeder? We call that “bookcase.” Deception like that would not only be cruel, it would literally be crazy making. How can anyone navigate the world if the names of things aren’t constant. Anything, then, can be everything. Meaning disappears. It all turns to mush. Who would want that?

Well, of course, people with power are in love with mush. The high fat, low vitamin variety. Deception, name swapping, is the reality they promote. And it makes us all crazy. What’s democracy? Oh, we call that free-market capitalism. What do we call the grievances of people victimized by this form of free market democracy? Victims with grievances? No, we call them evil. What do we call the clear-cutting of the rain forests and the blowing up of beautiful mountains to scrape out the coal by the cheapest means? We call if development of resources. We call it progress. What do we call our terrorism? We call it collateral damage, necessary and justified murder. What do we call national security? The right to classify the truth. What do we call the corporate media? We call that free speech because we have given corporations the rights of individuals under our Constitution. And corporate free speech includes the right to bribe with campaign contributions. What do we call a country that allows two presidential elections in a row to be stolen? The greatest democracy in the world! What I’m saying is nothing new. These are simply a few obvious hypocrisies that have become the foundation of political discourse in this country. It’s a corruption of language we would all be ashamed to use with a ten month old. It would be child abuse.

The worst for me though, the language that haunts me, is Obama’s portentous philosophical declaration that we shouldn’t seek accountability for the crimes of the Bush administration because we need to go into the future with our “core values” intact. Any school kid should know that a core value of democracy is accountability. You can’t pretend to live by the rule of law if only some people are held accountable, and the biggest crimes are too big to prosecute because they implicate the entire corrupt system.

Such a pronouncement makes me very sad. Sad for Obama that he presents such absurd cant as wisdom. Sad for a culture that accepts it. Because, besides what it means in terms of castrating democracy, it means that memory is cleansed of the truth. It means that teachers can’t teach that Bush and Cheney, Powell and Rice, Rumsfeld and Tenet and the rest of that pathetic gang committed war crimes and crimes against humanity. It means that the truth is a matter of opinion, a partisan either/or, one half of the fair & balanced equation. Which is which is never identified.

The quote at the top of this essay is from Desmond Tutu talking about the Truth and Reconciliation committees set up in South Africa after the end of apartheid . They decided that seeking justice for all the brutal crimes of apartheid would be too socially disruptive and agonizingly prolonged. But they also knew that the truth of what happened had to be acknowledged. Perpetrators had to admit publicly what they had done. Forgiveness without justice is a bitter pill. But denial and forgetting without justice makes forgiveness impossible and, as Tutu suggests, imprisons you forever in your own history. In this country we have been asked to forego justice and made forgiveness unnecessary because we have foregone the truth, too.

My grandson, like every little kid that age, has a quality of eager and vulnerable innocence, innocent even of the names of things. That innocence radiates out of him, presses outward from under his skin like a manna of joy, a nutritious balm of trust and hope potent enough, one would think, to penetrate the cynical armor of even the most shriveled heart. That radiance is innocent of the names of the objects that reflect it — innocent of categories, classifications, prejudices and euphemism, innocent of the sorrow of plastic, the corrosion of television, and the betrayal of war. This innocent light is particulated by awe and the purity of color. When he reaches his small hand up and rubs my prickly beard, it’s pure sensation for him. He has no words to describe it to himself. He puts his fingers in my mouth, his buzzing mind yet uninhabited words for teeth, tongue, and mucus membrane. But he knows this is where naming begins.

What are we to think of those who are slyly anticipating stealing that radiance, co-opting it with the titillations of advertising, infecting it with fear, and addicting it to violence and cynicism? What are we to think of people who define patriotism as profit? Who, in a few years, would lie to my grandson to enlist him to murder those who stand in the way of that profit. What are their core values? Do they want to name the beast for my grandson, look it in the eye, or do they prefer to be the beast–I mean, benefactor?

a walk in the woods

 

Don’t walk the plank like I did
You will be dispensed with
When you’ve become inconvenient

Upon Harrowdown Hill
Near where you used to go to school
That’s where I am
That’s where I’m lying down

- Thom Yorke, “Harrowdown Hill”

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23798597-70-year-gag-on-kelly-death-evidence.do

70-year Gag on Kelly Death Evidence

Evidence relating to the death of Government weapons inspector David Kelly is to be kept secret for 70 years, it has been reported.

