US commander in Afghanistan lobbies for more troops
By James Cogan

Less than six months after Barack Obama ordered 21,000 additional American soldiers to Afghanistan, and barely two weeks into the first major offensive by the reinforcements, General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed US commander, has launched a lobbying drive for a substantial further increase in troop numbers.
The military is using the US media as the conduit for its demands. On Friday, the Washington Post published a report in which unnamed Defense Department officials and military officers essentially spelt out what McChrystal will recommend when he delivers an operational review of the Afghan war to the Obama administration at the end of August. The basic

thrust of his assessment is being thoroughly leaked in order to prepare public opinion for another escalation of the conflict.
The current plan in Afghanistan provides for the beefed-up US force to spearhead a series of operations over the next 12 to 18 months, largely destroy the Taliban militarily and terrorise the population in southern Afghanistan into ending political support for the insurgency. Instead, McChrystal has already concluded that the Taliban resistance to the US/NATO occupation and the pro-US Afghan government cannot be defeated with the number of troops at his disposal.
According to the Post, McChrystal intends to request the deployment of thousands of American trainers and the commitment of billions more dollars to carry out a massive expansion in the size of the Afghan Army over the next several years. An unnamed senior officer told the Post last month that the view in the military was that as many as 30,000 more US troops were needed, on top of the 68,000 already deployed. READ MORE

Blitz of “Cyber Attacks” as Rockefeller Bill Approaches
by Kurt Nimmo

A determined propaganda blitz is well underway as the government sets the stage for the passage of Cybersecurity Act of 2009, introduced in the Senate earlier this year. If passed, it will allow Obama to shut down the internet and private networks. The legislation also calls for the government to have the authority to demand security data from private networks without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access. In other words, the bill allows the government to impose authoritarian control over electronic communications.

Earlier today, the corporate media reported on a “powerful attack that overwhelmed computers at U.S. and South Korean government agencies,” allegedly launched by North Korea. “South Korean intelligence officials believe the attacks were carried out by North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces,” the Associated Press reported.

It should be noted that South Korea’s intelligence apparatus — known as the Korean Central Intelligence Agency — was formed under the auspices of the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps during the Korean War and is notorious for intervening in that country’s politics and kidnapping Koreans living abroad and torturing them. In other words, anything South Korean intelligence tells the corporate media should be taken with a large grain of salt.

According to “security experts analyzing the attacks,” Obama’s White House, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange, the National Security Agency, Homeland Security Department, State Department, the Treasury Department, Federal Trade Commission and Secret Service, the Nasdaq stock market and The Washington Post were targeted.

All of this is happening as Senate Commerce Chairman John (Jay) Rockefeller — who has said we’d all be better off if the internet was never invented — plans a committee vote on cybersecurity legislation he introduced in April with Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. READ MORE

Straight Talk: Revealing the Real U.S.-Africa Policy
Gerald LeMelle | July 6, 2009

It's time for some straight talk on U.S. foreign policy as it relates to Africa. While Obama administration officials and the U.S. African Command (AFRICOM) representatives insist that U.S. foreign policy towards Africa isn't being militarized, the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. While Africans condemned U.S. military policy in Africa under the Bush administration, the Obama administration has not only mirrored Bush's approach, but has in fact enhanced it.

President George W. Bush established Africa as a foreign policy priority in 2003, when he announced that 25% of oil imported to the United States should come from Africa. Like the Cold War, the Global War on Terror

establishes a rationale for bolstering U.S. military presence and support in Africa. Yet official pronouncement of U.S. policy is routinely presented as if neither of these two developments occurred. Unfortunately, the more evasive we are about our intentions on the continent, the more we invite not only skepticism, but even resistance.

A policy is militarized when military might is deemed the only effective way to accomplish its agenda. In a June statement on U.S. policy in Africa, U.S. Assistant Secretary for African Affairs Johnny Carson said the agenda of the Obama administration is as follows: promoting and strengthening democracy and the rule of law, preventing and mitigating conflicts, encouraging sustained economic development and long-term growth, and working with African countries to face both old and new global challenges. The agenda makes no reference to the recent FY2010 budget that doubles the size of AFRICOM's funds. Nor does it mention the doubling of financial support for counterterrorism projects throughout the continent — including increasing funds for weapons, military training, and education at a time when U.S. foreign aid money is stagnating.

