Perhaps the American Wehrmacht has been influenced by the high school science experiment in which you beat a magnet with a hammer which causes it to demagnetize, to be failed, so to speak. But if it it is totally demagnetized, the beating will restore a little magnetism to it. Or maybe not, it’s hard to follow.
But if you have known loved ones or friends who have died of cancer, you may have seen the phenomenon first hand in which cancer treatment, chemotherapy or radiotherapy, indeed kills cancer cells but also selects for the most hardy so that, eventually, the cancer doesn’t respond at all to treatment. And the patient dies.
And unlike the US military, often doctors stop treatment because it does no good, making even worse the time the patient has left.
The Pentagon’s treatment of terrorism in foreign countries is never halted, no matter the consequences for the patient.
Ashton Carter is just another high-button apparatchik whose career was in buying weapons systems and writing pamphlets about the MX missile and communications systems for thermonuclear war before becoming Sec’y of Defnse so perhaps another medical definition for the war on terror is in order.
By this time the US military, like the HIV, is off working over another country, perhaps a close neighbor, someone with which it normally had relations.
In America today, HIV is a very serious disease but manageable through the use of effective anti-viral drugs and medications to stop secondary infections. However, there is nothing that can be used to make a country survivable once the US military has been turned loose in and on it.
Take a week or two reading mass opinion polls on terrorism while consulting with your multi-millionaire advisors carried over from the husband’s administration:
[Hillary Clinton’s strategy to battle terrorism] will include shutting down the terrorist network’s recruitment efforts online, stopping would-be jihadists from getting training overseas, preventing foreign fighters from coming into the U.S., discovering plots before they can be carried out and supporting law enforcement officers who respond to such attacks, according to a campaign official. She will also call for empowering Muslim-American communities here in the U.S.
“Discovering plots before they can be carried out” — groupspeakthink for more domestic and international surveillance as well as not subtle entrapment operations.
“Shutting down the terrorist network’s recruitment efforts online” — high-button cant for futile whack-a-mole, identical to everyone else’s futile whack-a-mole plans.
“Stopping would-be jihadists from getting training overseas” — reused boilerplate for more spying on Muslims domestically and more signature strikes and bombing of poor people in the Middle East and Africa.
“She will also call for empowering Muslim-American communities” — phony concern and happytalk meaning more surveillance of Muslim-Americans, semi-gentle shaming of them for “not doing more” and signaling to white paranoid America that she’s on the job. When reading or hearing the word empowering remember the true meaning — which is disempowering.
What it boilds down is that, again, Hillary Clinton is merely reactive. She looks at trends and formulates a position that coddles what is believed the mass wants. In this case, ginned up by fear after the San Bernardino shooting, to respond with more scrutiny and pressure on Muslims in America.
Nothing Clinton has suggested is new. It’s just the application of more domestic spying, a signal that she’s prepared to be tough, build the national security state, just like everyone else, and continue the endless wars and strikes that have inspired increasing radicalization, abroad and at home.
I watched “Spymasters: CIA In the Crosshairs” last night, Showtime’s new documentary about the CIA’s conversion into a paramilitary operation, rather than an intelligence and spying one, in the war on terror. Naturally, I stole it. [1]
Near the end, all the CIA’s directors, including Obama’s, insist the US can’t kill its way to victory. And that droning doesn’t work because it makes more enemies, even in countries that aren’t droned. At this point, it’s rather like telling us that eggs come from a chicken.
One woman, a senior counter-terrorism analyst named Gina Bennett, says at the end that terrorism isn’t even a threat to the existence of the US.
But no one explains if that’s what they believe, why do they keep ordering up more now that they’ve destabilized most of the Middle East? Your head would explode if it hadn’t been dynamited several times years ago over Iraq. Which they concede they screwed up big time, too.
There’s one fellow in it who rides a big motorcycle. I’ll omit his name and you’ll see below why I don’t want him Googling me.
He organized all the waterboarding for the CIA and looks like he wants to smash your face with a set of bass knuckles all the time he’s on screen.
He’s is softened somewhat by Leon Pannetta, one of Obama’s CIA directors, who works hard to create the impression that he’s a good Catholic and snuck off to church to work through his rosary a couple times after each drone strike he OK’d.
I also learned our waterboarding was not like Nazi waterboarding because we used a third less water, or something.
And you’ll see a quick shot of what might have been bin Laden’s coffin, with a brass plate labelled “Geronimo,” although according to Seymour Hersh the special forces men threw his remains out over the mountains.