A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported.

And a 30-year secrecy order has been placed on written records provided to Lord Hutton’s inquiry which were not produced in evidence.

The Ministry of Justice said decisions on the evidence were a matter for Lord Hutton. But Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker, who has conducted his own investigations into Dr Kelly’s death, described the order as “astonishing”.

Dr Kelly’s body was found in woods close to his Oxfordshire home in 2003, shortly after it was revealed that he was the source of a BBC report casting doubt on the Government’s claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being fired within 45 minutes.

An inquest was suspended by then Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer, who ruled that Lord Hutton’s inquiry could take its place. But in the event, the inquiry focused more on the question of how the BBC report came to be broadcast than on the medical explanation for Dr Kelly’s death.

Lord Hutton’s report in 2004 concluded that Dr Kelly killed himself by cutting an artery in his wrist. But the finding has been challenged by doctors who claim that the weapons inspector’s stated injuries were not serious enough.

One of the doctors seeking a full inquest, former assistant coroner Michael Powers, told the Mail on Sunday he had seen a letter from the legal team of Oxfordshire County Council explaining the unusual restrictions placed by Lord Hutton on material relating to his inquiry.

The letter states: “Lord Hutton made a request for the records provided to the inquiry, not produced in evidence, to be closed for 30 years, and that medical (including post-mortem) reports and photographs be closed for 70 years.”

Dr Powers asked: “Supposedly all evidence relevant to the cause of death has been heard in public at the time of Lord Hutton’s inquiry. If these secret reports support the suicide finding, what could they contain that could be so sensitive?”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-488667/Why-I-know-weapons-expert-Dr-David-Kelly-murdered-MP-spent-year-investigating-death.html

Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death

By Norman Baker

My investigations have been a journey into the unknown, and one that has taken many peculiar turns. Perhaps the most sinister came soon after starting my inquiries last year.

After writing a newspaper article outlining my early concerns, I found myself on a train speeding towards Exeter to see a man who had agreed to meet me only on condition of anonymity and after some rather circuitous arrangements.

These involved much complicated use of public telephone boxes to minimise the chance that his contact with me could be traced.

Finally, we talked over a glass of wine in a rather nondescript club.

He told me that he had recently retired but had connections to both the police and the security services, a claim which I subsequently verified through careful checks.

Like me, he had many doubts about the true circumstances surrounding Dr Kelly’s death and he had begun making his own surreptitious inquiries around Southmoor, the Oxfordshire village which was Dr Kelly’s home.

Posing as a freelance journalist, he had attempted to contact the key policemen involved in investigating the case. In this he was unsuccessful but within an hour he received an unexpected return call.

The person on the other end of the line did not bother with formalities, but instead cut to the quick. How would my contact welcome a full tax inspection of his business, VAT, national insurance, the lot?

Life could be made very difficult, he was told. How did he fancy having no money?

Naturally, this prospect did not appeal, and there he left matters until, at a wedding, he chanced upon an old friend whom he described to me initially as a very senior civil servant, but later as a “spook” from MI6.

He told his friend of his interest in the Kelly affair and also of the threatening phone call he had received.

His friend’s reply was a serious one: he should be careful, particularly when using his phone or his computer. Moreover, he should let the Kelly matter drop.

But my contact did not do so. Two weeks later he met his friend again, this time in a pub, and pressed him on the matter.

His friend took him outside, and as they stood in the cool air, told him Dr Kelly’s death had been “a wet operation, a wet disposal”.

He also warned him in very strong terms to leave the matter well alone. This time he decided to heed the warning.

I asked my contact to explain what he understood by the terms his friend had used. Essentially, it seems to refer to an assassination, perhaps carried out in a hurry.

A few months later, I called my contact to check one or two points of his story. He told me that three weeks after our meeting in Exeter, his house had been broken into and his laptop – containing all his material on Kelly – had been stolen. Other valuable goods, including a camera and an LCD television, had been left untouched.

It was sobering to be given such a clear indication that Dr Kelly had been murdered, but the scientist himself appears to have been fully aware that his work made him a target for assassins.

