Tenet: CIA warned of 'anarchy' in Iraq

George Tenet's Book Passage

The agency analysis painted what Tenet calls additional "worst-case" scenarios: "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States"; "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states"; and "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance."



Whenever I read stuff lie this I keep hearing this in the background:
REM, Document, Track Six.

Don't Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes

"War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid."

Winston Churchill wrote those words in 1930, in the aftermath of the First World War, which, from a purely technological standpoint, rivals any war in history for both cruelty and squalidness.

(The rest of Churchill's famous passage goes: "Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic maneuver, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of bleary-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill.")

The advent of the submarine, the tank, the machine gun and the airplane -- especially the airplane -- made the concept of total war inevitable. Churchill the romantic loathed these weapons, but Churchill the pragmatist eagerly embraced them.

If he was a paradox, it was because he straddled a period of military history changed more profoundly by advancing technology than any other. It's worth remembering that Churchill came of age when the cavalry charge was still a valid tactic for breaching the enemy's defenses and he didn't leave the world stage until Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been vaporized and atomic weaponry was a well-established fact.

You might be tempted to wonder what ennobles the lance or the mace or the broadsword, but I take Churchill's point. The science of killing is a ghastly business, but if you're going to do it there's something to be said for having to face your enemy on the battlefield and watch him die by your hand.

The ability to kill a man without touching him, or even seeing him, reduces the act to an abstract concept. That, in turn, inures us to the actual suffering we cause through waging high-tech warfare, allowing us to use, without irony, phrases like "collateral damage" and "normal wastage" in reference to combatants and noncombatants alike.

No, war is not boxing and the civilities of the Marquess of Queensbury rules don't apply. The object is survival, and, tangentially, victory. But if killing a man with a weapon wielded by hand is immoral, then killing him in a detached fashion, from 40,000 feet up or 200 miles away, is utterly amoral.

And the man who cannot distinguish between right and wrong, or doesn't have to, is the most dangerous animal in the human jungle. This is the jungle we inhabit today. This is where military technology and the inherent weaknesses of human beings have brought us.

It would be naïve, even stupid, to think that we can go back to the idealized Churchillian battlefield. We can't. The toothpaste is out of the tube, we've crossed the Rubicon, there's no crying over spilt milk -- pick your cliché. The fact is there's only one way to go and that's forward.

And in going forward there is only one solution. War itself must be made obsolete and that means eliminating the reasons men wage war: nationalism, religion, greed. But it will never happen, not in my lifetime or in yours, because that means 1.) abandoning the concept of the nation-state 2.) abolishing all religion 3.) replacing stock-market, corporate capitalism with universal socialism. It requires nothing less than a reinvention of the human condition. Imagine.

Hell will freeze first and, given the reality of global warming, that's not likely to happen, either.

So we're doomed. We will continue inventing exquisite new ways of killing each other, and justifying the need to do so, until we succeed in destroying everything.

Which, in the name of somebody's god or somebody's country or somebody's way of life, we will.

You have a nice day, now.

Article writtwn in Wired by The Luddite

The White House line that Iraq’s extremists are all backed by Iran is a myth

By robert fox

T his weekend, buyers from across the Gulf states and the Middle East will descend on a huge arms fair in Dubai. Sheikhs, emirs, princes and kings will be buying anything from specialised sniper ammunition by the ton, to the highest-tech surveillance gear and even the odd British Aerospace gunboat or Eurofighter.

The Arab world will use the International Defence Exhibition (IDEX), to tool up for a coming confrontation with Iran, and to arm Sunni insurgents to fight Iran's allies in Iraq, the Shia militias.

Even the Bush administration will now admit, under its collective breath of course, that Iraq is in the throes of a full-blown civil war between armed groups of its Sunni and Shia Arab communities, triggered a year ago by the destruction of the al-Laskar mosque in Samara, a revered Shia shrine.

‘The growth of Saudi and Jordanian support for the militants is one of the most worrying developments’

What the American authorities are reluctant to admit, however, is that there are signs that the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and their allies - including Jordan - have been equipping and training Sunni extremists in Iraq for some time now. Critically, not all the weaponry and munitions have been used against the militants' Shia and Kurdish Iraqi enemies. Some of them - including lethal roadside bombs - have been aimed at US forces.

"The growth of the official and unofficial Saudi and Jordanian support for the militants is one of the most worrying developments," a senior British officer has told me privately after a visit to Iraq.

The Bush administration has kept mum about this while it tries to concentrate the minds of America and the world on their new public enemy number one, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the region's chief sponsor of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

British strategic advisers to the Pentagon and the National Security Council report that, undeterred by their unfinished business in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are now intent on opening up a third front against Iran. Their argument runs that Saddam Hussein was bad and al-Qaeda even worse, but the threat to world peace now comes from Ahmadinejad. He must be stopped before he gets a nuclear weapon and uses it against Israel.

In Baghdad this week US forces have displayed 'shaped charge' roadside bomb kits - also known as EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) - which have killed 170 American service personnel in Iraq. This figure is surprisingly precise, in contrast to much of the rest of the American presentation: the officers and intelligence analysts would not give their names, and could not substantiate their claim that the deployment of the EFPs was sanctioned "at the highest level" of the Ahmadinejad regime.

It was also reported this week that a consignment of Steyr Mannlicher HS50 sniper rifles sold by Austria to the Iranian police force had ended up in the hands of Shia militias in Iraq. This was reported by the Daily Telegraph, but no one followed it up. The

Bush and Cheney are ramping up the case for an attack on Iran, just as they did before invading Iraq innuendos – if not the facts – are clear: Bush and Cheney are ramping up the case for an attack on Iran, just as they did before invading Iraq.

