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Sunday, August 30, 2009

Israeli hacker pleads guilty to stealing $10m from U.S. banks

Israeli hacker Ehud Tenenbaum pleaded guilty in a New York court last week to one count of bank-card fraud for his part in a hacking scheme that U.S. officials say netted some $10 million from American banks, technology news Web site Wired.com reported.

Tenenbaum, 29, who is also known as "the analyzer," was arrested in Canada last year along with three other hackers for allegedly stealing about $1.5 million from Canadian banks. But he was put on trial in the U.S. after officials there filed a request to have him extradited.

Prosecutors alleged that Tenenbaum hacked into two U.S. banks, a credit- and debit-card distribution company and a payment processor, Wired.com reported. But he was only charged with one count of conspiracy to commit access-device fraud and one count of access-device fraud.

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"The analyzer" first became known in 1998, when he was arrested at age 19 along with several other Israelis and two California teens after hacking into computers belonging to NASA, The Pentagon and the Knesset.

Tenenbaum was eventually sentenced in 2001 to six months of community service in Israel, after Israeli law enforcement prosecuted him instead of extraditing him to the United States.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who was serving his first term as prime minister when Tenenbaum was arrested, called Tenenbaum "damn good," but also "very dangerous, too," according to Wired.com.


 

By Haaretz Service

26/08/2009

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India nuclear test ‘did not work’

A retired atomic scientist who was closely associated with India's 1998 nuclear tests has said they were not as successful as was claimed.

By Sanjoy Majumder
BBC News, Delhi

K Santhanam said one of the tests – on a hydrogen bomb – had not worked, and that India would have to carry out more tests for a credible nuclear deterrent.

His statement has been dismissed by the government and his former colleagues.

The Indian tests led to similar tests by Pakistan, raising fears of a nuclear conflict between the two countries.

Cover-up?

K Santhanam is a respected Indian atomic scientist who was project director of the 1998 nuclear tests.

He now says that one of the five tests that were carried out, in which a thermonuclear device or hydrogen bomb was detonated, did not perform as well as expected.

He also said that everyone associated with the tests immediately recognised that something had gone wrong.

If his statement is accurate it points to a massive cover-up by India and also confirms what many in the West suspected at the time – that the nuclear devices India tested were not as powerful as had been thought.

India's government has dismissed Mr Santhanam's claim, which has also been disputed by senior officials of the BJP-led government which carried out the tests.

The scientist says that India is coming under pressure to sign up to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a move he says would be disastrous since he contends that the country does not yet have a credible nuclear deterrent.

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/india/nuke/

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Where there is gas, there will be fumes

By Khalid Mustafa

ISLAMABAD: In clear defiance of two immensely powerful foreign capitals which are fuming over Pakistan's pertinence, Islamabad is going ahead with the multi-billion dollar Iran-Pakistan gas line project and has initiated the process of arranging finances to the tune of $1.245 billion (Rs106 billion) required for laying the 800 km long pipeline from Pak-Iran border to Nawab Shah. This was revealed by the minutes of the last meeting of Steering Committee of the Economic Coordination Committee (ECC) on IP gas line project held in Karachi on August 22.

According to the minutes of the meeting, Pakistan will also be importing 1.05 billion cubic feet of gas per day (bcfd) from Iran, at 78 per cent of crude oil parity price. It is pertinent to mention that Pakistan and Iran have already signed Gas Sales Purchase Agreement (GSPA) for importing 750 million cubic feet gas per day (mmcfd), which will be used to generate 4,500 MW of electricity and would be a cheaper alternative to the present exorbitantly expensive and imported furnace oil being used in the existing thermal power houses.

The Economic Coordination Committee has already approved the import of 750 mmcfd gas, but in the wake of demand of Balochistan for 250 mmcfd gas from Iran for its industry in Gwadar, the government has now decided to import just over one bcfd gas from Iran.

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Resources will now reportedly move the summary in this regard seeking permission to import 250 mmcfd more gas for Balochistan at the same rates (i.e. at 78 per cent of crude oil parity price).

In the wake of increase in gas volume from 750 mmcfd to 1.05 bcfd to be imported through IP gas line, the diameter of the planned 800 KM pipeline too has been increased to 48 inches from the previous 42 inches.

Considering the magnitude and strategic nature of the project, the government has adopted a public-private partnership approach for financing the project to lay 800 KM pipeline with debt equity ratio of 70:30 under which the government of Pakistan will be providing 51 per cent equity. This equity would be injected upfront through selected Public Sector Entities (PSE) that include OGDCL (Oil and Gas Development Company Limited), PPL (Pakistan Petroleum Limited),GHPL (Government Holding Private Limited), EOBI (Employees Old Age Benefits Institution) and SLIC (State Life Insurance Corporation).

The debt will be sourced from the market backed by the government guarantees for transportation tariff. Reportedly, in the above cited ECC meeting, Finance Minister Shaukat Tarin mentioning the debt portion agreed that in case of any gap in raising the required debt from market, the funds will be ensured from PSDP allocations.

Mr Tarin in the same meeting on the issue of Return to Investors advised that instead of a fixed 18 per cent return on equity over the life of the project, the investors should be offered "sovereign bond yield plus risk premium of 6 per cent dollar dominated, net of taxes."

The committee agreed to this overall approach to fund the project and advised that a summary to this effect must be moved to ECC for approval. Since the volume of the finances required for the project is considerably high and ensuring the funding available on time is an uphill task under the prevalent depressed international investment climate, the government has also decided to appoint a top notch financial adviser for the project, who would be responsible for arranging private equity and debt financing.

The selection of financial adviser will be made through international bidding and will be given a firm time line for achieving the financial close.

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Taliban growth in northern Afghanistan threatens to expand war

By Jonathan S. Landay, Mcclatchy Newspapers Fri Aug 28


BAGHLAN-I-JADID, Afghanistan — Taliban insurgents have taken over parts of two northern provinces from which they were driven in 2001, threatening to disrupt NATO's new supply route from Central Asia and expand a war that's largely been confined to Afghanistan's southern half, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

Insurgents operating out of Baghlan district along the highway from Tajikistan launched coordinated attacks during the Aug. 20 presidential elections, killing the district police chief and a civilian, while losing a dozen of their own men, local officials said. It was the worst bloodshed reported in the country that day.

The violence has been on the rise in recent months, however, as the Taliban and al Qaida -linked foreign fighters have staged hit-and-run attacks, bombings and rocket strikes on German, Belgian and Hungarian forces in Baghlan and neighboring Kunduz provinces.

The insurgents now control three Pashtun-dominated districts in Kunduz and Baghlan-i-Jadid, a foothold in a region that was long considered safe. With a force estimated at 300 to 600 hard-core fighters, they operate checkpoints at night on the highway to the north, now a major supply route, local officials said, and are extorting money, food and lodging from villagers.

"The Taliban want to show the world that not only can they make chaos in southern Afghanistan , but in every part of Afghanistan ," Baghlan Governor Mohammad Akbar Barekzai said. "This is a big problem. We don't have sufficient forces here."

For U.S. commanders, whose stretched forces have been unable to pacify the south and are taking record casualties, it's another looming problem.