British diplomat David Broucher told the Hutton inquiry that, some months before Dr Kelly’s death, he had asked him what would happen if Iraq were invaded.

Rather chillingly, Dr Kelly replied that he “would probably be found dead in the woods”.

———————————————————————————

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/5701252/BP-wins-biggest-Iraq-oil-contract.html

A BP-led consortium on Tuesday won a deal to develop Iraq’s largest oilfield – the only successful foreign bid in a historic televised auction.

the ceremony of innocence

 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/this-is-what-bush-called-asking-some-questions.html

Three Corpses In Gitmo: The Very Worst Seems True

We have been told for so long that “enhanced interrogation techniques” are just “aggressive questioning”; that the ancient waterboarding technique is not torture; that Guantanamo Bay is a model prison facility where detainees are, if anything, molly-coddled (in fact, Rudy Giuliani recently opined that “Guantanamo is better than half the Federal prisons.”) We are also told routinely on Fox News that the United States has not and never would torture prisoners; we are told by the New York Times and NPR that use of the word “torture” is too biased; we have been told by many that to argue that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are war criminals is such an extreme position it disgraces anyone who states it, and marginalizes them to the fever swamps of leftist haters and hysterics.

These are all lies. They are pre-meditated lies. They are attempts to lie about some of the worst crimes committed by a president and vice-president of the United States in history. Anyone with their eyes open and their mind not closed knows this somewhere deep inside. And the only reason we do not know more about this is because of the criminal cover-up under the Bush administration and the enraging refusal of the Obama administration to do the right thing and open all of it to sunlight.

In the past, the Bush-Cheney administration could cover up their total control of the torture program and their direct authorization of the techniques used at Abu Ghraib by several distancing moves: “we are shocked that this happened”; it was the work of a “few bad apples”; the techniques we use are “relatively benign”; waterboarding is only torture if the Communists do it, and so on.

But now we have a clear case of something that pierces through this mendacity like a dagger – Scott Horton’s haunting report in Harpers on those three strange 2006 suicides at Gitmo.

In Gitmo, the most tightly controlled and directly monitored prison and torture camp under Cheney’s control, we already had a report that casts extraordinary doubt on the story-line that three deaths in Gitmo in 2006 were suicides. Dish readers may recall my recent airing of it here. Now, we have guards who have given clear and powerful evidence that strongly suggests that the three prisoners who allegedly hanged themselves did no such thing.

There are now credible accounts that, far from being suicides, these deaths were either the result of serious negligence in treatment of prisoners under “enhanced interrogation” or that, quite simply, they were tortured so badly in what appears to be a secret Gitmo black site that they died. Their deaths were then covered up and faked as suicides. Like some footnote in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s work, these suicides were nonetheless described by the military as aggressive acts of asymmetrical warfare against the U.S. Many branches of government must have been involved in such an act of torture or negligence or both, and the subsequent cover-up – from the FBI, the Justice Department, the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, and JSOC. The cover-up appears to have been continued by the Obama administration – a staggering surrender to pragmatism that is in fact a cooptation of evil.

This deserves to be the biggest story on the torture issue since Abu Ghraib – because it threatens to tear down the wall of lies and denial that have protected Americans from facing what the last administration actually did. Notice that these torture sessions – so severe they killed three prisoners – were conducted in June 2006. Long after the original crisis was over. Long after we have been told real torture sessions occurred. They were part of an ongoing torture program whose methods were so extreme that the Pentagon has already conceded that over a dozen prisoners had been tortured to death and up to a hundred US authorized deaths-by-torture are alleged by many human rights groups.

This case deserves a thorough and complete and exhaustive inquiry and investigation. I no longer believe that any entity in the US government can be trusted with such a task. The investigation must be able to go right to the very top of the torture program and do so with no political influence whatsoever. The investigation must be conducted by an independent prosecutor – Patrick Fitzgerald comes to mind – or by the Red Cross or an international body. It must go up the chain of command to the very top to find the real people who are responsible for this war crime and three homicides.

Among those who need to be subpoenaed are the former president and vice-president of the United States.

target audience

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?pagewanted=5

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

————————————————————————-

From Vallely’s From PSYOP to Mindwar: The Psychology of Victory, co-authored by Satanist Lt. Col. Michael Aquino:

http://www.xeper.org/maquino/nm/MindWar.pdf

In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe – neither through primitive “battlefield” leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics – but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth.

