Tag Archives: afghanistan

Dennis Kucinich: “WikiLeaks Gave Us 92,000 Reasons To Leave Afghanistan PICK ONE!”

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Moral Decay Within the Pentagon the Cause of Leaks Revealed by Wikileaks

Corporate corruption of the defense industry is at the heart of the motivation that leads insiders to leak information to Wikileaks. Honest everyday people that work for the government and its myriad of private contractors in the capitalist world are morally repulsed by the information that they are being charged with keeping secret represent to their sense of honoring their other sense for justice and truth. They cannot help themselves but reveal the corruption because it is morally repugnant to them. +++ The leak may have come from the State Department itself The controversy and the caliber of the information have led some political analysts to the conclusion that it could only have leaked from the State Department itself, which puts its efficiency under question. Vitaly Leibin, the chief editor of Russian Reporter, a magazine which claims to officially collaborate with WikiLeaks, also believes that the leaks are the result of people inside the US government wanting the information exposed. “These leaks would never have happened if not for the number of insiders who are ready to leak this information. It looks like it’s linked to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when officers understood that they are working for a not exactly fair business, and this moral decay inside the Pentagon caused these leaks,” he said. “The main thing this leak has done is break the illusion that the State department has everything under control. There have been exposed mechanisms – not secret, but quite simple and cynical. Partners of the US will be more careful now. It’s another sign that the US is no longer dominating the world,” he added. What the WikiLeaks incident shows is how the whole intelligence community has become over-reliant on technology, said former intelligence officer Glenmore Trenear-Harvey. He pointed out the inherent problems with the Secret Internet Protocol, a system of networks used by the US Defense and State Departments to transmit classified information that is one of the alleged sources of the leak. “The idea was for an exchange of information after 9/11, when the intelligent services weren’t sharing their information together,” he said. “Now what has happened is that whereas maybe 40,000 people within the intelligence community would have access, suddenly, bizarrely, diplomats, military people and, indeed, intelligence people – there’s over 2 million people that had access to it.” +++ Now that these revelations are making governments reconsider their security I would venture to say that this is going to lead to an extended cyberwar along with resistance from states to support some of the security measures that will likely be proposed by US lawmakers. added by: jubal

Moral Decay Within the Pentagon the Cause of Leaks Revealed by Wikileaks

Corporate corruption of the defense industry is at the heart of the motivation that leads insiders to leak information to Wikileaks. Honest everyday people that work for the government and its myriad of private contractors in the capitalist world are morally repulsed by the information that they are being charged with keeping secret represent to their sense of honoring their other sense for justice and truth. They cannot help themselves but reveal the corruption because it is morally repugnant to them. +++ The leak may have come from the State Department itself The controversy and the caliber of the information have led some political analysts to the conclusion that it could only have leaked from the State Department itself, which puts its efficiency under question. Vitaly Leibin, the chief editor of Russian Reporter, a magazine which claims to officially collaborate with WikiLeaks, also believes that the leaks are the result of people inside the US government wanting the information exposed. “These leaks would never have happened if not for the number of insiders who are ready to leak this information. It looks like it’s linked to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when officers understood that they are working for a not exactly fair business, and this moral decay inside the Pentagon caused these leaks,” he said. “The main thing this leak has done is break the illusion that the State department has everything under control. There have been exposed mechanisms – not secret, but quite simple and cynical. Partners of the US will be more careful now. It’s another sign that the US is no longer dominating the world,” he added. What the WikiLeaks incident shows is how the whole intelligence community has become over-reliant on technology, said former intelligence officer Glenmore Trenear-Harvey. He pointed out the inherent problems with the Secret Internet Protocol, a system of networks used by the US Defense and State Departments to transmit classified information that is one of the alleged sources of the leak. “The idea was for an exchange of information after 9/11, when the intelligent services weren’t sharing their information together,” he said. “Now what has happened is that whereas maybe 40,000 people within the intelligence community would have access, suddenly, bizarrely, diplomats, military people and, indeed, intelligence people – there’s over 2 million people that had access to it.” +++ Now that these revelations are making governments reconsider their security I would venture to say that this is going to lead to an extended cyberwar along with resistance from states to support some of the security measures that will likely be proposed by US lawmakers. added by: jubal