"What can we do to mitigate the risk? It's a question of means," said a senior U.S. defense official, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. "Clearly, the main effort is in the south. But we can't allow other areas of the country to be destabilized."

The official said he's begun discouraging Western aid workers from visiting projects in those areas.

The growing Taliban presence also threatens to aggravate long-standing tensions into violence between the region's Pashtuns — the ethnic group that dominates the Taliban — and Tajiks.

Many Pashtuns, descendents of settlers from southern Afghanistan awarded lands in the north in the early 20th century, supported the Taliban's rule of the 1990s, while many Tajiks fought against the religious militia.

Another potential danger is that al Qaida -linked foreign extremists could use Taliban sanctuaries in the north to stir up trouble in the adjacent former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan , whose authoritarian rulers have brutalized their Muslim populations.

" Al Qaida wants to have a base there," said retired Afghan Gen. Hillaluddin Hillal, a parliamentarian from Baghlan. " Al Qaida's support is behind them (the Taliban ). Al Qaida has an interest in Central Asia ."

A senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that Arabs, Chechens, Uzbeks and Pakistanis affiliated with al Qaida have been making their way into Baghlan and Kunduz from Pakistan's tribal areas.

The new NATO supply link, established after Pakistani insurgents began attacking the main logistics route from the Pakistani port of Karachi , consists of two roads, one from Uzbekistan and one from Tajikistan . After merging in Baghan Province outside the city of Pul-i-Khumri, the highway runs south through the towering Hindu Kush mountains to the main U.S. base at Bagram and to Kabul .

"The concern is if we don't stunt the ( Taliban ) growth, it could cause problems with our northern distribution network," said the senior intelligence official, who asked not to be further identified because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly. "A couple of years ago, ( Taliban leader) Mullah Omar said 'We need to open up new fronts in the north and cause a dissipation of (U.S.) resources.' To a degree, it's working."

Northern Afghanistan's nine provinces, dominated by ethnic minorities who opposed the Taliban , have mostly been peaceful since local forces aided by U.S. support ousted the militia in late 2001. About 5,700 German-led international troops have been overseeing major aid and reconstruction efforts from their headquarters in Kunduz.

The Taliban infiltration into Kunduz and Baghlan began 18 months ago with the return from Pakistan of insurgent leaders who ran the provinces during the Taliban rule of Afghanistan , U.S. and Afghan officials said. The establishment of the new NATO supply route may be a factor that drew Taliban from the south.

The Taliban are blamed for the killings of local officials and for one recent unsuccessful attack on former President Burhanuddin Rabbani in Kunduz, and another on a minor presidential candidate, Abdul Salam , a former Taliban commander known as "Mullah Rocketi," in Baghlan-i-Jadid.

The Taliban "have become stronger in the last five to six months," said Gul Agha, who heads Baghlan-i-Jadid's criminal investigation department. "Before, they moved in very small groups. Now they are moving in groups of 30 to 40 and they have a leader of each group. They have a (shadow) governor, district leaders and recruiters."

The senior U.S. intelligence official confirmed that the Taliban have set up "shadow governments," a tactic they've used to exercise control elsewhere in Afghanistan by punishing crimes and settling feuds that usually linger in corrupt, incompetent government institutions and courts.

Agha said that the insurgents "have influence" in all of Baghlan-i-Jadid's 268 villages, nestled amidst lush groves and rice paddies fed by the Southern Salang River , and that the local administration's authority doesn't extend beyond the district center of the same name.

The district shares its northern border with Chahar Dara, which Afghan officials identified as one of the three Kunduz Province districts controlled by the insurgents.

"There is only one mountain between us," said Amir Gul Baghlani , the Baghlan-i-Jadid district chief. "When they are under pressure over there, they come to this side. When they are under pressure here, they cross to the other side. We don't have enough security."

The district has only 90 police officers and has been recruiting and arming tribal militias in an effort to fill the gap, local officials said.

However, several residents charged that the militias, known as arbakai, have become part of the problem.

"These arbakai take food from villagers by force and taxes by force. My relatives went several times to complain to the authorities. When the arbakai found out, they beat my relatives. So they joined the Taliban to keep their prestige and honor," said Mohammad Ghulam , deputy director of the district's agricultural high school. "Now they are fighting the government."

Several U.S. military officials said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal , the recently installed U.S. commander in Afghanistan , hopes to stem the problem by deploying additional Afghan troops accompanied by U.S. military trainers, an idea that appealed to local officials who fear an influx of American soldiers would fuel violence and bloodshed.

Barekzai, the Baghlan governor, said that he only has about 1,400 police officers and 500 Afghan troops to call on. About 200 Hungarian forces deployed to secure aid projects in are barred from conducting offensive operations.

It isn't too late, however, to neutralize the Taliban presence, but time is running out, he continued.

"Give me resources and more police. The Taliban are like microbes. We need to use a strong antibiotic," he said. "If we don't do it now, then later on, say in six months, it will require more forces, more resources and more weapons and we will probably have more casualties."

( McClatchy special correspondent Hashim Shukoor contributed to this article.)

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Saturday, August 29, 2009

Saad Khan looses life in Unilever / Mindshare Reality Show accident

Posted by Teeth Maestro, August 28, 2009

In a very shocking development a young 32 year old person, father of four kids looses his life during the filming of a reality show sponsored by Unilever and being produced by their advertising agency Mindshare. Saad Khan was a game show contestant and the host/model Amina Sheikh, who also is the model of Clear Shampoo, gave an underwater challenge to Saad and during the execution of the stunt he apparently lost control, struggled and pleading for help could not recover, the inadequate safety personal and the equipment could not react in time and eventually he drowned

Saad Khan, 32 year old young man from Karachi and a father of four kids is sadly the victim, his body was returned to Karachi for burial two days back and the infuriated family has been running from pillar to post but it seems for some awkward reason it fails to catch the media attention and apparently no media house is ready to 'run the story'. It is a known fact that the media in Pakistan is usually head over heals on every other lame ass political slander, but surprisingly in Saad's case this case of gross neglect is not worthy of even a short news item. Might this have anything to do with the influence of Unilever and Mindshare who are giant spenders armed with enormous advertisement budgets.

Initially Saad's family was furious hoping to have Unilever cough up full responsibility, but at the moment they feel that the most important thing to look forward to is the future of Saad's four kids who have no future.

Aarpix: These details are given by a 2nd cousin of Saad on the condition of anonymity. Saad was 31, 6′2″, handsome man was employed at RBS (formerly ABN AMRO). Saad live a very ambitious and thrilled life. In his professional life, he had accomplished more than his age. He had well established career and didn't participate for the prize money or anything. He was rather very thrilling and adventurous. He was disqualified from the show after a few days but was then called by the death on a wild card entry.

He did not lose his balance in the water – he was an excellent swimmer but the doctors in Thailand after carrying out an autopsy told that his muscle had pulled and he had some weight tied up to his feet as part of the challenge and so could not make it back up. He was under water for about 6 minutes.

Saad has left a widow and 4 kids: Oldest one is 7 years old, then twins of age 5.5 and then the youngest who is only 1.5 years of age.