AFRICOM has been controversial on the continent since President Bush first announced it in February 2007. The Bush administration discussed several sites for its headquarters, but their failure to include African civil society in the discussion is widely regarded as a major mistake. Though the Western press barely reported it, the reaction on the continent was vociferous. Every country with the exception of Liberia rejected AFRICOM, and African civil society, where allowed to speak, has overwhelmingly characterized AFRICOM as a means to secure oil and nothing more. READ MORE

Lawyers for the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be transferred to US soil for a civilian trial, set for September 2010, asked on Thursday to see the secret CIA prisons where he was allegedly tortured.

The Associated Press reports, “A prosecutor agreed Thursday that the government will not dismantle overseas locations where a former Guantanamo detainee claims he was interrogated by the CIA before he was brought to the United States for trial on terrorism charges.”

“The prosecutor, David Raskin, told U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that the United States would preserve the locations for now even though it does not plan to use at trial any statements Ahmed Ghailani made while he was in the custody of any other government agencies,” the AP article continues.

Ghailani’s lawyers had argued that “his treatment at the locations will be relevant if the government seeks the death penalty in the case. Raskin said the government has not yet decided whether to seek the death penalty,” the AP reported.

Judge Kaplan quipped that due to the reversal on dismantling the black sites, he won’t “have to look at the classified information no matter how titillating it may be.” READ MORE

Pakistanis Reject U.S. "Aid" Flights, As Lawsuit is Filed Against U.S. Drone Attacks
By Jeremy Scahill

Damn those ungrateful Pakistanis. After U.S. drone attacks killed more than 600 of their people since 2006—most of them civilians—it seems they think they have some right to say they don’t want the U.S. flying its “aid” planes to Swat and other “tribal areas.” The New York Times reports that “the Pakistani authorities have refused to allow American workers or planes to distribute the aid in the camps for displaced people.” The paper reports:

Islamist charities and the United States are competing for the allegiance of the two million people displaced by the fight against the Taliban in Swat and other parts of Pakistan — and so far, the Islamists are in the lead.
Top US officials (and the Times) make no apologies for the fact that the aid is intended primarily as a counter-insurgency program:

The inconspicuous back seat is not what American officials had hoped for. At first, the huge exodus of people from Swat, many of whom had suffered from the brutality of the Taliban, seemed to present an opportunity for Washington to improve its image in Pakistan.

“There is an opportunity actually to provide services, much as we did with the earthquake relief, which had a profound impact on the perception of America,” Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who serves as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said during a hearing attended by the Obama administration’s special envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, at the start of the exodus.
Here is the best part of the U.S. effort:

In an effort to highlight American concern for the refugees, Mr. Holbrooke visited the camps in June, sitting on the floor of a sweltering tent and talking to people about their plight. “President Obama has sent us to see how we can help you,” he said.

Poor Dick Holbrooke, having to sit in that sweaty tent. I really hope someone at that meeting said, “Obama can help us by stopping his regular, deadly bombings.” The Times claims that what came out of the meeting “was an effort to send Pakistani-American female doctors to assist women in the camps, who according to their cultural traditions must be treated by women.”

Meanwhile, a Pakistani human rights lawyer filed a petition at the country’s Supreme Court asking it to order the Pakistani government to undertake a “comprehensive report” on U.S. drone attacks against the country. “I have filed the petition in the Supreme Court as a protest to let the world know about the sentiments of the people of Pakistan on consecutive drone attacks which are killing scores of people,” said the attorney, M. Tariq Asad. READ MORE

UK weapons inspector who was found dead was writing expose: paper
by John Byrne
Global Research, July 11, 2009
The Raw Story - 2009-07-06

British weapons inspector Dr. David Kelly was writing an expose about his work with anthrax and his warnings that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction at the time of his death in July 2003, according to a report published in a British newspaper.

Kelly’s death — said to have been a suicide — has stirred controversy, as it came on the heels of testimony to the House of Commons about a memo which purported that Britain had “sexed up” a dossier on Iraq’s alleged

weapons of mass destruction. A Parliamentary inquiry ruled that the death had been suicide, though it also included testimony from a former British ambassador who quotes Kelly as having said, “I will probably be found dead in the woods” if Iraq were invaded.

The new report says Kelly had spoken with an Oxford publisher several times about a book.

“He had several discussions with a publisher in Oxford and was seeking advice on how far he could go without breaking the law on secrets,” the UK Daily Express alleged.

Kelly’s computers were seized in the wake of his death. He was a signatory to Britain’s Official Secrets Act, which allows for the prosecution of those who talk to the press about state secrets and prescribes a more stringent framework for secrecy than in the United States.