Plus, George Tenet is a big and permanently angry churl, America’s grizzly bear. And you’d be like that, too, one supposes if you’d messed up as often and as big time as he did. Although, actually, it was apparently good for his career. Which is also why it’s good to be at the top of the CIA athough we are told CIA director wives don’t think so. It’s great job security. You can set the world ablaze, cost hundreds or tens of thousands of lives, never get fired (well, except for David Petraeus and that was over a girl), be world famous and do very well.
1. I’ll review just about anything. Just send it or suggest where it can be stolen.
Justice, not escalations or state-sanctioned atrocities rationalized as helping an ally. Piecemeal WWIII isn’t a strategy. It’s a description, worth thinking about as in how to undo. Either that or continue to reap the whirlwind.
Another atrocity, or My Lai moment, has arrived for the US military in what was described superciliously as its pointless bombing wars last week.
Whether the American government will actually do something about it other than issue the usual get-out-of-jail-free card as it has done with every single hit job in the last decade remains to be seen. Personally, I’d bet against anything more than the equivalents of shit happens and/or they had it coming.
The Army Green Berets who requested the Oct. 3 airstrike on the Doctors without Borders trauma center in Afghanistan were aware it was a functioning hospital but believed it was under Taliban control, The Associated Press has learned …
A day before an American AC-130 gunship attacked the hospital, a senior officer in the Green Beret unit wrote in a report that U.S. forces had discussed the hospital with the country director of the medical charity group, presumably in Kabul, according to two people who have seen the document.
The attack left a mounting death toll, now up to 30 people.
Separately, in the days before the attack, “an official in Washington” asked Doctors without Borders “whether our hospital had a large group of Taliban fighters in it,” spokesman Tim Shenk said in an email. “We replied that this was not the case. We also stated that we were very clear with both sides to the conflict about the need to respect medical structures.”
The hospital was destroyed by the gunship and is now abandoned.
“Doctors without Borders has said it was frantically calling Kabul and Washington during the attack, trying to make the U.S. aware of what was unfolding as patients died in their beds,” rreports AP.
“Presumably, the gun camera video from the plane would show whether anyone was firing from the hospital.”
Although the gun camera video has not yet been made available, in the past the US military has not been particularly reticent about showing AC-130 gun ships hosing down buildings, vehicles and alleged terrorists. There are exampleson YouTube, often accompanied by quite a bit of bragging about its merciless power.
A week ago, there was a great deal of excuse making and assertion that if a war crime had been executed, it would be hard to prove.
From NPR:
John Bellinger, a former legal adviser to the State Department, says the bombing of the hospital was a terrible tragedy, but he believes it would be a rush to judgment to call it a war crime.
“The mere fact that civilians are killed, that a hospital is damaged, doesn’t automatically mean that there has been a war crime,” he says. “It only becomes a war crime if it is shown that the target was intentionally attacked.”
If the AP’s report is good, there goes that argument.
Fourteen years ago Osama bin Laden showed the world the United States had a glass jaw. After one very hard hit, the world superpower would appear to rise up, united only to see its people and leaders fail in spectacular fashion as they abandoned all principles they thought they stood for.
Fourteen years later, we’re subdued and fearful owners of a combination corporate dictatorship national security state equipped with an armored car-driving paramilitary police force and surveillance apparatus designed for the suppression of civilian participation. Add to that an embedded racial apartheid, one that puts African Americans and the poor in prison for profits, targets of extortion in the way of organized heists disguised as fines for petty infractions and legitimately resentful of their terrible officials.
The largest military and national security complex in world history was erected. And it’s only strategy, with the only exception being the recent agreement with Iran , is attacking much poorer nations with overwhelming force, selectively bombing impoverished regions of misery and lawlessness, launching pinprick military raids/assassinations and creating or exacerbating failed states.
A small example, yesterday, from Fox News and overseas sources (delivered by mercenaries probably on the US payroll, yet), reasonable evidence that ISIS can manufacture small amounts of mustard gas in Syria, for use in mortar shells and improvised bombs aimed at local militias opposed to them.
And who brought it about? We did when an illegitimate war was launched, one that destroyed Iraq and destabilized the entire region, a place where we’re still bombing people, making things worse, stirring the pot, training lousy local fighters who desert, and arming the same with weapons that eventually get turned over to even worse people.
One Kurdish soldier said that of 52 mortars ISIS launched at his team during one attack, three released yellow smoke that caused their skin to immediately water, discharge liquids, blister and create large wounds. Soldiers exposed to the gas vomited and experienced extreme abdominal pain and severe burning and itching eyes. Other mortars discharged a silver glittery substance that stuck to their skin like glue. The Kurdish soldiers said the Iraqi military also said ISIS used these chemical weapons on their forces.
The attached photos, if genuine, show wounds that appear to be caused by a blistering agent.