Fareed Zakaria Calls Out Glenn Beck’s Math Skills On Muslim Terrorist Claim

Fareed Zakaria, who occasionally throws fairly well-disguised bombs from his perches at CNN and Time in a manner so serene many fail to notice– is taking on his cable news stylistic opposite, Glenn Beck– or at the very least, his math skills. In his trademark soothing tones, Zakaria gave Beck a math lesson on those 10%, or 157 million, “Muslim terrorists” Beck claimed were plotting to attack America– namely, that that figure is “1000% wrong.” Zakaria opens up his segment, aptly titled “What in the world?,” by simply following through on the 10% math to figure out just how many people 10% of the international Muslim community would be. Zakaria’s lesson even included a virtual chalkboard, just to make sure Beck got the message, one must assume. He correctly points out would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 157,000,000 Muslim terrorists, and notes Beck’s laments of “why, oh why wasn’t this receiving any media coverage?” Zakaria’s answer? “Well, let me suggest one reason: it is total nonsense– a figure made up by Glenn Beck with absolutely no basis in fact.” He also uses U.S. State Department figures to negate Beck’s, which claim there were 11,000 total terrorist attacks around the world in 2009, including every act of terror in Iraq and Afghanistan, and testimony from terror expert Peter Bergen, who emailed Zakaria to tell him Beck’s figures were “1000% wrong.” It doesn’t get much better for Beck during Zakaria’s semi-out of character deconstructing of his argument. Team Beck, meanwhile, has already put together a comprehensive retort to Zakaria, with data showing, among other things, that support for Osama Bin Laden “ranges from 4% in Azerbaijan to 56% in the Palestinian territories.” added by: TimALoftis

11 reasons why the threat from Al Qaeda is not real

“All governments lie.” You can add to that great quote “and all newspapers lie, too.” -American journalist I. F. Stone. Knowing the truth matters in a democracy because without the truth citizens can’t make informed decisions about government policies that impact their lives. It is not possible to consciously answer fundamental societal questions like “should we go to war?” without a firm grasp of all the facts at hand. When independent journalists fail to provide the simple and straightforward facts to the public, they become complicit in government murder and fraud, and deserve even more ridicule than dishonest government officials and government-owned journalists. 11 Reasons Why The Threat From Al-Qaeda is Not Real Al-Qaeda is either one of these things, or it is a combination of them: a) a completely fake threat; the organization does not exist, b) an organization that exists in small numbers but was created by the CIA to serve a corrupt U.S. foreign policy, and remains a U.S. intelligence asset in the manufactured global war on terrorism, or c) a small organization that exists independently of the U.S. government but its strength and influence in the Middle East is exaggerated by radical policymakers and officials in Washington. Out of all three statements the first and second deserve the most serious attention because they are supported by the evidence listed below. #1. Radical American cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki, who was ordered to be assassinated by President Obama, met with top military officials at the Pentagon months after the 9/11 attacks. #2. CIA Director Leon Panetta revealed in June 2010 on ABC’s This Week that there are less than 100 Al-Qaeda members in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. #3. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), one of the world’s leading security think tanks, published a report this year which said that the threat of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban is exaggerated by Western policymakers. #4. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview to the Los Angeles Times’s Patt Morrison in October 2010 that Al-Qaeda doesn’t exist. #5. The U.S. government created, and funded Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s to be used to draw the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, and bleed it to death in a costly and unwinnable war. #6. Robin Cook, who served as a British MP for 22 years and as Foreign Secretary from 1997 to 2001, wrote an article for the Guardian in July 2005, a month before his death, called “The struggle against terrorism cannot be won by military means.” #7. A BBC article from July 2004 called “Al-Qaeda’s origins and links” reveals that Osama Bin Laden was a CIA agent in the 1980s. #8. J. Michael Springmann, a 20 year foreign service official, and a former Consulate officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has publicly stated for many years that the CIA brought over Muslim radicals to the United States for secret terrorist training. #9. Germany’s Der Spiegel’s published an article by Siegesmund von Ilsemann called “Arming the Middle East: The Checkered History of American Weapons Deals” in June 2007. The article backed up the reporting done by the BBC, and elsewhere that the United States government “supplied Afghan freedom fighters in the 1980s with money and arms for their struggle against occupying Soviet troops. One of the best customers for the CIA back then was Saudi millionaire Osama Bin Laden.” This account is only half-true. The CIA funded and trained a network of Muslim fighters not to liberate Afghanistan from corrupt Soviet influence, but to create havoc and instigate a Soviet invasion so that it would drain itself of blood and treasure. Once the objective of bringing down the Soviet Union was achieved, the stage was set for the United States and the West to invade Afghanistan and take advantage of the country’s vast resources, from oil to heroin. #10. Selig Harrison, a current member of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, a former senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and an expert on South Asia, said in March 2001 at a conference called “Terrorism and Regional Security: Managing the Challenges in Asia,” that the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI helped create the backward and tyrannical Taliban. #11. The September 11, 2001 attacks, which serve as the basis for America’s wars in the Middle East, were committed by the United States government with assistance from the government of Israel. This is an indisputable fact added by: maasanova