A MindWar message does not have to fit conditions of abstract credibility as do PSYOP themes; its source makes it credible. As Livy once said: “The terror of the Roman name will be such that the world shall know that, once a Roman army had laid siege to a city, nothing will move it — not the rigors or winter nor the weariness of months and years — that it knows no end but victory and is ready, if a swift and sudden stroke will not serve, to preserve until that victory is achieved.”

For the mind to believe in its own decisions, it must feel that it made those decisions without coercion. Coercive measures used by the operative, consequently, must not be detectable by ordinary means. There is no need to resort to mind-weakening drugs such as those explored by the CIA; in fact the exposure of a single such method would do unacceptable damage to MindWar’s reputation for truth. Existing PSYOP identifies purely-sociological factors which suggest appropriate idioms for messages. Doctrine in this area is highly developed, and the task is basically one of assembling and maintaining individuals and teams with enough expertise and experience to apply the doctrine effectively. This, however, is only the sociological dimension of target receptiveness measures. There are some purely natural conditions under which minds may become more or less receptive to ideas, and MindWar should take full advantage of such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves.

———————————————————————–

From Aquino’s “Temple of Set” website:

http://www.xeper.org/pub/gil/xp_FS_gil.htm

The Black Magician, on the other hand, rejects both the desirability of union with the Universe and any self-deceptive antics designed to create such an illusion. He has considered the existence of the individual psyche – the “core you” of your conscious intelligence – and has taken satisfaction from its existence as something unlike anything else in the Universe. The Black Magician desires this psyche to live, to experience, and to continue. He does not wish to die – or to lose his consciousness and identity in a larger, Universal consciousness [assuming that such exists]. He wants to be. This decision in favor of individual existence is the first premise of the Temple of Set.

The second premise of the Temple is that the psychecentric consciousness can evolve towards its own divinity through deliberate exercise of the intelligence and Will, a process of becoming or coming into being whose roots may be found in the dialectic method expounded by Plato and the conscious exaltation of the Will proposed by Nietzsche.

How much daylight do you suppose separates Aquino’s “deliberate exercise of the intelligence and Will” from his and Vallely’s “national will to victory”?

———————————————————————–

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Paul_E._Vallely

Vallely is also the Military Committee Chairman for the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and a member of the Iran Policy Committee. He is co-author, with Thomas McInerney, of “Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror”, advocating military-led regime change in Iran.

———————————————————————–

http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/views-improve-sharply-afghanistan-criticisms-us-stay-high/story?id=9511961

Hopes for a brighter future have soared in Afghanistan, bolstered by a broad rally in support for the country’s re-elected president, improved development efforts and economic gains. Blame on the United States and NATO for violence has eased – but their overall ratings remain weak. In one key shift, the latest poll by ABC News, the BBC and ARD German TV finds that sharply more Afghans now see the Taliban as the main source of their country’s strife, while many fewer blame the United States or its allies – significant progress in a central aim of the new commander of U.S. and NATO forces, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=9536011

———————————————————————

I’m glad such men are on our side, aren’t you?

Connect the dots

But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with falsehood. Between them lies the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence finds its only refuge in falsehood, falsehood its only support in violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his method must inexorably choose falsehood as his principle. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only complicity in falsehood.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

World War Three will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.

- Marshall McLuhan

—————————————————————-

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/07/terror.report.findings/index.html#

In the end, the six-page report found, it was the inability of the intelligence community to “connect the dots” in putting all the pieces of information and analysis together.

“Though all of the information was available to all-source analysts at the CIA and the NCTC [National Counter Terrorism Center] prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected, and as a result, the problem appears to be more a component failure to ‘connect the dots,’ rather than a lack of information sharing,” the report said.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2002/05/17/failure-usatcov.htm

—————————————————————-

http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/01/breaking-news-well-dressed-man-story.html

Saturday, January 09, 2010

BREAKING NEWS–Well Dressed Man Story Backed Up by Second Passenger

Kurt just had contact with an individual from our flight. This person, who wishes to remain anonymous, has backed up his story on the well dressed man, however, this person does not want to come out in public and tell their story, as they are worried they will suffer some sort of backlash as we have. How sad is that? They have read people talking badly about us online, and they don’t want the same thing to happen to them or their family.