While this story is slowly making its way around, it seems that some serious counter efforts were made against Farhan Janjua of Aarpix, who first broke the story, WebHostingPad suddenly issued Aarpix a short notice disabling his website for "nature of content" [do have a look at Aarpix and see if you find any objectionable material] they then told Farhan to quickly move his data with immediate effect or else they will delete his content [4 years of hard work] – panicking the poor chap found a local friend willing to help him, but as soon as the DNS prorogation started 'someone' called Farhan's friend and asked questions about Aarpix and if they can possibly 'have the owners cell phone number' worrying for the safety of his friends Farhan resolved to buy a sever internationally and used their support services to help salvage the at-risk data. As I write this post at 2am Aarpix is slowly coming back online.

I strongly believe these scare tactics must be condemned, Unilever/Mindshare should be held accountable for this accident and must be forced to offer compensation to the grieved family with immediate effect. I do not mean merely doling out a paltry 1 lac rupees to the affected family but stress a far more expensive compensation to widow and the four kids who now have a life to live without the primary bread earner and literally no husband or father to look after them. May Allah give them the courage and patience to recover from this tragic incident

UPDATE: Just noticed that Dawn.com is also playing some mischief in this incident as well, the above Obituatry message was published in Sunday's edition of Dawn, 23rd August, 2009. If you scroll to page 14 Karachi Metropolian section within the online archive hosted at epaper.dawn.com you do see this image in small print, but clicking on Saad Khan's Obituary, and it comes with an error "The Article image is missing", might this be an accidental mistake, possible but aint it too coincidental?

UPDATE 2: The missing image from the epaper edition of Dawn.com has been fixed, one of their adminstrators personally called me up to inform me that it was a site-wide problem for that particular day, and the website administrators are fixing it with immediate effect, he has reassured me that there was no foul play. It was an Obituary ad and does not come under the editorial control of Dawn, even if they wanted to

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Friday, August 28, 2009

Fallout over Kazakhstan: 60 years of suffering

(Kazakhstan , August 27, 2009-issue 579)

By Jack Losh
TCA correspondent

ASTANA (TCA) — This Saturday sees the 60th anniversary of the former USSR's first nuclear bomb test at Semipalatinsk, north-east Kazakhstan. Carried out deep in the vast, desolate steppes of Soviet Central Asia, as it then was, the detonation at 7am, August 29th 1949 ushered in a new and terrifying era.

The figures are incredible. Over the next forty years, the 18,000 sq km site would be home to practically 75% of all Soviet nuclear tests: 456 in total, both below and above ground, unleashing energy equivalent to 2,500 Hiroshima bombs.

Thanks to the powerful, grassroots anti-nuclear movement, 'Nevada-Semipalatinsk', nuclear explosions here are a thing of the past, but although the testing of nuclear weapons may have ceased, the fallout's devastating legacy endures. Tests inside the 'Polygon', as the site was known, have affected peripheral land over 16 times its size (approximately 304,000 sq km) and account for an unprecedented amount of health problems in the region.

"The UN and I encouraged the Government of Kazakhstan to take its case to the UN General Assembly," said Herbert Behrstock, who served as Resident Coordinator of the UN in Kazakhstan from 1996-1999. "Three successive years in the late 1990s, the UN/GA adopted resolutions unanimously acknowledging Kazakhstan's virtually unique position in the world, the suffering and the tests' serious consequences."

Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev himself has described it as "the drama of the Kazakh land". For years, the Soviets endeavoured to keep their experiment's after-effects under wraps. Even today, the Russian government is still withholding information, thwarting attempts at making the conclusive link between population's high levels of cancer and radiation exposure.

"Officially, national and regional authorities acknowledged that much of the information about nuclear tests, contamination, et cetera was retained in Soviet military archives and was not likely to become available to the Government of Kazakhstan," Mr. Behrstock added. "It is significant to note that none of the three resolutions introduced by the Kazakh Government specifically mentioned the USSR or Russia – seeking neither an apology nor special consideration for assistance."

The population of and around Semipalatinsk (or Semey, as it is now known) is prone to abnormal levels of illness. Cancers run at five times the national average, birth defects three times. Psychological disorders are widespread, especially amongst young men, and the suicide rate noticeably exceeds that outside the Polygon. Increased rates of heart and thyroid disease, digestive system complaints and fertility problems plague the area.

"I don't think there is any doubt that there were individuals who suffered from the testing program, especially in the early years and the atmospheric tests," said Professor Weinberg of the Baylor College of Medicine, who helped establish a healthcare partnership in the medical services in the region during the 1990s. "The problem is that the exposure data and medical data from that time period are not easy to evaluate."

The region's struggling local economy, inadequate diet and poor sanitation does not help matters: "During the early visits my impression was of the general harshness of life due to both the climate and the decline of the Soviet structure," said Randall Wright, who was responsible for introducing healthcare management principles to the region in the late 1990s, a time when newly-independent Kazakhstan was struggling to find its feet. "The healthcare system was a paradox.  There was a generally well-educated team of medical professionals but a significant scarcity of basic resources."

For Dr Larry Laufman (who from 1995-2000 conducted master classes at the Semipalatinsk Medical School on new methods of teaching and student evaluation), the local doctors he worked with were extraordinarily committed professionals: "In those days, we were told that physicians were earning about $100 a month and many had not been paid for 3 months, yet they continued to go to work.

"Here, even during the Soviet era, the standard operating procedure was to sterilize and re-use needles and other items that would simply be disposables in the West."

The Polygon was selected in 1947 by Lavrentiy Beria, political head of the Soviet atomic bomb project and chief of Stalin's notorious NKVD (secret police). With 3,000 people spread across the territory in remote villages, 150,000 in the city of Semipalatinsk itself (150km from the Polygon) and 20,000 in Kurchatov (just a few km away), assurances that the region was uninhabited were bogus.

The authorities' total indifference to the wellbeing of the local Kazakh population was complemented by their morbid fascination in the side-effects of the explosions' residual radioactivity. A battalion of scientists was stationed at the Polygon to record the after-effects that the nuclear blasts would wreak upon the people, animals and surrounding land. Tests would even be determined by weather conditions, the days with wind blowing in the direction of residential areas being the most favored. It was not until 1953 that locals were given (an hour's) prior warning of the next explosion.

Evacuation procedures were eventually introduced. Residents would be moved to safe zones during tests, returning to their farms nine days later. However, with radiation levels as high as 250 roentgens per hour after detonation in this nuclear no-man's-land (a dose of about 500 R in 5 hours is lethal for humans), this was hardly a humanitarian gesture.

"Certainly some would probably like an apology," said Professor Weinberg who was also instrumental, along with his colleague Sara Rozin, in coordinating large shipments of medical supplies to the region. "However, most people that we worked with would probably benefit more from […] transparency and education. This would help them manage any remaining health consequences from the testing program and build a quality healthcare system for the future."

In a bitter twist, the rural populace remains inexorably bound to the testing range, using the poisoned land for pasture and cultivation: "Governmental officials indicated they could not prevent local populations from straying into potentially contaminated areas, even if warning signs were posted," said Mr. Behrstock, the former UN representative. "Livestock were known to graze in some of the areas near 'ground zero' and drink from surface water, including one infamous water source that was protected by barbed wire."