A Message to FDL From the White House | MyFDL

Thank you for purchasing our fine product, Barack Obama’s First Term. We are very proud of this new and improved version of Herbert Hoover’s last term. As you know, this product features impressive 11-dimensional chess accessories, inspiring ass-kissing of every Republican in sight, immunity legislation for massive mortgage fraud perpetrators, a wide variety of Iraq and Afghanistan war options ranging from no withdrawal to no withdrawal, and no consideration whatsoever of anything even remotely resembling campaign promises. Disclaimers: Mind-numbing spine assembly required. Consult your physician before use. Use only in a well-ventilated veal pen. Discontinue use if you experience nausea, vomiting, fever, convulsions, more than one stroke, or paralyzing fury. Not responsible for direct, indirect, incidental, or catastrophic damages resulting from every defect, error or failure to perform. Any vague resemblance to any actual Democratic presidents, living or dead, is unintentional and purely coincidental. Consume alcoholic beverages frequently while using this product. Some additional tax cuts for the rich may apply. Hamid Karzai action figures sold separately. Graphic hypocrisy may be too intense for some viewers. This product not intended for use as a dental drill. Unplug before servicing. Any reproduction, retransmission, or rebroadcast of any Obama statement anywhere on anything without the express written consent of Mitch McConnell is strictly prohibited. Contents may evaporate under no pressure at all. Danger: harmful or fatal for America. Do not think about this product while operating heavy equipment. Individual results may vary. Take several bottles of sedatives three times daily until gone. Not to be used as a personal flotation device. This is not an offer to sell securities . . . well . . . actually, it is. Not valid in any areas. Predator drones in your mirror may be closer than they appear. Subject to caving in without notice. The views expressed by purchasers of this product do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors. Please remain seated until real change in America comes to a complete stop. You can get up now. added by: toyotabedzrock

BBC News – List of facilities ‘vital to US security’ leaked

A long list of key facilities around the world that the US describes as vital to its national security has been released by Wikileaks. The US State Department in February 2009 asked all US missions abroad to list all installations whose loss could critically affect US national security. The list includes pipelines, communication and transport hubs. Several UK sites are listed, including cable locations, satellite sites and BAE Systems plants. This is probably the most controversial document yet from the Wikileaks organisation. The definition of US national security revealed by the cable is broad and all embracing. In addition to obvious pieces of strategic infrastructure like communications hubs, gas pipelines and so on, it contains, amongst other things, a cobalt mine in Congo, an anti-snake venom factory in Australia and an insulin plant in Denmark. The US missions were asked to list all installations whose loss could critically impact the public health, economic security or national security of the United States. In Britain, for example, the list ranges from Cornwall to Scotland, including key satellite communications sites and the places where trans-Atlantic cables make landfall. “What the list might do is to prompt potential attackers to look at a broader range of targets” A number of BAE Systems plants involved in joint weapons programmes with the Americans are listed, along with a marine engineering firm in Edinburgh which is said to be “critical” for nuclear powered submarines. 'Targets for terror' The geographical range of the document is extraordinary. If the US sees itself as waging a “global war on terror” then this represents a global directory of the key installations and facilities – many of them medical or industrial – that are seen as being of vital importance to Washington. No wonder then that the Times newspaper in London has published the story under the headline “Wikileaks lists 'targets for terror' against the US”. Some locations are given unique billing. The Nadym gas pipeline junction in western Siberia, for example, is described as “the most critical gas facility in the world”. Continue reading the main story The Main Leaks So Far Fears that terrorists may acquire Pakistani nuclear material Several Arab leaders urged attack on Iran over nuclear issue US instructs spying on key UN officials China's changing relationship with North Korea Yemen approved US strikes on militants Personal and embarrassing comments on world leaders Afghan leader Hamid Karzai freed dangerous detainees Russia is a “virtual mafia state” with widespread corruption and bribery Afghan President Hamid Karzai is “paranoid and weak” Comments on the extent of alleged corruption in Afghanistan Chinese leadership was 'behind hacking of Google' Wikileaks cables: Key issues It is a crucial transit point for Russian gas heading for western Europe. In some cases, specific pharmaceutical plants or those making blood products are highlighted for their crucial importance to the global supply chain. Of course the critical question is that raised by the Times newspaper's headline: Is this really a listing of potential targets that might be of use to a terrorist? The cable contains a simple listing. In many cases towns are noted as the location but not actual street addresses. That, of course, is not going to hinder anyone with access to the internet. There are also no details of security measures at any of the listed sites. What the list might do is to prompt potential attackers to look at a broader range of targets, especially given that the US authorities classify them as being so important. It is not perhaps a major security breach, but many governments may see it as an unhelpful development. It inevitably prompts the question as to exactly what positive benefit Wikileaks was intending in releasing this document. Former UK Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind condemned the move. “This is further evidence that they have been generally irresponsible, bordering on criminal,” Mr Rifkind said. “This is the kind of information terrorists are interested in knowing.” added by: Itsbatman_Durr