The nature of the story appears to show that only small amounts, militarily insignificant, are being produced and put into mortar shells, in and of itself a hazardous undertaking. The primary aim would appear to be to cause an additional measure of terror and demoralization.
The incident also appears to describe a failed improvised weapon, I’m guessing — something sticky and flammable — styrofoam or styrene dissolved in an organic solvent until thickened, to adhere. In this case, there was no ignition.
And what are we looking forward to in 2016?
More of the same, almost certainly.
Why, here’s the alleged leading candidate of the Democratic Party, being distasteful and awful, as it turned out, in making what she thinks is an off-camera joke about the killing of Moe Gadaffi.
Hilarious. Failed states and refugee crises.
Still the best song that applies. Shoulda been a contender.
Incidentally, it’s the only rock video to show anthrax mailer Bruce Ivins entertaining in a Maryland bar AND his vanity-pressing white label single, “Pass Me By.”
Ivins’ anthrax mailings touched off the biggest investment in bioterror defense in world history (we’re always number one in these dubious achievements), all to counter a threat, the predicted scope of which has never materialized.
The best and only bioterrorist minted during the war on terror? Our man! Paid for by the US taxpayer.
Also eyeball the video for the “puffer machine.” (We’ll check you now, for purity!) Designed for the detection of explosives at airports, many were bought. None of them worked and it was subsequently canned.
Great quotes, from our old white guys in charge at the Pentagon:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Martin Dempsey, who also testified Wednesday, said he would not support shifting the strategy from sending U.S. military advisers to sending U.S combat troops [to Iraq]. “I would not recommend that we put U.S. forces in harm’s way simply to stiffen the spine of local forces. If their spine is not stiffened by the threat of ISIL on their way of life, nothing we do is going to stiffen their spine.???
The situation is apparently worse in Syria … [The Pentagon] has begun training just under 100 men at a camp inside Jordan. No Syrian forces have yet to graduate from any training program.
In the Middle East, having created failed states in Iraq, Libya and Yemen, our bolt is shot. Pin-prick raids, assassinations by drone, data collection and random tactical bombings mean nothing when the locals have virtually zero interest in fighting for your side or taking training.
Hey, want to be another lopped-off head for ISIS? What? No volunteers?! What’s the matter with you people!
Part of the fog of lies and military aggrandizement that are the regular dispensations on the forever war is that “troves” of information have been seized. It’s insisted that troves are often everything to the war effort.
It’s the concoction of a fable, one in a series of interlocking fables on American military actions in the failed states of the Middle East. Of course, the failed state of Iraq is so because we made it that way. And so an elaborate narrative of total crap must be created in the mainstream media, something to sell the idea that the military action is actually winning in some way, rather than just spreading ruin and death, making an already tortured place worse.
And the troves of information are a necessary part, feeding a fancy that with more and more and more data, war can be massaged, manipulated and managed to your advantage just like the digital world
The most famous of troves, of course, were the materials allegedly seized in the bin Laden raid.
When Seymour Hersh’s story broke that the raid was an arranged killing and that very little material of value was gained during it, the intelligence services moved quickly to offer the bin Laden trove online.
There was little value in it other than as clickbait for net gawkers. To be honest, I saw nothing worthwhile in it. Boring otiose letters, software manuals, American books of no great interest, public domain US documents and papers culled from the web.
One document, and “document” is a little too fancy a word for it, on the “Terror Franchise,” linked to last week, was merely a collection of wishful thoughts, desires and various rubbishes on killing and projects to make poisons and biological weapons. From 2009.
In reading these alleged scrapings, that part of Hersh’s story, that little information had been gained, was off-handedly confirmed.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published another trove story, this time from materials allegedly seized during a Delta Force raid in Syria.
The raid, aimed at bagging one of ISIS/Daesh’s bureaucrats, Abu Sayyaf, killed him. So, in his place, the wife was kidnapped.
New insights yielded by the seized trove — four to seven terabytes of data, according to one official — include how the organization’s shadowy leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, operates and tries to avoid being tracked by coalition forces …
Wives of the top Islamic State leaders, including Mr. Baghdadi’s, play a more important role than previously known, passing information to one another, and then to their spouses, in an effort to avoid electronic intercepts.
“I’ll just say from that raid we’re learning quite a bit that we did not know before,??? a senior State Department official told reporters in a telephone briefing last week. “Every single day the picture becomes clearer of what this organization is, how sophisticated it is, how global it is and how networked it is.???
Abu Sayyaf’s wife, Umm Sayyaf, who was captured in the operation, has also provided information to investigators, one senior American official said.
Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said last month that the killing of Abu Sayyaf dealt a “significant blow??? to the group.