 

When Kurt asked this person for details, their story aligned with his. This person was sitting right next to us in the glass room by the last boarding person. When Kurt asked this person how sure they were that the terrorist was the man with the well dressed man, or if they did not know for sure, their response was 99% it was the terrorist.

Kurt was thrilled to talk to someone who saw the same thing. Even though this person does not want to come out to the public right now, it made both of us feel really good to hear someone else witnessed what Kurt did.

The plot seems to keep thickening…….Who knows if they will ever look into the claims though, no matter HOW many people come out and admit that this situation did happen.

Wow.

———————————————————————————–

Almost a month after the event, unable to ignore the inconvenient testimony of the Haskells and others any longer and unable to discredit it, the Machine responds with this vague admission, buried at the end of an ABC News article about “female suicide bombers”:

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/female-suicide-bombers-heading-yemen/story?id=9636341

As part of the additional scrutiny, federal agents are conducting extensive background checks on every passenger who flew to Detroit on the Northwest flight in case one of them might have been sent as a “spotter” on the mission.

Federal agents also tell ABCNews.com they are attempting to identify a man who passengers said helped Abdulmutallab change planes for Detroit when he landed in Amsterdam from Lagos, Nigeria.

Authorities had initially discounted the passenger accounts, but the agents say there is a growing belief the man have played a role to make sure Abdulmutallab “did not get cold feet.”

http://haskellfamily.blogspot.com/2010/01/initially-discounted.html

OMFG. Cannot even believe the article below. I think I may have fallen over if I had been standing when I read this article. A woman posted a link to this article in comments on my blog, and I clicked on it. Most of the article has nothing to do with Flight 253. Which is interesting too. Why is this not total breaking news????? The part of the article that is incredible, I will post below.

I think we now know WHY the video is not being released. Because IT SHOWS WHAT KURT SAID!!!!!! I mean, where is his apology? Where? They come out in the media, basically calling Kurt a liar, then they take it back, but it is in the bottom of another nonrelated article. Ridiculous. And still, to date, no authorities contactinig KURT to ask him to look at the freaking video and help identify the guy. It’s so insane to me. We have an eyewitness to this, and they just don’t care.

Let the right one in

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/27/world/main6027160.shtml

As a member of an uppercrust Nigerian family, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab received the best schooling, from the elite British International School in West Africa to the vaunted University College London.

 

But the education he sought was of a different sort: Nigerian officials say his interest in extremist Islam prompted his father, the former CEO of one of Nigeria’s largest banks, to warn U.S. authorities. As Abdulmutallab was being escorted in handcuffs off the Detroit-bound airliner he attempted to blow up on Christmas Day, he told U.S. officials that he had sought extremist education at an Islamist hotbed in Yemen.

 

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/report_dutch_police_investigat.html

 

Reuters reports Dutch military police are investigating claims that an accomplice may have helped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab board Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam on Christmas day without a passport, a story first told here on MLive.com.

 

Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up the Detroit-bound plane with an explosive chemical he smuggled through security.

 

Kurt Haskell of Newport, Mich., took to the comments section of this Web site early Saturday to share his story: That he and his wife, Lori, saw a well-dressed man help Abdulmutallab board the flight without a passport under the guise he was a Sudanese refugee.

 

Dutch military police say they can’t corroborate Haskell’s account, but are investigating the allegation.

 

http://backstory.latimesmagazine.com/2009/12/eyewitness-terror-suspect-had-accomplice-in-amsterdam.html 

 

“At the airport in Schiphol, waiting for the flight to depart…I was 10 feet away from the ticket counter sitting on the floor,” Haskell explains. “It was a small area walled in by glass. It was very quiet in there, and I am very clear about what I heard and what I saw. Two men approached the ticket agent—one I would describe as a poor, black teenager who later turned out to be the man who tried to blow up our flight. With him was a man…my first impression was that he was wealthy and Indian…He was wearing an expensive suit. I think it was tan. He was about six feet tall and 230 to 240 pounds. The man said to the ticket agent [about Abdulmutallab], ‘He’s from Sudan. He doesn’t have his passport—we do this all the time.’ The ticket agent pointed them down the hallway and said they needed to speak with a manager…I didn’t think enough of it at the time to even mention it to my wife, but I am very clear about what I saw and heard.”