Fox & Al-Qaeda share the same finance sources – Saudis

Wikileaks: Saudis 'chief funders of Sunni militants' The cables said militant groups had used front companies in Saudi Arabia to fundraise Continue reading the main story Wikileaks Revelations US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned last year in a leaked classified memo that donors in Saudi Arabia were the “most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”. She said it was “an ongoing challenge” to persuade Saudi officials to treat such activity as a strategic priority. The groups funded include al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, she added. The memo, released by Wikileaks, also criticised efforts to combat militants by the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait. Meanwhile, a lawyer for the founder of the Wikileaks website said he was holding back secret material for release if anything happened to him. He told the BBC that a rape case being prepared in Sweden against Julian Assange, an Australian national, was politically motivated. 'Dependent on CIA' In one classified cable sent in December 2009, Mrs Clinton urged diplomats to redouble efforts to stop funds reaching militants “threatening stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan and targeting Coalition soldiers”. “While the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) takes seriously the threat of terrorism within Saudi Arabia, it has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority,” she wrote. Large sums are raised by militant groups during the annual Hajj pilgrimage, US diplomats believe The Saudi government had begun to make important progress, but “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide”, she added. Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba “probably raised millions of dollars” annually from Saudi sources, often during the Hajj – and the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, she alleged. Mrs Clinton said reforms to criminalise terrorist financing and restrict the overseas flow of funds from Saudi-based charities had been effective, but that they did not cover equally suspect “multilateral organisations”. sources and more on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11923176 added by: alexandrek

Mainstream media promotes ‘centrist’ Third Party propaganda

You heard it here first! The Democrats and Republicans are both finished as viable parties, so now the mainstream media is pushing a new, but phony third-party centrist paradigm. Phony ‘Centrist’ Third Party Propaganda Escalates http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/third_party_245.html On Nov. 6, both Bob Herbert and Charles M. Blow —conventional “mainstream” pundits of the classic NY Times stripe—had side-by-side columns on the NY Times’s popular op-ed page, trumpeting the proposition that both the “liberal Democrats” and the “conservative Republicans” are politically, intellectually and, for all intents and purposes, morally bankrupt. The nation is endangered, they wrote, unless there are solutions and saviors that emerge outside the conventional liberal-conservative paradigm to which Americans have become accustomed through the “two party” system that now prevails. Writing in the Times, Herbert—in his “Tone-Deaf in DC” column—stated flatly: Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are offering voters the kind of change that they seem so desperately to want. . . .What voters want is leadership that will help them through an economic nightmare and fix a country that has been pitched into a state of sharp decline. They long for leaders with a clear and compelling vision of a better America and a road map for getting there. That leadership has long been AWOL. The hope in the tumultuous elections of 2008 was that it would come from Mr. Obama and the Democrats, but that hope, after just two years, is on life support. . . .The Democrats are in disarray because it’s a party that lacks a spine. The Republicans, conversely, fight like wild people whether they’re in the majority or not. What neither party is doing is offering a bold, coherent plan to get the nation’s economy in good shape and create jobs, to bring our young men and women home from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to rebuild the education system in a way that will prepare the next generation for the great challenges of the 21st century . . . . added by: maasanova

Julian Assange Fired From IT Job At Pentagon

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01775/assangeSUM_1775173b…. ARLINGTON, VA—With officials describing his publication of sensitive U.S. State Department documents as “the last straw,” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was asked to resign from his position as the Pentagon's IT coordinator Monday. “We gave him his first warning after the whole Iraq and Afghanistan war diaries thing, and strike two was when he forwarded that video montage of Nicolas Cage yelling to the entire staff,” Defense Department human resources director Curtis Shannon said. “But we just can't overlook this latest offense. Even if he's the only one who knows where the spare USB cables are.” At press time, Assange had already been invited to interview for an IT position at the Central Intelligence Agency. added by: toyotabedzrock