The wives are important claim is central because it lends justification to kidnapping women when everything else has gone to pot.
For the Times, other anonymous officials acknowledged that maybe the intelligence wasn’t really that valuable. ISIS, after all, has not been losing. Quite the contrary.
And the placement of a graphic within the story on the organization’s gains in Libya undercut the entire argument.
Nevertheless, this is what we get from our national security experts.
It’s the equivalent of a designed and purposeful mental illness, in this case, the insistence, in the face of years of evidence to the contrary, that one can find one’s way to some kind of victory against a region spanning foe through pin-prick raids, assassinations of random thugs dressed up as very important and irreplaceable leaders, and the seizure of whatever digital detritus is on hand.
Here’s a perfect example of the pathology at work:
“In the recent raid on Abu Sayyaf, we collected substantial information on Daesh financial operations,??? John R. Allen, the retired general who now serves as the diplomatic envoy coordinating the coalition against the Islamic State, told a conference in Qatar on Wednesday. “And we’re gaining a much clearer understanding of Daesh’s organization and business enterprise.???
This is a stupid-ass belief, something only an American could come up with, that “analyzing the financial operations” of ISIS (it used to be al Qaeda) gets you anything at all. Although it flies with reporters and meaningless conferences at a posh resort in Qatar well away from the battlefield.
“Lt. Gen. John Hesterman III, the top allied air commander, told reporters by phone from his headquarters in Qatar that ‘there is a whole bunch of targeting that is opening up here, as we gain and learn more about this enemy,’ ” it continues.
All this, particularly the NY Times story, it was said, might begin to “sow fear in their ranks that the United States and its allies were beginning to crack their shield of secrecy.”
Keep in mind there is no evidence that ISIS is becoming afraid of anything as it takes more cities in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. And that the thing called the Iraqi Army, trained by Americans, has broken and run twice in combat, requiring complete reconstruction plus ever more infusions of “advisers.”
What you don’t see in the stories as admissions from anonymous sources is the reason American-trained Iraqi formations run. Logically, they probably don’t want to fight or be seen as a US flunky force. But that they will take a training paycheck up until they have to engage in real action.
Why would this be surprising?
Do American military leaders and intelligence men believe analyzing the alleged finances of ISIS, combined with commando raids, are something winning?
If they do, they’re fools. I don’t believe American generals are fools but I do think that since they have nothing to lose by executing the process, they’ll conduct it. It’s a living, apparently.
ISIS gets its money from its conquered areas, in the form of taxes, levies, theft and the sale of anything valuable, whether it be antiquities, small amounts of fuel or other commodities.
And it is now apparent it has learned that American tactical bombing isn’t effective in close-in fighting. This is the same thing the army of North Vietnam and the Viet Cong worked out. The conclusion is that if you close in and fight the enemy belt to belt, the advantage of American air supremacy and bombs are negated.
Here American technology isn’t the last answer, the final thing that trumps all else. Networked communications, information dominance, the super-machines of US war-power have not worked and won’t.
“ ‘We’ve gotten very good at document exploitation,’ said Matthew Levitt, a former Treasury Department official who is director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the [some institute in the nation’s capitol],” reads the Times.
Yes, right. It’s to laugh out loud that someone actually passes it off as wisdom. Document exploitation. Examine the financing. Don’t forget about kidnapping the wife, too.
“Islamic State militants staged attacks near Baghdad and the Libyan city of Surt on Tuesday, underscoring the group’s persistent strength on both fronts despite a months long American-led air campaign against it in Syria and Iraq,” reads another story.
Thought question: Who came up with the theory that point tactical bombing and running what are essentially nothing more than highly trained and supported death squads wins wars or does anything more than make conditions worse in failed states?
If you’re part of the civilian population in such areas, what do Americans think is the current enthusiasm among them for US forces that, whenever they come, assassinate someone, maybe a bad person, while also always destroying a random assortment of the really unlucky in the doing.
Unlike other U.S. military bases around the world, Camp Lemonnier has to use civilian air-traffic controllers hired by the government of Djibouti, the Post said. The base shares its two runways with Djibouti’s only international airport, a French military base and a contingent of Japanese military planes.
As traffic at the base has increased, the controllers’ dangerous habits and dislike for drones have disrupted U.S. military operations and prompted repeated warnings about the risk of a deadly accident, the Post said.
Controllers sometimes punished U.S. flight crews by forcing them to circle overhead until they ran low on fuel, the Post said.
In one case, an observer told an air traffic controller that an unmanned plane he was monitoring was low on fuel. The controller said he did not care because drones “only want to kill Muslims in Yemen and Somalia,” the report said.
They play video games and sleep on the job, too, it says.
