Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Who are the Terrorists??

There are many, many good writers on the Internet and I enjoy cruising around and reading different pieces. With how busy my days can become I don't always have the time to spend the hours that it takes to pull together good written pieces with sources so I've been getting lazy and posting others written work. I don't think this is a bad thing as maybe you haven't read their articles so it is worth giving their articles more exposure. Plus it opens up your eyes to other websites that you may not have explored yourself.

That having been said, here is a good piece from the Winter Patriot blogspot. I encourage you to check all the links and read all the material offered to get a good and thorough understanding of all the issues. It's the only way to really understand everything..

"Who Is The Real Terrorist?" Reports From Pakistan And Afghanistan Differ
Sunday, January 20, 2008

A couple of days ago I lost the only draft of a piece that was half-finished and already so complicated it made my head hurt. In that piece I had quoted Chris Floyd quoting Scott Horton quoting Carlotta Gall and David Rohde and Barnett Rubin. Are you with me so far?

The subject was Pakistan and Afghanistan: The piece by Gall and Rhode talked about Pakistan having lost control of the extremists that had been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, before Pakistan joined the War on Terror. The Rubin piece linked this loss of control to the bombing of the Serena Hotel [photo], Kabul's luxury spot for foreign visitors.

I don't have the heart to reproduce the post as I originally intended it, especially since reading it might make your head hurt, too. So I will try to give you more or the less the same information in a very different way.

I once read that the best blog entries consist of links, quotes, and comments. Maybe that's the secret.

Carlotta Gall and David Rohde in the New York Times: Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say
Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.
...

One former senior Pakistani intelligence official, as well as other people close to the agency, acknowledged that the ISI led the effort to manipulate Pakistan’s last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President Pervez Musharraf.

A person close to the ISI said Mr. Musharraf had now ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, and denied that the agency was working to rig the vote. But the acknowledgment of past rigging is certain to fuel opposition fears of new meddling.
...

The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading.

Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.
...

After 9/11, the Bush administration pressed Mr. Musharraf to choose a side in fighting Islamist extremism and to abandon Pakistan’s longtime support for the Taliban and other Islamist militants.

In the 1990s, the ISI supported the militants as a proxy force to contest Indian-controlled Kashmir, the border territory that India and Pakistan both claim, and to gain a controlling influence in neighboring Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the United States supported militants, too, funneling billions of dollars to Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan through the ISI, vastly increasing the agency’s size and power.

Publicly, Mr. Musharraf agreed to reverse course in 2001, and he has received $10 billion in aid for Pakistan since then in return. In an interview in November, he vehemently defended the conduct of the ISI, an agency that, according to American officials, was under his firm control for the last eight years while he served as both president and army chief.

Mr. Musharraf dismissed criticism of the ISI’s relationship with the militants. He cited the deaths of 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police officers in battles with the militants in recent years — as well as several assassination attempts against himself — as proof of the seriousness of Pakistan’s counterterrorism effort.
...

One militant leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, typifies how extremists once trained by the ISI have broken free of the agency’s control, turned against the government and joined with other militants to create powerful new networks.

In 2000, Mr. Azhar received support from the ISI when he founded Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Army of Muhammad, a Pakistani militant group fighting Indian forces in Kashmir, according to Robert Grenier, who served as the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Islamabad from 1999 to 2002. The ISI intermittently provided training and operational coordination to such groups, he said, but struggled to fully control them.

Mr. Musharraf banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and detained Mr. Azhar after militants carried out an attack on the Indian Parliament building in December 2001. Indian officials accused Jaish-e-Muhammad and another Pakistani militant group of masterminding the attack. After India massed hundreds of thousands of troops on Pakistan’s border, Mr. Musharraf vowed in a nationally televised speech that January to crack down on all militants in Pakistan.

“We will take strict action against any Pakistani who is involved in terrorism inside the country or abroad,” he said. Two weeks later, a British-born member of Mr. Azhar’s group, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, kidnapped Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded by his captors. Mr. Sheikh surrendered to the ISI, the agency that had supported Jaish-e-Muhammad, and was sentenced to death for the kidnapping.

After Mr. Pearl’s killing, Pakistani officials arrested more than 2,000 people in a crackdown. But within a year, Mr. Azhar and most of the 2,000 militants who had been arrested were freed. “I never believed that government ties with these groups was being irrevocably cut,” said Mr. Grenier, now a managing director at Kroll, a risk consulting firm.

At the same time, Pakistan seemingly went “through the motions” when it came to hunting Taliban leaders who fled into Pakistan after the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan, he said.

Encouraged by the United States, the Pakistanis focused their resources on arresting senior Qaeda members, he said, which they successfully did from 2002 to 2005. Since then, arrests have slowed as Al Qaeda and other militant groups have become more entrenched in the tribal areas.

Asked in 2006 why the Pakistani government did not move against the leading Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Sirajuddin, who are based in the tribal areas and have long had links with Al Qaeda, one senior ISI official said it was because Pakistan needed to retain some assets of its own.
...

“Pakistan would certainly be better off if the ISI were never used for domestic political purposes,” said Mr. Grenier, the former C.I.A. Islamabad station chief. “That goes without saying.”

Continue with reading the story here.

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Saturday, December 29, 2007

Genocide in Iraq Continues; Now Aided by U.S.

As we are asked to spend trillions more on the 'war on terror' (which is to say the war on the people of this whole world and no one [except the elitist] is exempt) where does all the money go?? It must be going straight to the elitist bank accounts, to their stocks in all the companies that are bankrolling this horrendous trumped up affair.

IRAQ: Saddam Provided More Food Than the U.S.
By Ahmed Ali and Dahr Jamail

BAQUBA, Dec 27 (IPS) - The Iraqi government announcement that monthly food rations will be cut by half has left many Iraqis asking how they can survive.

