No candidate opposed to the US occupation is permitted to run in Iraqi or Afghan elections. It will be the same in Egypt and Libya if the US gets its way. Soviet-style rigged elections make a mockery of the occupied peoples’ desire for self-determination, for honest courts, for social mobility, and for an end to the wealth-stealing dictators and monarchs who have forced servitude on the Arab world, thanks to the US empire.
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Tag Archives: Secret Wars
Arrest of CIA Agent Sheds Light on American Covert War in Pakistan, Straining U.S.-Pakistani Relations
Democracy Now is leans socialists on most issue. They propose government force as a solution to most problems. However, like many socialists, they are right about the problems, they just propose the wrong solutions.
* U.S. media goes along with the government lie.
U.S. Gov’t has been preparing Egypt spy chief to take over
I’m sure the CIA has tentacles on every side of the conflict in Egypt. They want to have influence over whoever happens to win, as Ron Paul has said. Here is one example:
New cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the U.S. government has been quietly anticipating as well as cultivating Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian spy chief, as the top candidate to take over the country should anything happen to President Hosni Mubarak. On Saturday, this expectation was proved correct when Mubarak named Suleiman to the post of vice-president making him the first in line to assume power.
An intelligence official who trained at the U.S. Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, Suleiman became head of the spy agency in 1993 which brought him into close contact with the Central Intelligence Agency. Recently he took up a more public role as chief Egyptian interlocuter with Israel to discuss the peace process with Hamas and Fatah, the rival Palestinian factions. (Read more from wikileaks.ch)
U.S. played central role in disastrous 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia
But Al Nayhan’s jocular praise, as reported in WikiLeaks’ trove of leaked diplomatic cables, is a rare admission that the United States played a central role in the disastrous December 2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, a move that ultimately emboldened the very Islamic extremists the U.S. and Ethiopia had hoped to squash. (Read more from )
30 False Fronts Won Contracts for Blackwater
Blackwater Worldwide created a web of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain millions of dollars in American government contracts after the security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in Iraq, according to Congressional investigators and former Blackwater officials. (Read more from nytimes.com)
Blackwater/Xe founder relocating to UAE
Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious security company Blackwater/Xe, has left the United States and is settling with his family in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Prince, 51, personally is not facing any criminal charges for now, but his company, now known as Xe Services LLC, has been implicated in a series of scandals related to its operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, court documents say. (Read more from presstv.ir)
The Real U.S. Government
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest demonstrates once again why she’s easily one of the best investigative journalists in the nation — if not the best — with the publication of Part I of her series, co-written with William Arkin, detailing the sprawling, unaccountable, inexorably growing secret U.S. Government: what the article calls “Top Secret America.” To the extent the series receives much substantive attention (and I doubt it will), the focus will likely be on the bureaucratic problems it documents: the massive redundancies, overlap, waste, and inefficiencies which plague this “hidden world, growing beyond control” — as though everything would better if Top Secret America just functioned a bit more effectively. But the far more significant fact so compellingly illustrated by this first installment is the one I described last week when writing about the Obama administration’s escalating war on whistle blowers:
Most of what the U.S. Government does of any significance — literally — occurs behind a vast wall of secrecy, completely unknown to the citizenry. . . . Secrecy is the religion of the political class, and the prime enabler of its corruption. That’s why whistle blowers are among the most hated heretics. They’re one of the very few classes of people able to shed a small amount of light on what actually takes place.
U.S. Expanding Secret Military Activities in Middle East
The top American commander in the Middle East has ordered a broad expansion of clandestine military activity in an effort to disrupt militant groups or counter threats in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and other countries in the region, according to defense officials and military documents. (Read more from nytimes.com)
Ron Paul Discusses The Political Re-Alignment
@5:30 – Federal Reserve is really, really scared about the audit movement.
@8:30 – Government involvement in drug trade.
US AFRICOM Launches Large-Scale Offensive In Somalia
Over 43 people have been killed in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in two days of fighting between Shabab (al-Shabaab) insurgent forces, who on March 10 advanced to within one mile of the nation’s presidential palace, and troops of the U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government. The fighting has just begun.
The last ambassador of the United States to Somalia (1994-1995), Daniel H. Simpson, penned a column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on March 10 in which which he posed the question “why, apart from the only lightly documented charge of Islamic extremism among the Shabab, is the United States reengaging in Somalia at this time?”
He answered it in stating “Part of the reason is because the United States has its only base in Africa up the coast from Mogadishu, in Djibouti, the former French Somaliland. The U.S. Africa Command was established there in 2008, and, absent the willingness of other African countries to host it, the base in Djibouti became the headquarters for U.S. troops and fighter bombers in Africa.