An army of volunteers, recruited from both national and international groups, has been involved in a mass clean-up of the Semipalatinsk test site. The first phase of the clean-up was completed at the end of 2000 in a joint Kazakh-Russian operation, although experts estimate that total decontamination of the site would require a minimum of $43 million.  The Institute for Radiation Safety and Ecology at Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center claims that up to 80% of the land is salvageable, and a 1998 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded that "there is now little or no residual radioactivity over most of the test site".

However, Kazakhstan's Ambassador to the UN, Yerzhan Kazykhanov, has criticized the U.N.'s efforts as inadequate, calling on the donor community to provide financial and technical assistance for the region's long-term regeneration and development: "The rehabilitation of disaster areas, especially those affected by radioactive contamination, should continue to be a top priority for the international community."

And yet this abominable cloud has had a silver lining, for Kazakhstan has emerged today as one of the world's strongest advocates against nuclear weapons. As the old USSR collapsed around it, this Central Asian State was left with a substantial nuclear inheritance – nuclear weapons facilities, components for a strategic anti-missile defence system, and 1,410 strategic nuclear warheads, not to mention one of the world's largest nuclear testing sites at Semipalatinsk.

Yet the country used its new-found independence to close the Polygon and relinquish its nuclear arsenal, fourth largest in the world. It joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state in 1993, and in September 2006 (the 15th anniversary of the test site's closing), Semipalatinsk hosted the signing of an agreement among Central Asian states to set up a nuclear-free zone.

"President Nazarbayev deserves admiration and respect for his leadership, wisdom and perseverance – at least beginning in the 1980s when Kazakhstan was part of the USSR – to advocate the cessation of nuclear testing," said Mr. Behrstock.

"In my personal view, Semipalatinsk is symbolic of the worst and the best of the history of nuclear weapons," he added.  "If the worst is the initial nuclear explosion 60 years ago and the development and testing of some of the most destructive weapons in the history of humankind, the best is how the Government and leadership of Kazakhstan opened an enlightened, admirable chapter that should be widely applauded."

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Thursday, August 27, 2009

The Silence of the Sheep



By William Lind

August 05, 2009 "Military.com" -- 
In early July, U.S. Army Colonel Timothy Reese committed truth.  According to a story by Michael Gordon in the New York Times (reprinted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where I saw it), Colonel Reese wrote

an unusually blunt memo (concluding) that Iraqi forces suffer from entrenched deficiencies but are now able to protect the Iraqi government and that it is time "for the U.S. to declare victory and go home."

As the old saying goes, 'Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days,'" Reese wrote.  "Since the signing of the 2009 Security Agreement, we are guests in Iraq, and after six years in Iraq, we now smell bad to the Iraqi nose."

As usual, committing truth horrified Reese's superiors.  Michael Gordon reported: 

Those (Reese's) conclusions are not shared by the senior U.S. Commander in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno . . .

A spokeswoman for Odierno said that the memo did not reflect the official stance of the U.S. military and was not intended for a broad audience.

Truth never is.  On the situation in Iraq as on everything else, the American people get the mushroom treatment.  That is how Brave New World works.

In fact, Colonel Reese's conclusion, that we should leave Iraq as quickly as we can, is so obvious it raises some second-order questions.  First, exactly why are we keeping 130,000 men in a horribly exposed position, their main LOC running parallel to a potential enemy's front for 1000 miles, surrounded by a slowly accelerating civil war?

The official answer, that "we are there to back up the Iraqi government," doesn't wash.  The Iraqi government and its security forces represent the currently dominant Shiite faction, nothing more.  There is no state.  There won't be one until the Iraqis settle their own differences, by fighting.  Our presence may delay that conflict, but cannot prevent it.

So, Mr. Obama, what's the real agenda?  Under Bush, we knew: an Iraq that had been reduced to an American client state was to provide us with military bases from which we could dominate the region and an unlimited supply of oil.  Is the Bush administration's agenda now the Obama administration's agenda?  If not, what is?  Exactly why are 130,000 U.S. troops hanging out in a bad part of town with a "kick me" sign taped to their backs?  Inertia?  Indecision?  What?

That's one second-order question.  Another one is, why is no one in Congress asking the first question?  Iraq seems to have vanished off Washington's radar screen, despite the fact that so long as we're there, we are smoking in the powder magazine.

It seems that whatever the Obama administration's agenda in Iraq is, it has gathered virtually unanimous support in Congress.  Having worked on the Hill, I know some institutional reasons for that.  Congress focuses on whatever the voters are focused on, which at the moment means the economy. 

But even there, Iraq raises one of its hydra heads.  The American occupation of Iraq continues to burn through money at the cyclic rate.  So why aren't the Blue Dog Democrats and other deficit hawks howling about our continued stay?  All we hear is the silence of the sheep.

There are two possible explanations for the Obama administration's remarkable failure to use its mandate to get out of Iraq while we still can.  The first suggests some deep, dark plot, involving money, oil, the SMEC and the SMEC's Washington's agents in the White House.  During the Bush administration, this explanation was plausible.  It is still possible, but I think less likely true.
The more likely truth is that the Obama administration is a mile wide and an inch deep. 

The public is beginning to sense this, as President Obama's falling approval ratings show.  But within the Establishment, which includes Congress and most of the press, America's first black President remains immune to criticism because he is America's first black President.  Were the current President, say, a Georgia cracker, the Establishment would already have him in the stocks, subject to a barrage of rotten fruit.

But even if President Obama were himself a man of depth and wisdom, an administration is much more than one man.  Most of the Obama administration's leading figures are merely second and third-stringers from the Clinton administration, resurrected as zombies (starting with Hillary herself).  I don't know of a single strategist among the lot.  Most are playing at government, just as little girls play house.

If there is one among the lot who can think beyond the end of his nose – Jim Jones, has the cat got your tongue? –he would do well to quote Colonel Reese's words to the President:

We now have an Iraqi government that has gained its balance and thinks it knows how to ride the bike in the race…Our hand on the back of the seat is holding them back and causing resentment.  We need to let go before we both tumble to the ground.   

With a thud that will be heard around the world.

William Sturgiss Lind, Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation, is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, born July 9, 1947. He graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1969 and received a Master's Degree in History from Princeton University in 1971. He worked as a legislative aide for armed services for Senator Robert Taft, Jr., of Ohio from 1973 through 1976 and held a similar position with Senator Gary Hart of Colorado from 1977 through 1986. He joined Free Congress Foundation in 1987.

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Sunday, August 16, 2009

I Shouldn’t Read the News. I Really Shouldn’t.

by Fred Reed

I love it. The following is an account of Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talking to Albert Jazeera:
"When asked why the United States was not in FATA despite having the knowledge that Al Qaeda was present there, he [Admiral Mullen] said, `Because FATA is in Pakistan and Pakistan is a sovereign country and we don't go into sovereign countries.'"

Hahn? The hell we don't. What was this buoyant cannibal thinking? The US loves to go into sovereign countries. It hardly does anything else. I suppose Iraq wasn't sovereign. It isn't now, but it was. How about Panama, Laos, Cambodia? We gave Pakistan, until recently sovereign, the choice of inviting us to kill its people with drones, or else be bombed into the Stone Age. Recently we have bombed Somalia, technically sovereign.