The government also wants to reduce the number of people depending on the rationing system by five million by June 2008.

Iraq's food rations system was introduced by the Saddam Hussein government in 1991 in response to the UN economic sanctions. Families were allotted basic foodstuffs monthly because the Iraqi Dinar and the economy collapsed.

The sanctions, imposed after Saddam Hussein ordered the invasion of Kuwait, were described as "genocidal" by Denis Halliday, then UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Halliday quit his post in protest against the U.S.-backed sanctions.

The sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children, and as many adults, according to the UN. They brought malnutrition, disease, and lack of medicines. Iraqis became nearly completely reliant on food rations for survival. The programme has continued into the U.S.-led occupation.

But now the U.S.-backed Iraqi government has announced it will halve the essential items in the ration because of "insufficient funds and spiralling inflation."
Read the rest of the story here.

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Saturday, December 22, 2007

Mass Quarantines Likely If America Faced Bioterrorism Attack

This story can no longer be found at its original URL location, regardless, the implications it presents remain the same.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,31376,00.html
FoxNews.com
8-4-1

CHICAGO -(AP) In an America that guards its civil liberties, police can't just shut down cities, make mass arrests and quarantine thousands of people. Or can they?

Current and former federal officials said Friday that if there is a terrorist attack with biological weapons, private rights would quickly be swamped by the need to protect the public. State borders could close, vaccines could be rationed or commandeered, the Army could even take over cities within weeks of a deadly attack, an American Bar Association panel predicted.

"To an extent, people are going to do what needs to be done and worry about the legal niceties later," said Suzanne Spaulding, a former top lawyer for the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The ABA panel, part of the annual meeting of the 400,000-lawyer organization, played out an imaginary terrorist campaign to infect Americans with the plague - from the first tips by an FBI informant in New Mexico to closure of the Minnesota borders and riots in Cincinnati.

Along the way came word that a rogue Russian scientist and the Iraqi military were involved. Eventually, the FBI, CIA, National Centers for Disease Control, the White House, Pentagon and governors of several states were also involved - each with broader power than many people
probably know they have, participants said.

Under the hypothetical scenario, law enforcement could do little when a would-be terrorist shows up at a Santa Fe emergency room with a case of the plague. The investigation intensified, and the FBI got much broader authority, when several people died of the plague after attending a concert in Minneapolis.

Political pressure intensified, with a demand from 20 senators of the opposite political party from the president that the White House declare a national state of emergency. Then came word that the terrorists planned another attack during a street festival in Cincinnati.

Under this scenario, the FBI could go to a special court for permission to investigate foreigners, but could not begin stopping everyone in downtown Cincinnati who resembles a tipster's description of a suspected terrorist, said Eugene Bowman, deputy general counsel for the FBI.

Nor could the FBI order the downtown area cordoned off and every building searched, Bowman said. Agents would need warrants based on better specifics than those offered in the hypothetical terrorist attack.

But local police could do what the FBI cannot, so long as it was based on the need to protect public health, said Terry O'Brien, legal consultant to a national notification network tracking infections diseases.

"The idea is to prevent the epidemic," not to catch and punish a wrongdoer, O'Brien said.

The president could declare martial law and federalize state National Guards, said Michael Wermuth, head of a group advising the government on how well it is preparing for nuclear, chemical or biological terrorism.

The attorney general and the defense secretary could also invoke a federal law that lets them call in soldiers to keep order if police or other law enforcement cannot, Wermuth said.

"The military can be engaged directly in arrests, search and seizure and intelligence collection for law enforcement purposes," Wermuth said. "There's very raw authority to use the military to do any number of things that (look) like law enforcement, or to assist public health authorities by (enforcing) quarantines."

The government would also have the legal power to force people to be immunized, although as a practical matter it is probably impossible, O'Brien said. "What are you going to do, go into somebody's home and tie them up?"

On the other hand, the government could take control of vaccine supplies, even if it meant overriding state governors bent on hoarding their in-state stockpiles, the panelists said.

The hypothetical exercise ended short of the president declaring nationwide martial law, and without the arrest or trial of the terrorists.

[Editor's Note: Does anyone reading this still think that they are living in a constitutionally protected Republic? This article is a good example of the disinformation/propaganda that is setting up the public for the "terrorist biological attack" that will surely come and the "emergency measures" that our Illuminated government servants will be "forced to impose" in order to protect us. The Tavistock technique of public brain washing employed here is always the same: gradual, but unrelenting acclaimation and habituation to the idea of accepting the loss of personal liberty and constitutional rights from the government in exchange for their "protecting" society at large, which is, of course, pure rot. The real plan is to destroy America and most Americans. I would be very leary of buying into this orchestrated stampede to get vaccinated when the "terrorist" attacks kick in. You will likely have much more to worry about from the vaccine that will be given than from the supposed terrorist's threat. Note the following: 1. There is no reporter taking credit for this "article" 2. Who is supplying the information? A 'former top lawyer for the CIA'. and 3. the curent crop of Tavistock approved buzzwords: "rogue", "hoarding" and the ever present "Iraqi threat". ]

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U.S. Soldiers Mutiny in Iraq

A U.S. Army platoon, tired and worn out from the death and wanton destruction, refused to follow orders in Iraq. After suffering many causalities, some suicides, the soldiers gathered together and made a decision that they would not continue to subject themselves to going into the same areas where they were losing so many of their members.

Feeling betrayed to no end and not really understanding who the real enemy is any more these men did the gallant thing and set their weapons down. It's a story of great bravery especially in light of the consequences that they possibly face with their superior officers.

Digg It!

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