David Kay, whose Iraq Survey Group torpedoed the claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, says: "If you want to avoid the perception that you've cooked the books you come out and make the charges publicly" - and, he might have added, you name your sources and define the quality of your information. Something the Bush administration has failed to do.

The Americans have also been coy about the threat to their helicopters. At least six are now admitted to have been downed by hostile fire, and the number could be as high as 50, including a Chinook loaded with dozens of troops. Who is doing this and how, the Americans will not say - for obvious security reasons. But the chances are that at least some of the helicopters have been downed by those Sunni extremist pals of Saudi Arabia and Jordan - which hardly helps the case for war against Iran.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk?menudID=1&subID=1147

A little levity...

The phases of our life, still in the second panel...

The chicken has come home to roust America

The Coming Holocaust-Like Event Against Immigrants

...Some radio talk show hosts and their audiences espouse hatred and resentment towards ‘illegal’ aliens. They warn of a cataclysmic event if the U.S. is ever ‘overran’ by immigrants. Others claim that ‘illegal’ aliens should be severely punished and tortured which would ‘teach them a lesson’ before they are deported to their country of origin.

...Some websites, filled with supremacist ideology, advocate extreme violence against ‘illegal’ aliens and say they should be shot and to ‘clean your guns and have plenty of ammunition ready.’ ‘Border Patrol,’ a racist video game, portrays 88 Latino men, women, and children running swiftly across a river under the image of a gun’s telescope. The players shoot at them and bonus points are awarded if they hit pregnant women with children. (1)

...The loss that Germany suffered as a result of World War I, both economically and in human lives, along with severe war reparations and the Great Depression gave rise to ultra nationalist and extreme patriotic movements. Adolf Hitler’s infamous book ‘Mein Kampf,‘ which blamed the Jews and Communists for Germany’s loss in World War I, simply played on and reinforced peoples fears and racist tendencies.

...When President George W. Bush promoted his immigration reform plan in Arizona, he linked securing the homeland with ‘eliminating’ ‘illegal’ immigration and expressed concern that they were putting ‘pressure on our schools and hospitals…and straining the resources needed for law enforcement and emergency services.’ He also claimed that released immigrants were often ‘murderers, rapists, child molesters, and violent criminals.’

Blogger: How could this be the America my parents knew? What the hell happened to you guys?!

Wikipedia Entry

The Reichstag fire was a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany. At 21:14 on the night of February 27, 1933 a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building, the assembly location of the German Parliament, was ablaze. The fire seemed to have been started in several places, and by the time the police and firemen arrived a huge explosion had set the main Chamber of Deputies in flames. Looking for clues, the police quickly found Marinus van der Lubbe, shirtless, inside the building. Van der Lubbe was a Dutch insurrectionist council communist and unemployed bricklayer who had recently arrived in Germany.

The party leaders were determined to demonstrate the Reichstag Fire was a deed of the Comintern, and in early March 1933, three men were arrested who were to play pivotal roles during the Leipzig Trial, known also as "Reichstag Fire Trial," namely three Bulgarians: Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov. The Bulgarians were known to the Prussian police as senior Comintern operatives, but the police had no idea how senior they were: Dimitrov was head of all Comintern operations in Western Europe.

Blogger: Were the 9/11 bombers not people known to police/FBI? Were they not senior operatives for some international organization? Did that the actions of 9/11 not guarantee new powers to a government to fight the threat these new "Collumnist”? Shall we be placing the blame for the a possible economic down cycle on groups like African-Americans, Latinos & Muslims rather than the billion dollar a month war for in Iraq?

this american life

http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid271557392/bctid666401814


great link

Cat Soup, 3 of 3

Cat Soup, 2 of 3

Cat Soup, 1 of 3

Oscar Wilde - In The Old Days Men Had The Rack

In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement, certainly. But still it is very bad and wrong, and demoralising. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over peoples' private lives seems to be quite extraordinary. The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike habits, supplies their demands...and what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is the leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man on all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all.

There Are Hundreds Of Paths Up The Mountain

There are hundreds of paths up the mountain,
all leading in the same direction,
so it doesn't matter which path you take.
The only one wasting time is the one
who runs around and around the mountain,
telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.

Hindu teaching

I guess its bad that I know what these peopel are talking about

Stupid & Funny

Quote

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have.
Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.
Bill Buxton

Empire v. Democracy

Why Nemesis Is at Our Door
By Chalmers Johnson

I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public। These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as well as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation does come -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is incapable of putting the events in context. Not surprisingly, then, Americans tend to support speedy acts of revenge intended to punish the actual, or alleged, perpetrators. These moments of lashing out, of course, only prepare the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.

Me: This seems to explain too much to be completely unture.

See:
Cheney Doctrine
Baseworld
One Percent Doctrine

Re: AYBABTU

In A.D. 2101

War was beginning

Captain: What happen?
Operator: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You!!
Cats: How are you gentlemen!!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say!!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: Ha Ha Ha Ha ….
Captain: Take off every "zig."
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move "zig".
Captain: For great justice.

You have been warned. ®

...To understand the duality of Japanese society - the strait-laced conformity, on the one hand, combined with what we might consider almost reckless abandonment - it is necessary to get to grips with two Japanese concepts: honne and tatemae. Honne means your true feelings, which you normally keep to yourself. Tatemae is the face you present to society, the way society expects you to behave. Japanese people always understand, when someone says or does something, that they may be merely expressing tatemae. It may well not be what they really think or feel.

Lesley Downer is the author of 'Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World' (Headline 1999) and 'Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Seduced the West (Headline 2002)