When the Pentagon's alpha-floater says something so transparently nonsensical, so patently false, one wonders: Is he merely lying, or does he somehow actually believe this stuff? I mean, drugs are supposed to be discouraged by the Navy.

Next, more comic-book moral leadership, this time from Ralph Peters, the pay-per-view Clausewitz for Fox News. Walphie, a retired colonel, is hugely in favor of the war against Islam. Grrrrr. Fierce he is. He is a retired "intelligence" officer, and therefore all-wise in things military. And he is Upset. Good.

Before exploring his upsettance, we might note that Walph is of the school of martial ferocity holding that other people should go get killed. Not Walph. He is what in a forgotten war in Asia we called a REMF. That's Rear-Echelon Motherfucker. It refers to paper-pushers who sit safely way behind the lines while men in the military fight. Walph spent his career largely in Europe, a real hardship post. I mean, sometimes your martini might not be properly chilled. A veritable Tamerlane of the cocktail circuit, Walph.

But don't underestimate him. The blood lust of a podium doughnut is a thing to reckon with, I reckon. Kings faint. Empires quail.

Another point worth considering is that "intelligence officer" doesn't mean "an intelligent officer." Except during WWII, the intel analysts have had a dismal record. Just off the top of my head, Naval Intelligence didn't know where the Japanese fleet was in 1941, oops.

The Korean War caught the spooks flatfooted, as did the entry of the Chinese into the war. The intel weenies didn't predict that the Viets would fight, though the French experience wasn't secret. There was the comic-opera Son Tay raid, in which the military choppered into Hanoi to rescue American POWs, only to find that the spooks hadn't noticed the prisoners had been moved. The CIA didn't predict that the Cubans would fail to turn against Castro in the Bay of Pigs. They were surprised when the Berlin Wall went up, and when it came down, and again when the USSR, its chief object of study, went tits up. There was the clownish business of the Glomar Explorer. The Air Force bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade because the weenies didn't know where it was (try the phone book, maybe?). They didn't warn that the Arabs might fight in Iraq, perhaps never having heard of Israel. They didn't predict 9/11, and can't find bin Laden.

I'm impressed, Walph. You're an intelligence officer.

Now, why is Peters all wrought up? It seems that an American private by name of Bowe Bergdahl got captured by the Taliban in Afghanistan, or got tired of killing Afghans and deserted, or something. Bergdahl then showed up all over the internet drinking tea with his captors in a video in which he pleaded for America to bring its troops home. Peters waxed wroth over this "disloyalty," and opined that it would be a good thing if the Taliban killed the kid to save the cost of a trial.

There is something unseemly in this over-promoted clerk, for whom a war wound would mean a paper cut, savaging a young man in the hands of the Taliban. If Bergdahl was captured against his will, and the Taliban are as bad as the Walphies tell us, he faces torture if he doesn't cooperate. How manly of Walph to urge that Bergdahl be peeled alive and have his joints crushed. Typical officer.

After the death of my father, a veteran of the Pacific in WWII, I found a published letter he had written to the Washington Post during Korea. Dad, who spent his life as a weapons-development mathematician, was no peacenik. He said that captured American troops should be told to confess to anything whatever rather than be tortured.

You are a hell of a man, Walph. You really are.

But suppose that Bergdahl got tired of killing people he had no reason to kill, and escaped to the Taliban. Why would this be disloyalty to the United States? Where is the benefit of the war to America? The Pentagon is killing GI after GI after GI for no reason. It is also killing Afghans for no reason. Loyalty to America would seem to consist in refusing to do it.

There are countervailing retired colonels. Try Ltc. Karen Kwiatkowski, (she has an archive at lewrockwell.com). She suspects that Peters is worried because the Bergdahl affair may indicate that the troops are getting fed up and preparing to bail by one route or another. True? I don't know. Yet it has to be the prevailing nightmare in the Five-Sided Death Box. This sure happened in our Asian foray into the dissemination of democracy. Fraggings were the most conspicuous form of disagreement, but there were enough unreported mutinies and refusals to fight.

Then I find this: "A U.S. military spokeswoman in Afghanistan, Lt. Cmdr. Christine Sidenstricker, said the Taliban was [sic] using their captive for propaganda. `They are exploiting the soldier in violation of international law,' she said. U.S. military spokesman Colonel Greg Julian added, "We condemn the use of this video and the public humiliation of prisoners."

Most harrumphish, Christine is. This brings me back to the question of Admiral Mullen's assertion of the obviously untrue. Humiliation of prisoners? Does this twit Christine Whatever compartmentalize her mind to the point that she isn't aware of Guantanamo? As for international law, I have the impression that torture of prisoners transgresses it. Torture is American national policy. Anyway, who was humiliated, the prisoner or the Pentagon? Christine will of course say whatever she is told to say, that being the function of flacks, flacks being the low-rent Goerings that they are. I need a drink.

Fred Reed is author of

Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down

a Well and the just-published, A Brass Pole in Bangkok: A Thing I Aspire to Be.

His latest book is Curmudgeing Through Paradise: Reports from a Fractal Dung Beetle.


Visit his blog.

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Priority projects of the Kyrgyz Railway Company

BY MARIA LEVINA, TCA CORRESPONDENT

BISHKEK (TCA) — Kyrgyzstan is helping in the construction of the Chinese-Kyrgyz-Uzbek railway, said General Director of the Kyrgyz Temir Jolu (Kyrgyz Railway) National Company, Asan Rysmendiev, during celebrations of the 85th anniversary of the Kyrgyz Railways.

Construction of the Chinese-Kyrgyz-Uzbek railway is expected to be hugely beneficial to the Kyrgyz economy. The project will create a southern corridor in the Eurasian transcontinental railway, connecting Kyrgyzstan with ports in both the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf .

"The new railroad will help these Central Asian countries to integrate into the global transportation infrastructure, and establish new trade and economic ties with the outside world. Moreover, the railroad will help to intensively develop regions adjacent to it," said Rysmendiev.

At 268.4 km , the Chinese-Kyrgyz-Uzbek railway will travel from the city of Kashgar in Xinjiang, northwest China, to the Kyrgyz-Chinese border, subsequently passing through the Torugart pass, the Tuzbel pass, the Arpa valley, the Fergana Ridge and the town of Kara-Suu, eventually connecting with Uzbekistan's railway network.

In 2002, China and Kyrgyzstan signed an agreement to study how feasible the Kyrgyz section of railway would be. According to the agreement, China provided 20 million yuan (US$2.9 million) worth of financial aid to this study.


 

Electrification of the railway

Among the project's priorities is the electrification of the Bishkek-Lugovaya section of the railway. The company is unable to achieve this without investors' assistance. In order to attract foreign investment, Kyrgyz Temir Jolu is negotiating with the Asian Development Bank and Chinese investors.

Despite being relatively small ( 154 km ), Bishkek-Lugovaya section is a major artery connecting Kyrgyzstan to Kazakhstan and Russia .

The company is planning to replace diesel locomotives with electric ones, bringing with it numerous advantages to both the company and to its passengers. Travels should be smoother and more comfortable. Trains will increase their speed from the current 60 km/h to 100- 120 km/h . Those living in the Chui oblast will be able to commute to Bishkek, thus reducing (it is hoped) the Chui oblast's relatively high rate of migration.