After living through a failed bombing of an aircraft, Haskell says he feels incredibly lucky to be alive, but he remains confused as to why the detail of the possible accomplice is not being acknowledged by the FBI. He also wonders why it took the FBI until today to admit that a second man had been handcuffed and detained coming off the flight after a bomb-sniffing dog smelled explosives in his bag.

Haskell and I discussed the possibility that the well-dressed man helping Abdulmutallab could have been a good Samaritan who was unwittingly helping a terrorist board an airplane. Even if that were true, he believes the FBI should acknowledge that his eyewitness account is being investigated. He says this is why “the CCTV video footage from the [Schiphol] airport should be released. You’ll be able to see me sitting on the floor, the bomber and the man helping him.”

Haskell says he is certain that the well-dressed man was not a passenger on Northwest Flight 253. After the flight landed, he, his wife and all of the other passengers were detained in Detroit for “nearly six hours.” During that time, Haskell says, he looked over every passenger hoping to identify the possible accomplice. “There was nobody even close to [looking like] him. There is no doubt in my mind that he wasn’t on the flight.”

http://www.forbes.com/2003/03/07/cx_pm_0307westafrica_print.html

 

Oilmen looking for an alternative to the politically troubled oil fields of the Middle East think they see one beneath the waters off West Africa. The bad news is that the arc of nations stretching along the shore of the Gulf of Guinea from the Ivory Coast to Angola looks as politically testing as Arabian ones.

With estimated reserves of 24 billion barrels, the Gulf of Guinea is likely to become the world’s leading deepwater offshore production center. Its fields contain good-quality low-sulfur crude. They are directly across the Atlantic from refineries on America’s East Coast (Africa lacks much refining capacity of its own outside Nigeria and South Africa). It is open sea–no maritime choke points to navigate.

Being offshore isolates the fields from the vagaries of Africa’s civil and border wars, coups, rebellions and revolutions. Islam is well entrenched, but it is not the dominant faith of the coastal nations. Nor is there evidence that Al-Qaeda has got a foothold in the region, as it has on the eastern side of the continent–though it may have had contacts with local fundamentalist groups in Islamic northern Nigeria.

 

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Nigeria’s_oil_industry#International_Oil_Companies

There are eighteen international oil companies operating in the country. Some of them are new entrants who have an interest in the deep offshore blocks in partnership with other operators. The oil majors account for about 99% of crude oil production in Nigeria. The international oil companies operating in Nigeria and when they established are:

Shell Petroleum Development Company Limited (since 1937)

Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited (since 1955)

Chevron Nigeria Limited (since 1961)

Texaco Overseas Nigeria Petroleum Company Unlimited (since 1961)

Elf Petroleum Nigeria Limited (since 1962)

Philip (since 1964); Pan Ocean Oil Corporation (since 1972); Bought over Ashland Oil Nigeria Limited (1973)

Agip Energy & Natural Resources (since 1979)

Statoil/BP Alliance (since 1992)

Esso Exploration & Production Nigeria Limited (since 1992)

Texaco Outer Shelf Nigeria Limited (since 1992)

Shell Nigeria Exploration & Production Company (since 1992)

Total (Nigeria) Exploration & Production Company Ltd. (since 1992)

Amoco Corporation (since 1992)

Chevron Exploration & Production Company (since 1992)

Conoco (since 1992)

Abacan (since 1992)

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/33282/

If U.S. troops go to Africa, it won’t be for a humanitarian intervention; it will be to protect American oil interests in the troubled Niger Delta.

Africa’s humanitarian needs — today the pillage in Darfur, yesterday the famine in Niger — dominate the headlines. Human suffering, from hunger to rape, also dominates the limited attention that Americans have for hearing about problems in the most troubled part of the world. Now that may be changing as an armed insurgency in oil-rich Nigeria threatens oil exports to the U.S. and raises the possibility that U.S. troops will dig into African soil in order to protect a resource deemed vital to American interests.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200912100945.html

In his 11 July 2009 speech in Accra, Ghana, US President Barack Obama declared, “America has a responsibility to advance this vision, not just with words, but with support that strengthens African capacity. When there is genocide in Darfur or terrorists in Somalia, these are not simply African problems – they are global security challenges, and they demand a global response.