According to the paper, “he was intending to reveal that he warned Prime Minister Tony Blair there were no weapons of mass destruction anywhere in Iraq weeks before the British and American invasion… and was also intending to lift the lid on a potentially bigger scandal, his own secret dealings in germ warfare with the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

The allegations of a potential Kelly expose come from a new film about biological weapons being debuted in London on the sixth anniversary of Kelly’s death titled “Anthrax War” (the documentary aired earlier this year on Canadian public television). Kelly was an expert in biological warfare agents, as well as a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. READ MORE

Banksters Love Cap-and-Trade

The well-placed and well-connected are set to make trillions off new climate bill; economic collapse about to accelerate
James Corbett
The Corbett Report

The sweeping new bill which just passed the House last Friday, the Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, is ostensibly about climate change, but it is in fact a bill of staggering economic ramifications that is going to accelerate the takeover of the economy by the well-placed financiers who have already plundered the Treasury and the Fed of $12+ trillion and counting. It was rushed through the House in the tradition of such nightmarish legislation as the Patriot Act and the banker bailout of last October: hundreds of pages were added to it at the last minute and it was humanly impossible for anyone to have read it before they voted on it. This, of course, is exactly what Obama promised his administration would never allow to happen, and for good reason; bills passed in this manner are always the result of fear and panic and inevitably results in legislation that would never be passed upon sober second thought.

In this case, the rush to pass this new bill was an attempt to stop any scrutiny of a plan that is going to utterly transform the American economy, further centralize control of citizens' lives in the hands of unaccountable federal bureaucrats and complete the transfer of the American economy from Main Street to Wall Street. And all of this in the name of fighting a threat which itself is a demonstrable fraud. In short, the banksters and bureaucrats are sharpening their knives, preparing to butcher what's left of the carcass of the United States, and a good portion of the public are not only willing to allow it but are actually clamoring for it.

The first thing that needs to be understood about the brand new trillion dollar carbon-trading commodities market that will be brought into existence if this bill passes the Senate is that it is a ripoff designed by and for the very corporate interests the environmentalists claim to be fighting. For an historical precedent of what is being proposed under this cap-and-trade scam one can look to Enron, which immediately found ways to plunder billions of dollars from new energy market legislation passed by the Clinton Administration in 2000. They gave schemes for manipulating billions of dollars out of Californians funny little names like Death Star and even went so far as to rig up a completely fake trading floor in their offices in order to bamboozle investors who were interested in the company's remarkable success. They got away with it because they were The Smartest Guys in the Room, much brighter than the government bureaucrats who were supposed to stop them from committing such blatant fraud (assuming the regulators weren't simply paid to look the other way). And now supporters of this new bill are putting their blind faith in these same bureaucrats to regulate a scheme to create a vastly more complex market with hundreds of times as much money at stake. Is it any wonder Enron was a booster for cap-and-trade?

That the new carbon trading market can and will be manipulated by the very same financial oligarchs and government bureaucrats who have brought the world to the brink of economic Armageddon is laid bare in a must-read article by Matt Taibi in the latest issue of Rolling Stone. In "The Great Bubble Machine" Taibi meticulously documents how the amazingly well-connected Goldman Sachs has managed to manipulate and profit from every financial bubble since the Roaring Twenties and how they're getting set to do it all over again with the creation of a carbon trading bubble: READ MORE

Western Governments Funding Taliban & Al-Qaeda To Kill U.S. Troops, Destabilize Countries

Sunni terrorist groups armed, funded, and moved around the global chessboard to suit geopolitical agenda of Anglo-American establishment

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com

Recent revelations concerning the U.S. importing Taliban members into Iraq to foster false flag terrorism is merely the tip of the iceberg when compared to the U.S. intelligence complex’s multi-decade history in sponsoring Sunni Al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups around the world.

Wayne Madsen recently revealed how Taliban fighters were being imported from Afghanistan into Iraq to attack civilians and U.S. soldiers, as well as how Muqtada al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi Army was being allowed to import materials to make IEDs.

However, this is just one aspect of how the U.S. has used terrorist groups as pawns on the global chessboard, moving them around the globe in line with their geopolitical objectives.
As is voluminously documented, the U.S. first worked covertly with Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan from 1979-1989.

Following this, the Al-Qaeda pawns were moved on to Bosnia shortly after the outbreak of war in 1992 to fight against Bosnian Serbs who were subsequently the target of NATO air strikes.

