President Obama’s enormous expansion of the U.S. drone program may be pushing too fast for military staffing to keep up.
David S. Cloud of The Los Angeles Times reports the military is now forced to rely on a string of civilian contractors placed at all levels along the “kill chain.” These are the people who analyze incoming drone video and decide when to fire Hellfire missiles.
The practice is not new.
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Duh!
Warnings from many experts are coming true: Libya is being pulled into a civil war. Now anti-Gaddafists are carving up power and Libya’s capital of Tripoli is already seeing clashes as the rebels are fighting for the local airport.
Libya that was united by one goal – to topple Gaddafi, is now on the verge of chaos. Late Saturday, the so-called Libya’s national guards attempted to seize control over the Tripoli airport and attacked their former allies from the city of Zintan. Their attempt failed but left some people killed and injured. The national guards pledged to try again and were calmed down only by the tribal elders.
At the same time, militants attempted to murder Libya’s Chief Commander Khalifa Haftar.
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Phil Goff said he would withdraw New Zealand out of Afghanistan because we were supporting a corrupt government. This is true of course.
Opium harvests have never been so huge and it’s the US army guarding the fields while the Afghan peasants grow the drug which will be exported to Russia and Europe and the US to create havoc under the young and vulnerable and it will be the same banks who are ripping the fabric of society apart at the seams with their derivatives and greed will will be raking in the profits.
This morning I woke up to the news that Iran had shot down an unmanned US drone which had violated Iran’s borders.
Oh, happy day as we thunder towards WWIII and oil prices going through the roof destroying what is left of the global economy. Continue reading
“Tactical nuclear weapons were used, at least one in Iraq and several were used in Afghanistan –in the Tora Bora mountains,” Peter Eyre, a Middle East consultant, said.
Eyre pointed out that the atomic bomb dropped on Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region was so powerful that it actually created an earthquake there.
The analyst went on to say that the use of such lethal weapons by US military, which is a gross violation of the Geneva Convention, has been sanctioned by the US presidents; thus they should be prosecuted for war crimes.
“In America, the ultimate commander in chief is the president,” Eyre said, adding that the President has the final say in using such weapons.
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By Paul Joseph Watson
Yet another indication that Syria could be the next target of a NATO-led military assault arrived today with the news that the United Arab Emirates is the latest country to urge its citizens to leave, as a deadline imposed by the Arab League for Syria to respond to its demand to send in observers passed without comment.
“Emiratis who are already in Syria are advised to avoid large gatherings of people, exercise caution and leave Syrian territory because of the current circumstances there,” Director of Nationals’ Affairs at the Ministry Ambassador Eissa Abdullah Al-Kalbani said.
The warning follows similar advisories by the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, which urged its citizens to leave Syria “immediately,” while Turkey’s foreign ministry told its citizens to avoid traveling through the country on their return home from Saudi Arabia.
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While all your attention was directed to the possible bankers take over in New Zealand here are some things that might have escaped your attention!
It remains unclear exactly why or how the Gadhafi regime went from “a model” and an “important ally” to the next target for regime change in a period of just a few years. But after claims of “genocide” as the justification for NATO intervention were disputed by experts, several other theories have been floated. Oil, of course, has been mentioned frequently — Libya is Africa‘s largest oil producer. But one possible reason in particular for Gadhafi’s fall from grace has gained significant traction among analysts and segments of the non-Western media: central banking and the global monetary system.
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Here is Max Keiser talking about how Goldman Sachs robbed the Lybians of their money.
So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure. What if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it over the past seven and a half months?
The overthrow of Gaddafi & Co was far from being a straightforward revolution against tyranny, but the West’s latest military intervention can’t be debunked as being simply about oil. Presented by the National Transitional Council (NTC) and cheered on by the Western media as an integral part of the Arab Spring, and thus supposedly of a kind with the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, the Libyan drama is rather an addition to the list of Western or Western-backed wars against hostile, ‘defiant’, insufficiently ‘compliant’, or ‘rogue’ regimes: Afghanistan I (v. the Communist regime, 1979-92), Iraq I (1990-91), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (over Kosovo, 1999), Afghanistan II (v. the Taliban regime, 2001) and Iraq II (2003), to which we might, with qualifications, add the military interventions in Panama (1989-90), Sierra Leone (2000) and the Ivory Coast (2011). An older series of events we might bear in mind includes the Bay of Pigs (1961), the intervention by Western mercenaries in the Congo (1964), the British-assisted palace coup in Oman in 1970 and – last but not least – three abortive plots, farmed out to David Stirling and sundry other mercenaries under the initially benevolent eye of Western intelligence services, to overthrow the Gaddafi regime between 1971 and 1973 in an episode known as the Hilton Assignment.
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The Obama administration’s fabricated terror plot blamed on Iran represents the green light for an Israeli attack on Iran set to take place within the next two weeks, according to confidential military sources who spoke with Alex Jones.
Israel is concerned that major powers like Germany are moving closer to smoothing relations with Iran and allowing Iran to continue its nuclear enrichment program unimpeded. A two month window has been allocated during which Israel has the opportunity to launch a military assault, waiting until winter when the attack will be more difficult to pull off is not an option.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s October 3 Tel Aviv visit was used by Israeli hawks to convince the United States that it should green light the attack. Less than 10 days later, a fanciful terror plot involving a used car salesman was invented to implicate Iran and create the pretext for a military assault.
“In recent weeks, intense discussions have taken place in Israeli military and intelligence circles about whether or not to launch a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Apparently, the key question in the debate was how to ensure that the United States took part in the attack or, at the very least, intervened on Israel’s side if the initial strike triggered a wider war,” writes Patrick Seale of Gulf News.
That intervention has now been mandated by the announcement of the fabricated terror plot, which was actually concocted last month but only made public now.
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