 

Development programs

Kyrgyz Temir Jolu, which employs approximately five thousand people, has refrained from any of the more drastic actions that other companies have resorted in relation to the global economic crisis, said Asan Rysmendiev. The company did not fire its workers but did temporarily move to a four-day working week: "Now the situation has stabilized and we have returned to business as usual," said Rysmendiev.

Developing the railway has not been easy. Employees of the company recall the days when Kyrgyz Temir Jolu could neither properly maintain its rolling stock and railway equipment, nor pay wages on time.  In a relatively short time, however, the enterprise has successfully undertaken a number of large-scale development programs.

In recent years, the company has become one of the most promising enterprises in the country. According to the General Director, the company's earnings have increased by more than three times since 2005, and the average monthly salary has doubled.

Without outside help, the company overhauls and reconditions passenger cars, increasing their life by another 10-15 years. Over the past five years, 53 rail cars have been put into operation, said Rysmendiev.  Temir Jolu specialists use similar methods of Russian car-mechanics and use modern inspection and maintenance facilities.

Russian partners support the company. They leased the company six locomotives and 60 passenger cars, said Rysmendiev.


 

Passenger service

The company is always keen to improve the quality of service. Cashier's offices for ticket sales are located in almost every region of the country. The offices are equipped with an automated system that allows passengers to buy tickets to any CIS and Baltic country.

Their service is expanding to Russia , the press service of Kyrgyz Temir Jolu said. Since June 25 2009, the Bishkek-Sverdlovsk service runs three times a week. In mid-June, the direct service between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan reopened, having not worked for the past eleven years. The Tashkent-Balykchy ( Issyk-Kul ) route will develop both economic and cultural relations between the two countries.

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Saturday, August 8, 2009

Helping Blind Drivers Take the Wheel

By Alex Rabinowitz

August 5, 2009

Steven Mackay/Virginia Tech University Wesley Majerus finishes driving the Virginia Tech Blind Driver Challenge vehicle on a campus driving course. In the passenger seat is Greg Jannaman, who led the student design team.

Undergraduate students at the Virginia Tech College of Engineering have entered relatively uncharted territory in the automobile world. They have created a vehicle that enables the visually impaired to drive unassisted.

Virginia Tech began work on the project in 2004. The college was the only research institution to accept the challenge and grant offered by the Jernigan Institute, a subsidiary of the National Federation of the Blind, to design a car that the blind can drive without assistance from another person.

"We accepted because we saw the potential impact of all the spin-off technologies that can come out of this project — both for the blind and the sighted, both for driving and nondriving applications," said Prof. Dennis Hong, director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory of the mechanical engineering department at Virginia Tech.

The bare-bones vehicle, which resembles a big go-kart or a quad in size and design, was tested at the Blind Driver Challenge event on a course at the Virginia Tech campus this summer. Last week, the car was available for testing on the College Park campus of the University of Maryland, as the federation held its biennial Youth Slam, a program designed to expose blind adolescents to careers that they might otherwise consider closed off from.

Steven Mackay/Virginia Tech University Patrick Johnson, a legally blind graduate student at Virginia Tech, test drives the university's Blind Driver Challenge vehicle on a campus parking lot with Mr. Jannaman.

The car is Virginia Tech College of Engineering's latest and most successful version. It makes use of laser range finders and an instant voice command interface that guides the driver. According to Greg Jannaman, the 2008-9 team leader of the Blind Driver Challenge project, the car's technology focuses on three areas: speed, emergency stops and steering.

Vibrational motors in the seat straps on both sides of the driver indicate how fast the car is moving. As the driver increases the speed, the vibrations become more and more intense. When the driver has reached a speed considered unsafe, the vibrations are the most violent and the vehicle will stop. As for turning the car, the steering wheel sends audible clicks to the driver through headphones. The car then tells the driver how many clicks to move the wheel to make a turn.

"Night, fog, low visibility have no impact," Professor Hong said. "As a matter of fact, the laser can see better in these conditions than a human eye. It is limited by the fact that the driver needs to concentrate on these new interface signals, but then again, sighted people also need to pay attention to the road."

The vehicle still requires further research and a lot more testing. According to Professor Hong, the next step includes creating an electric car (for environmental reasons) and fine-tuning the technology, as well as reducing the vehicle's cost.

When asked how long he believed it will take to develop a car that can put the sight impaired on the road with everyone else, Professor Hong said, "I can't speculate, but I know that the technology will be ready before the society will be ready."

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Japanese 'robot suit' to help disabled

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

A Japanese company has unveiled a robotic suit that is designed to help people with weak limbs or limited physical range to walk and move like an able-bodied person.

The suit, called HAL – or Hybrid Assistive Limb – is the work of Cyberdyne Corporation in Japan, and has been created to "upgrade the existing physical capabilities of the human body".

HAL, which weighs 23kg, is comprised of robotic 'limbs', and a backpack containing the suit's battery and computer system. It is strapped to the body and controlled by thought. When a person attempts to move, nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles, and very weak traces of these signals can be detected on the surface of the skin. The HAL suit identifies these signals using a sensor attached the skin of the wearer, and a signal is sent to the suit's power unit telling the suit to move in unison with the wearer's own limbs.

People with physical disabilities, such as stroke-induced paralysis or spinal cord injuries, can hire the suit at a cost of Y220,000 (£1,370) per month, and Cyberdyne Corporation believes the technology can have a variety of applications, including in physical training and rehabilitation, adding extra "muscle" to heavy labour jobs, and even in rescue and recovery operations.

HAL can help the wearer to carry out a variety of every day tasks, including standing up from a chair, walking, climbing up and down stairs, and lifting heavy objects. The suit can operate for almost five hours before it needs recharging, and Cyberdyne Corporation says that it does not feel heavy to wear,
because the robotic exoskeleton supports its own weight.


Researchers at the corporation said HAL had been designed for use both indoors and outdoors. Professor Yoshiyuki Sankai, the company's founder and chief executive, originally created the suit for climbing mountains. "HAL can even work in the snow at a height of 4,000m above sea level," claims the company.

posted by arbroath

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Friday, August 7, 2009

Award winning fake crocodiles at Amsterdam airport

by Scott Carmichael on May 20th 200





Amsterdam airport just won an award for their "something to declare" PR stunt.

To remind arriving passengers to be honest, and use the red line to declare taxable items, they used suitcases with fake crocodiles sticking out the side. The suitcases were pulled through the airport, and placed on the baggage carousels in the arrivals hall.

Despite having a natural aversion against using the red customs line, I have to admit that this is a pretty funny stunt, though I'm fairly sure it only reminds people to put even more effort into putting on a poker face when you walk through the green line pretending that those extra bottles of booze in your suitcase are filled with water

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At a Loss for Words: The Day Facebook, Twitter Crashed

By Monica Hesse

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 7, 2009

What happened Thursday, in 140 characters: Twitter went down. Facebook went down. People panicked, unused to not oversharing minutiae of life. Twitter back up. Facebook back up. Phew.

At 9 a.m., millions of users of Twitter.com found themselves unable to access the microblogging Web site, the modern version of the telephone party line through which more than 40 million people announce what they are doing, reading, eating and thinking at any given moment. Twitter has been used for on-the-ground reports from protests in Tehran and, more recently, by Paula Abdul, who announced her resignation from "American Idol" via her Twitter feed.

