News that make you go GRRR!

The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was thought, “changed the political debate in a party and a country that desperately needed to take a new direction.”[1] Like most preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F. Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America’s engagement in Bush’s Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan. If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters desired.

Those of us convinced that a war machine prevails in Washington were not surprised. The situation was similar to the disappointment experienced with Jimmy Carter: Carter was elected in 1976 with a promise to cut the defense budget. Instead, he initiated both an expansion of the defense budget and also an expansion of U.S. influence into the Indian Ocean.[2]

As I wrote in The Road to 9/11, after Carter’s election:

It appeared on the surface that with the blessing of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, the traditional U.S. search for unilateral domination would be abandoned. But… the 1970s were a period in which a major “intellectual counterrevolution” was mustered, to mobilize conservative opinion with the aid of vast amounts of money… By the time SALT II was signed in 1979, Carter had consented to significant new weapons programs and arms budget increases (reversing his campaign pledge).[3]

I noted further that the complex strategy for reversing Carter’s promises was revived for a new mobilization in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, in which a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld was prominent.[4]

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by Prof Peter Dale Scott

SOURCE: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=16713

“The developments come as the White House seeks grounds to establish a major military presence in Africa….[A]nalysts caution that similar pretexts were used to justify the US invasion of Afghanistan,AFRICOM, America’s global military agenda the missile attacks in Pakistan, and its waning military operations in Iraq, where the civilian population continues to bear the brunt of the US intervention.”

“AFRICOM facilitates the United States advancing on the African continent, taking control of the Eurasian continent and proceeding to take the helm of the entire globe.”
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October 1st marked the one-year anniversary of the activation of the first U.S. overseas military command in a quarter of a century, Africa Command (AFRICOM).

AFRICOM was established as a temporary command under the wing of U.S. European Command (EUCOM) a year earlier and launched as an independent entity on October 1, 2008.

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Rick Rozoff – Oct 27, 09

SOURCE: http://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/africom-and-americas-global-military-agenda-1/

Citing Justice Department missteps, a judge has dismissed all charges against the Blackwater guards accused in the killing of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007, the AP is reporting.

From the AP:

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina said Thursday the Justice Department overstepped its bounds and wrongly used evidence it was not allowed to see. He said the government’s explanations have been contradictory, unbelievable and not credible.

In the September 2007 Nisour Square incident, 17 Iraqi civilians were killed by Blackwater guards. They have said they were fired on.

Indictments charging the five former Blackwater guards with manslaughter were unsealed one year ago this month.

While Nisour Square contributed to Blackwater falling out of favor with the State Department in Iraq, it is now working Pentagon contracts in Afghanistan.

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Justin Elliott December 31, 2009, 3:43PM

SOURCE: http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/12/ap_all_charges_dismissed_against_blackwater_guards.php

SOURCE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uCPx1ed-R4

More details have emerged in this morning’s perplexing story, in which a suicide bomber attacked what officials called a “gym” on a military base in Khost Province, killing eight Americans the military identified as “civilians.”

Now US officials admit that all eight Americans slain in the attack were actually CIA agents, adding a reason why the Haqqani network was so quickly blamed, as CIA drones have been bombing the Haqqanis in North Waziristan for over a year.

Moreover, the “gym” at the Forward Operating Base was actually being used as a CIA “operations and surveillance center,” explaining the conspicuous lack of military personnel harmed in the attack.

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by Jason Ditz, December 30, 2009

SOURCE: http://news.antiwar.com/2009/12/30/eight-americans-killed-in-afghan-bombing-revealed-to-be-cia-agents/

It just wouldn’t be Christmas in the age of terror if we didn’t have a visitation, ostensibly from al-Qaeda, now would it? ‘Tis the season, and all that. Recall Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber,” arrested on December 22, 2001, for trying to blow up American Airlines flight 63, coming into Miami from Paris. As in the current case involving one Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian, the explosive used was PETN, also known as pentaerythritol: Reid, like Umar, was subdued by passengers and airline attendants, and, to add yet another touch of déjà vu, Reid’s stunt led to the imposition of the take-off-your-shoes rule at airport security, just as Umar’s midair antics have now inspired the Transportation Safety Authority to inaugurate a spate of new regulations: nothing in your lap, please, and no getting up from your seat for a solid hour before landing.