Following the end of the war, “hundreds of Bosnian passports were provided to the mujahedeen by the Muslim-controlled government in Sarajevo,” according to Lenard Cohen, professor of political science at Simon Fraser University. This all happened with the approval of the United Nations and the United States, who had brokered the peace deal to end the war.

“They also set up secret terrorist training camps in Bosnia — activities financed by the sale of opium produced in Afghanistan and secretly shipped through Turkey and Kosovo into central Europe,” reports the National Post.

Shortly before the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Sunni terrorist groups moved into Kosovo, Serbia’s southern province, to aid the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Albanian terrorist faction that was being supported by the U.S. and NATO in its terror campaign against Serbs in the region. READ MORE

Banks own the US government
There are smart ways to raise money and regulate the market, but Wall Street is working to kill any meaningful financial reform

by Dean Baker
Global Research, July 2, 2009
The Guardian - 2009-06-30

Last month, when the US Congress failed to pass a bankruptcy reform measure that would have allowed home mortgages to be modified in bankruptcy, senator Dick Durbin succinctly commented: "The banks own the place." That seems pretty clear.

After all, it was the banks' greed that fed the housing bubble with loony loans that were guaranteed to go bad. Of course the finance guys also made a fortune guaranteeing the loans that were guaranteed to go bad (ie AIG), and when everything went bust, the taxpayers got handed the bill. The cost of the bailout will certainly be in the hundreds of billions, if not more than $1tn when it is all over.

More importantly, we are looking at the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression. The cumulative lost output over the years 2008-2012 will almost certainly exceed $5tn. That comes to more than $60,000 for an average family of four. This is the price that we are paying for the bankers' greed, coupled with incredible incompetence and/or corruption from our regulators.

Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to think that the bankers would be keeping a low profile for a while. That's not the way it works in Washington. The banks are aggressively pushing their case in Congress and Obama administration. Not only are we not going to see bankruptcy reform, but any financial reform package that gets through Congress will probably contain enough loopholes that it will be almost useless.

In this political environment, the poor might get empathy, but Wall Street gets money, and lots of it. Even when the issue is global warming Wall Street has its hand out. The fees on trading carbon permits could run into the hundreds of billions of dollars in coming decades. A simple carbon tax would have been far more efficient, but efficiency is not the most important value when it comes to making Wall Street richer.

This is why it was so encouraging to see congressman Peter DeFazio's proposal to tax trades in oil options and futures. DeFazio proposed a tax of 0.02% on trades in oil futures and options as a way to make up a shortfall in the federal government's highway trust fund. This tax could raise billions of dollars each year in revenue and make speculation in the oil market a more dangerous affair. READ MORE

The new GM
11 July 2009

The “new” General Motors exited bankruptcy court on Friday. With the help of the courts, and under the direction of the Obama administration, the company has shed nearly $130 billion in liabilities and created the framework for a vast increase in the exploitation of its workers.

The speed of the bankruptcy proceedings is remarkable. GM passed through the entire process in less than six weeks. One analyst called it “unprecedented, unbelievable, breathtaking.”

Bankruptcy court Judge Robert Gerber brushed aside a series of objections from retirees who will see their health care eliminated, along with asbestos and accident victims and other unsecured creditors. With the potentially profitable assets sold to the new GM, these obligations, along with a number of unwanted brands, will languish in bankruptcy court as part of the “old” GM.

The whole process was a travesty of legality and due process, demonstrating that when Wall Street wants something done, every institution of the American state snaps into line. The bankruptcy courts are supposedly a mechanism for mediating the different claims of various “stakeholders.” In the event, the court served as a rubber stamp for decisions that had already been made. The wealthy investors and banks will recover 100 percent of their investments in GM debt, while workers and other claimants will end up with nothing.

The new GM is born out of a process of social devastation. The company will shed 27,000 more jobs in the US, bringing its total US workforce to 64,000. Thirty years ago the company employed over 618,000 in the US. At the beginning of last year, it employed 110,000.

An additional 14 plants will be closed, along with some 2,000 dealerships. GM is also shutting plants in Canada, bringing the total workforce there to 7,000, down from 20,000 in 2005.

The “new” company emerges from the rubble of closed factories and dealerships and the impoverishment of working class communities that depended on auto employment to fund schools, hospitals and other basic services, as well as the blighted lives of hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees.

As part of a deal negotiated with the United Auto Workers, workers who retain their jobs will have their wages frozen. A no-strike pledge through 2015 agreed by the UAW will facilitate further job, wage and benefit cuts, without the inconvenience of a contract vote. The company aims to replace all older workers with new-hires making $14 an hour. READ MORE