Undaunted, the rejected Twitterers trooped to Facebook.com, the social networking site that has more than 200 million users, which has "status updates" that mimic Twitter feeds. But before users could begin to type, "Is sad that Twitter is down," a terrible and panic-inducing discovery: Facebook was down, too.

The two companies offered answers:

"On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial-of-service attack," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote on the official Twitter blog. "Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as . . . Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now."

Kathleen Loughlin, a spokeswoman for Facebook, also cited a denial-of-service attack, which she said "resulted in degraded service for some users." She added that no user data were at risk during the attack and promised that Facebook was "continuing to monitor the situation to ensure that users have the fast and reliable experience they've come to expect from Facebook."

Ben Rushlo, director of Internet technologies at Keynote, a Web site-monitoring firm in San Mateo, Calif., called the attack "the largest and most extensive outage" the company has tracked against a social networking site. "I haven't seen anything quite this significant on a major site," Rushlo said.

Neither company offered explanations for the attacks, which occur when a person or group of people target a Web site for the purpose of making a site dysfunctional for its intended users.

And lest the Twitter-less and Facebook-less consider blogging their grievances, blog host LiveJournal was down, too, blaming another denial-of-service attack. It was not clear where these attacks originated or whether the three attacks were related.

It was almost like social networking had died. Or had a heart attack, at least. For several hours, millions of users were catapulted back to the dark, informationless days of 2003, before such pertinent information as what Ashton Kutcher had for a snack became readily available, before it was possible for people to take a simple quiz to learn which "Twilight" character or dog breed they were most like.

For most of the morning, access to these sites remained spotty. The sole word on the blog IsTwitterDown.com -- created just to inform people of the site's functionality -- was "Yes."

Some people classified the meltdown as a non-story, and an easily mockable one at that: "As an avid non-user," one blogger wrote, "I yawned when I heard the news."

It wasn't until the sites became accessible again, later in the afternoon, that the true magnitude of the moment became apparent. Twitterers and Facebookers flocked back to their online homes, posting updates revealing how much they felt they'd missed in the day without social networks.

"Director John Hughes died today and I didn't know because Twitter was down," a user called kristenthomson tweeted shortly after the site was functioning again. "Do I have to go back to watching the news to get my news?"

Staff writers Brian Krebs and Cecilia Kang contributed to this report.

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How are Golf Steel Shafts Made?

From Tom Wishon, for About.com

There are two primary ways to manufacture steel golf shafts. One is called "seemless" construction; the other is "welded tube" construction.

A seamless steel shaft starts life as a large cylinder of solid steel. The cylinder is heated and pierced with a special machine, turning the solid steel log into a large, thick-walled tube. Over a series of stretching operations on very specialized machines called draw benches, the large, thick tube is gradually reduced in diameter and wall thickness to become a thin-walled steel tube five-eighths of an inch in diameter. These shaft "blanks," as they are called, are then subjected to a series of squeezing operations that form the individual sections of diameter reduction called the "step-downs" on the shaft.

A welded tube construction steel shaft begins as a flat strip of steel that is coiled and welded into a tube. The welding procedure is quite different than what most people are used to seeing. Through what is called high-frequency welding, the two ends of the coiled strip are literally fused together without the presence of a second, different material as in the case of most welding. A special machine then removes the excess metal from the outside and inside of the welded tube in a procedure called "skiving." Once formed, the tube is stretched down to the required 5/8-inch outer diameter in the same procedures used in the forming of the seamless steel shaft, with the step-downs formed in the same manner as well.

Once formed into the step pattern dictated by each individual shaft design, the raw steel shafts are heat treated, straightened and then nickel-chrome electroplated to prevent rusting.

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Thursday, August 6, 2009

It's the Body Bags Stupid

By Iftekhar A. Khan

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do"
(Samuel P Huntington).


August 04, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- It's irrelevant to discuss who was responsible for 9/11. The western world knows who engineered it and rest of the world fearful for its safety is silent about it. Why to destroy the Towers by demolition when the West could invade sovereign countries without the stratagem would remain a mystery. Iraq had no link to WTC destruction yet the West invaded and occupied it. The FBI said it had "no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11." Neither did FBI in its Most wanted terrorist web page, implicate Laden in 9/11, but US attacked Afghanistan nonetheless. Muslims' perception that the West has no qualms about unleashing its violence against them is therefore a stark reality. The West marches its armies anywhere it fancies.

Violence follows a preconceived method far from madness. Muslim states marked for occupation must not only overflow with energy resources but also possess strategic importance. However, occupation isn't a free course through a country; it entails blood, death, and body bags. Afghans seem to rephrase Bill Clinton's "it's economy stupid" to "it's body bags stupid."

US has occupied Iraq, established its largest embassy and 14 military bases, after massacring more than 1.3 million civilians. Had the US-UK-NATO alliance, veritably renamed Anti-Muslim Western Alliance (AWA), invaded Iraq without the mendacity of WMD, none of the Muslim leaderships would have stirred. Leaving Iraq to its fate, Barack Obama has focused on war in Afghanistan, assumed as his war. Will he win it? Not likely. Pashtuns are more tenacious than are the Iraqis. Taliban is another name of the Pashtuns striving to rid their country of foreign occupiers. Account of a British soldier in the UK Guardian unravelled the mystery of Taliban and Pashtuns for those who confuse the two: "One minute these...are Afghan farmers another minute Taliban." The soldier later lost his life in Helmand.

Many who thought Obama would change US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan have been disappointed. Obama and Brown don't formulate policies; reps of powerful interest groups do. How could Robert Gates, who outlasted Bush regime, take a U-turn on the AfPak strategy he himself devised? He has been at the centre stage of conceiving and planning the brutal military offensive Panther's Claw in Helmand - Southern Afghanistan. Richard Holbrooke on the AfPak scene is another face for Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

AWA has slim chance of winning the war in Afghanistan as Guardian's editorial (July 23) explained: "Two major thrusts by US and British troops into territory the Taliban once dominated have resulted in record US and Isaf casualties: 31 US troops and 23 Isaf, 22 of them British, have been killed so far this month and many more (57) grievously injured. The Taliban have lost men, but they have an endless supply of recruits. And they would be even less bothered by loss of territory. The battlefield has merely grown." AWA has endless supply of military hardware but it lacks the nerve to supply more boots on ground.

Merely 22 British soldiers' death this month taking the tally to 189 so far has set off wide public resentment in UK. Mourners continue to protest against keeping the royal blood in jagged Afghanistan. Compare it with the slaughter of 1.3 million Iraqis and hundreds of thousands of Afghans when none of the two nations had aggressed against the West. After ruthless AWA bombing of their mud hamlets, Pashtuns have been collecting bits and pieces of their men, women, and children to bury them in mass graves, while civilised West grieves over the death of its few soldiers.

Even if US-led AWA bombs every inch of Southern Afghanistan, it will ultimately need hundreds of thousands boots on ground to put down the resistance, which will mean thousands of body bags. AWA cannot afford to take casualties because the dead arriving home draped in national flags exact political cost. Yet military commanders in Helmand "insist that troops morale remains high" even though ruthless Taliban exploitation of sophisticated IEDs make every foot and vehicle patrol a potentially lethal last journey. Some morale it is that remains high when taking each step is a lethal last journey.