Also please note the timing: the Reid incident occurred at a volatile moment, right after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and just as the Bush administration was ramping up to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq. Umar, the lap bomber – so called because he apparently had his explosive device hidden in his pants – also leaps onto the international stage at a sensitive time, when President Obama is launching a major offensive in Afghanistan and the US has “assisted” Yemen in its air strikes on the alleged al-Qaeda stronghold in that country – where Umar, we’re told, received “training” and the actual explosive device.

Yes, the parallels are certainly eerie – but so what? After all, these terrorists are seemingly a simple-minded lot, if the behavior and demeanor of, say, Richard Reid is any indication. How many different explosive substances are available for such a “job,” and, at any rate, what else can one expect from the TSA in response except a bunch of useless and needlessly intrusive regulations that have little relevance to what happened? And, of course, the US, it seems, is always launching some new attack or military campaign, somewhere, so the timing is pure chance. Right?

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By: Justin Raimondo

SOURCE: http://www.etherzone.com/2009/raim122909.shtml

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 (IPS) – U.S. intelligence has concluded that the document published recently by the Times of London, which purportedly describes an Iranian plan to do experiments on what the newspaper described as a “neutron initiator” for an atomic weapon, is a fabrication, according to a former Central Intelligence Agency official.

Philip Giraldi, who was a CIA counterterrorism official from 1976 to 1992, told IPS that intelligence sources say that the United States had nothing to do with forging the document, and that Israel is the primary suspect. The sources do not rule out a British role in the fabrication, however.

The Times of London story published Dec. 14 did not identify the source of the document. But it quoted “an Asian intelligence source” – a term some news media have used for Israeli intelligence officials – as confirming that his government believes Iran was working on a neutron initiator as recently as 2007.

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By Gareth Porter
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 — 9:49 am

SOURCE: http://rawstory.com/2009/12/official-intelligence-iran-nuke-document-forged/

Israeli police have arrested nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu for allegedly being in touch with a foreigner, police said on Tuesday.

“Vanunu was detained in Jerusalem last night,” said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld.

“He was arrested for talking with a foreigner,” Rosenfeld told AFP.

YNet News said Vanunu was arrested at a Jerusalem hotel during a meeting with a Norwegian.

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by Staff Writers
Jerusalem (AFP) Dec 29, 2009

SOURCE: http://www.spacewar.com/reports/Israels_nuclear_whistleblower_Vanunu_detained_999.html

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — The military is inching closer to using laser weapons on the battlefield after recent tests in which lasers were used to shoot down a drone aircraft and were fired from an airplane to damage a vehicle on the ground.

The Air Force recently test-fired its Advanced Tactical Laser from a C-130 Hercules, scorching a truck’s hood. And last month the Army and Air Force teamed with Boeing Co. for a demonstration in which lasers on the ground shot down drones at China Lake, Calif., company officials said.

Laser weapon projects in the works include the Navy’s powerful Free Electron Laser; the Advanced Tactical Laser; the Laser Avenger, which was used to shoot down the drones at China Lake; and the Army’s High Energy Laser Technology Demonstrator, or HEL TD.

“The technology is there,” said Scott McPheeters, senior research engineer at the Army’s Program Executive Office Missiles and Space in Huntsville, Ala. “What we need to do is get the systems put into more rugged configurations [to handle different environments].”

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By Mark Abramson, Stars and Stripes

SOURCE: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=66915

Whether you’ve been forced to listen to Pat Buchanan (again) promote the suspension of rule of law, watched as the media machine chewed noisily on Joe Lieberman’s latest pitch for preemptive war, or felt assuredly unassured by our President’s promise to fight terrorism ‘wherever it is’, one thing ought to be certain by now: The US ‘War on Terror’ is neither at its beginning, its middle, and certainly not at its end.

As the tired – and disproven – arguments get pulled out of the cupboard, let us acknowledge Yemen and the Yemenis, who know as much about a Nigerian bomber as most Americans know of the Arabian Peninsula. It’s possible that the US public would benefit from a deeper understanding of Yemen’s violent civil war, its endemic water crisis, its long history of food, fuel and economic crises, and the overall extreme level of poverty that makes it one of the least developed countries on the planet.

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12.29.09 – 10:58 AM
by Jon Queally

SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/further/2009/12/29