“That is why we stand ready to partner through diplomacy, technical assistance, and logistical support, and will stand behind efforts to hold war criminals accountable. Our Africa Command is focused not on establishing a foothold in the continent, but on confronting these common challenges to advance the security of America, Africa and the world.”

 

And yet all the available evidence demonstrates that he is determined to continue the expansion of US military activity on the continent initiated by President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s and dramatically escalated by President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009. While many expected the Obama administration to adopt a security policy toward Africa that would be far less militaristic and unilateral than that pursued by his predecessor, the facts show that he is in fact essentially following the same policy that has guided US military involvement in Africa for more than a decade.

 

The clearest indication of President Obama’s intentions for AFRICOM (United States African Command) and for America’s military involvement in Africa is provided by the budget requests for the 2010 financial year submitted by the Departments of State and Defense to Congress in May 2009. The State Department budget request – which includes funding for all US arms sales, military training, and other security assistance programmes – proposes major increases in funding for US arms sales to a number of African countries through the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) programme.

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Cui bono?

Fool me twice

Two persons truly deserving of a “Peace” prize:

Cindy Sheehan

and Graeme MacQueen

“special” friends

From the watchful NPR Check blog:

http://nprcheck.blogspot.com/2009/12/propaganda-squared.html

A reader noted in the Q Tips section below that Tuesday’s ATC featured Pentagon propaganda on the Green Berets. It’s no secret that NPR do love it some counterinsurgency, including the Green Berets.

The piece from Jon Kalish was an unabashed, uncritical advertisement for a Green Beret commercial called Why We Fight Now. There was no critique of the Green Berets, just positive comments, an “explanation” of the filmmaker’s motives, and a handy link to the 10 minutes of the film on YouTube (watch it if you can stomach it – it’s a lazy, stupid, paean to warriorism).

 

Here’s a taste of the NPR feature:

 

Kalish: The film is titled Why We Fight Now, a nod to the World War II series Why We Fight, produced by Hollywood filmmaker Frank Capra for the U.S. War Department…..Why We Fight Now has no narration and consists mostly of Green Berets talking about their work. It was directed by Mark Benjamin, a 62-year-old Manhattan filmmaker who might seem an odd choice for the job.” [Actually there is nothing but narration, provided by Green Berets parroting a simple-minded world view and the worship of war and counterinsurgency which in NPRspeak is "talking about their 'work.' "]

 

Benjamin: “I’ve always been anti-war and never thought I would ever work for the military.”

 

Kalish: On the wall in Benjamin’s office is a poster of Che Guevara, but there’s also a picture of a Green Beret handing a piece of food to a child in Afghanistan. Benjamin’s political evolution is due in no small part to the terrorist attacks of September 11. He knew people who died and has made several films dealing with the day’s repercussions.”

 

Benjamin: “Because of 9/11, I became this liberal hawk. My own political perspective on global conflicts, democracy, capitalism, human rights everything changed. I certainly became more militant. I think we should go after terror wherever it is.”

 

As always there was no mention of the sordid history of the Green Berets supporting dictators and torture states – such as the disgusting Karimov of Uzbekistan or the torture deaths of Green Beret prisoners in Afghanistan (yawn…) or the usual trail of torture, blood, and repression that US special forces leave in their wake all over the world.

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Somehow Mr. Kalish seems to have overlooked Eugene Jarecki’s version of Why We Fight.

One of the Green Beret “special” missions is designating targets for air strikes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/world/asia/07afghan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Thankfully, NPR’s audience will continue to be spared the discomfort of “errors” like these:

Belling the Cat

Long ago, the mice had a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat.

Some said this, and some said that; but at last a young mouse got up and said he had a proposal to make, which he thought would meet the case.

“You will all agree,” said he, “that our chief danger consists in the sly and treacherous manner in which the enemy approaches us. Now, if we could receive some signal of her approach, we could easily escape from her. I venture, therefore, to propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon round the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when she was about, and could easily retire while she was in the neighborhood.”

This proposal met with general applause, until an old mouse got up and said: “That is all very well, but who is to bell the Cat?”

The mice looked at one another and nobody spoke.

- Æsop