“Flush with money, in spite of the expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense obviously feels itself in a position to undertake military action in Africa, in Somalia.” [1]
Fulfilling its appointed role, the New York Times leaked U.S. military plans for the current offensive in Somalia on March 5 in a report titled “U.S. Aiding Somalia in Its Plan to Retake Its Capital.” (Note that the Transitional Federal Government is presented as Somalia itself and Mogadishu as its capital.)
The tone of the feature was of course one of approval and endorsement of the Pentagon’s rationale for directly intervening in Somalia. (Read more from )
The Strange Case of Adam Gadahn
Two Pakistani officers and a government official said Sunday that an American charged with treason for working with al-Qaida had been captured, a development that could deliver another significant blow in the U.S.-led battle against the terror network.
U.S. defense, intelligence and law enforcement officials could not immediately verify the reported detention of Adam Gadahn, a 31-year-old spokesman for al-Qaida who has appeared on videos threatening the West, including one that emerged earlier Sunday. (Read more from news.yahoo.com)
Later, stories emerged that this was in fact not the case.
This great New Yorker article tell his crazy story.
Some blogs have suggested the means through which the story of his capture was propagated through twitter smells fishy:
Flight 253 passenger contradicts FBI story
This is getting to be old news, but I think it’s important. Inconsistencies often appear in the big sensational stories, especially the scary ones which justify our loss of liberty in the name of security.
[Kurt Haskell:] Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.
Ever since I got off of Flight 253 I have been repeating what I saw in US Customs. Specifically, 1 hour after we left the plane, bomb sniffing dogs arrived. Up to this point, all of the passengers on Flight 253 stood in a small area in an evacuated luggage claim area of an airport terminal. During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived, 1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30 ish Indian man. This is not the so called “Sharp Dressed” man. I will refer to this man as “The man in orange”. The man in orange, who stood some 20ft away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) “You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out.” We were then marched out of the baggage claim area and into a long hallway. This entire time period and until we left customs, no person that wasn’t a law enforcement personnel or a passenger on our flight was allowed anywhere on our floor of the terminal (or possibly the entire terminal) The FBI was so concerned during this time, that we were not allowed to use the bathroom unless we went alone with an FBI agent, we were not allowed to eat or drink, or text or call anyone. I have been repeating this same story over the last 5 days. The FBI has, since we landed, insisted that only one man was arrested for the airliner attack (contradicting my account). However, several of my fellow passengers have come over the past few days, backed up my claim, and put pressure on FBI/Customs to tell the truth. Early today, I heard from two different reporters that a federal agency (FBI or Customs) was now admitting that another man has been held (and will be held indefinitely) since our flight landed for “immigration reasons.” Notice that this man was “being held” and not “arrested”, which was a cute semantic ploy by the FBI to stretch the truth and not lie.
Just a question, could that mean that the man in orange had no passport?
However, a few hours later, Customs changed its story again. This time, Mr. Ron Smith of Customs, says the man that was detained “had been taken into custody, but today tells the news the person was a passenger on a different flight.”
. . . .
For the last five days I have been reporting my story of the so
called “sharp dressed man.” For those of you who haven’t read my
account, it involves a sharp dressed “Indian man” attempting to talk a ticket agent into letting a supposed “Sudanese refugee” (The terrorist) onto flight 253 without a passport. I have never had any idea how it played out except to note that the so called “Sudanese reefugee” later boarded my flight and attempted to blow it up and kill me. At no time did my story involve, or even find important whether the terrorist actually had a passport. The importance of my story was and always will be, the attempt with an accomplice (apparently succesful) of a terrorist with all sorts of prior terrorist warning signs to skirt the normal passport boarding procedures in Amsterdam. By the way, Amsterdam security did come out the other day and admit that the terrorist did not have to “Go through normal passport checking procedures”. (Read more from mlive.com)
Don’t tell Fox “News” about this. To them, the important thing about this story is the possibility of Iran’s involvement, and us remaining afraid.
“We need to take out the CIA”
“[I will] smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.” ~John F. Kennedy
Mumbai terror suspect David Headley was ‘rogue US secret agent’
A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe. (Read more from timesonline.co.uk)
Filipinos want US out of Mindanao
Progressive forces in the Philippines have urged Manila to scrap a military deal with the US after former officials testified that US soldiers have been fighting in Mindanao in violation of the country’s constitution.
Under a Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), hundreds of elite US troops have been deployed in half a dozen locations in the southern Philippines since 2002, ostensibly to train and advise Filipino troops fighting Islamist militants and the Maoist New People’s Army.
On Thursday retired Philippine navy lieutenant Nancy Gadian testified at a congressional hearing that US troops based on Mindanao were embedded with Filipino units in combat situations.
The Philippine constitution bars foreign troops from fighting in the country, which was a US colony until 1946. (Read more from morningstaronline.co.uk)
We cannot afford all this war, neither morally nor economically nor politically.