However, situation in Afghanistan has begun to change despite Messrs Brown and Miliband's lofty assertions a fortnight ago that troops would remain there to secure British lives in UK, not explaining the nature of danger the Pashtuns posed. Five days, 22 British and 31 US soldiers' lives later, operation Panther's Claw envisioned to put down resistance in southern Afghanistan has run aground. Both Britain and US have decided to open talks with the Taliban - the moderate Taliban. Both powers even consider an exit strategy. Why the sudden change in policy? Perhaps caskets reaching home and their consequent political fallout have compelled them to rethink their strategy. So far, AWA only wants to negotiate with moderate Taliban; soon it will be willing to negotiate with all of them.

The writer is a freelance columnist - E-mail: pinecity@gmail.com

This item was first published in the Nation: Pakistan

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Afghan Triangle: Opium, Oil and Taliban

By A Khokar • Aug 2nd, 2009


 

On July 4, 2009 – authorities in New York made heroin bust with a street value of US$33 million and arrested 12 people, who were using Build-A-Bear dolls packed with drug as their distribution network. They also seized US$150,000 in cash – Daily News , July 5, 2009. Source of heroin was Afghanistan.

After humiliating the Red Army in Afghanistan and making Uncle Sam the sole world power – The Mujahideen Islamist leaders fell from the favour of America and its proxy governments in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan – in the fear that they might establish an Iran-friendly Islamic regime in Kabul. Therefore, a new group based on Saudi-version of Islamic state was given birth by CIA, ISI and Riyadh, which with the active help from Pakistan Air Force – forced two prominent Mujahideed leaders, Afghan President Rabbani and Afghan Prime Minister Gulbedin, to seek refuge in Iran in 1996. These two leaders were treated like foreign dignatories till the Taliban were ousted from power by their former midwife, the US.

The 9/11 was used as an excuse to make devil out of Taliban and their guest Osama Bin Laden. Both were blamed for 9/11 – though Taliban in their six-year-rule, did not had a single commercial or military plane or modern telecommunication network – but they were able to pull-out the greatest terror attack on American soil.

And how evil Taliban were – a Zionist Jew writer, Eben Kaplan, wrote in the journal of the most powerful Zionist think tank, 'Council on Foreign Relations' (it's reported that 400 of its members including its Jew president Richard Haass, Hilary Clinton and Dennis Ross are part of Obama's administration) under the title The Taliban in Afghanistan, on July 2, 2008:

"Public reaction to Taliban's rule was not wholly negative. While the rigid social standards (Wahhabism) fostered resentment, the Taliban cracked down on corruption that had run rampant through the government for years. The new leaders also brought stability to Afghanistan, greatly reducing the infighting between warlords that had devastated the civilian population. Seven year after their ouster, the Taliban continue to provide a semblance of stability in regions where coalition and government officials have been unable to restore order and provide basic services……"

Richard Haass, president CFR, who is also a senior adviser to Obama on foreign policy – has never criticized Zionist-regime's "thugocracy" against all its Arab neighbours – has in his June 26 interview with Bernard Gwertzman said: "The Iranian theocracy has become a "thugocracy" (having defeated the "Zion Revolution" in the aftermath of Ahmadinejad's huge victory) – but the Iranian regime will likely prevail because of its use of force against the population. This makes the urgency of negotiating an end to country's nuclear program more pronounced, and possibly more difficult. Iranian challenge (to Israel) still exists, and may actually be somewhat worse….."

So the question comes to mind is: why occupy Afghanistan when the leaders of both Afghan Mujahideen and Taliban were pro-America? The answer lies in the planning of the pro-Israel high-ranking officials in Clinton and Bush administrations – long before September 11, 2001 tragedy. The planned occupation of Afghanistan was based on two factors of greed - the Caspian Sea oil reserves and Taliban's ban on Poppy cultivation - the source of US$600 billion opium business in 2007 (second to oil and arms trade).

Taliban, on several occasions, offered to turn over Osama Bin Laden to a third country for trail, once Washington and Jewish media blamed him for masterminding the 9/11 – However, both Clinton and Bush administrations rejected those offers.

American puppet regimes were nededed both in Afghanistan and Pakistan to built the cheapest oil pipeline from Caspian Sea to Gwader port in Balochistan via Afghanistan.Furthermore, both these countries are itself rich in oil/gas and other natural resources: "Massive untapped gas reserves are believed to be lying beneath Pakistan's remotest deserts, but they're being held hostage by armed tribal groups demanding a better deal from the central government," – AFP, September 1, 2001.

Taliban's eradication program led to a 94% decline in opium cultivation by 2000. According to UN's 2001 figures, opium cultivation had fallen to 185 tons. Immediately, following US occupation in December 2001 – production increased dramatically, regaining its historical levels – 6,100 tons in 2006 (a 3200% increase in five years).

And who are the greatest beneficiaries of opium cultivated in Afghanistan, India and the rest of Far East countries – David Sassoon (1792-1864) and his family of course. Historically, Rothschild-controlled Britain won Hong Kong by launching the Opium Wars to give the Sassoons exclusive rights to drug an entire nation! According to the 1944 Jewish Encyclopedia: "He (David Sassoon) employed only Jews in his business, and wherever he sent them he built Synagouges and schools for them. He imported whole family of fellow Jews…and put them to work."

Arnold Rothstein was known as the American Drug Kingpin.

In order to keep a steady and secure flow of oil and opium – a powerful army is needed – and that's where the Arms Industry and NATO fits in. And let us not forget the "intelligence mafia" which keep the terrorism hoax alive – such as CIA, MI6, RAW, SVR, and MOSSAD.  

Source: Rehmat World

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Fruitless manoeuvres in the Great Game

By Mahir Ali
Wednesday, 05 Aug, 2009

'IN the interests, then, of peace; in the interests of commerce; in the interests of moral and material improvement, it may be asserted that interference in Afghanistan has now become a duty, and that any moderate outlay or responsibility we incur in restoring order at Kabul will prove in the sequel to be true economy.'

The language, to some extent, betrays the provenance of this piece of advocacy: 21st-century spin doctors would couch their aims in somewhat different terms. Yet the advice offered in 1868 by Sir Henry Rawlinson, a member of the Council of India, serves as a useful reminder of the longevity of the Great Game.

His comments were made in the context of the potential threat posed by a Russian presence in Afghanistan, and it is notable that commerce took precedence over other concerns. It could also be argued, not entirely without merit, that in the late 20th century the Great Game was resumed only when the prospect of a Russian presence arose once more.

However, it's not that simple. By the late 1970s, Afghanistan was an unlikely zone for the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union and the US were the main protagonists, with Britain reduced to a relatively insignificant ally of the latter. Its basically feudal structure notwithstanding, Afghanistan was considered to be in the Soviet sphere of influence, much as the United States' Latin American 'backyard' was construed to be a politico-economic playing field exclusive to Uncle Sam. But then the Saur Revolution – styled thus, presumably, to evoke the landmark October variant in its neighbourhood – helped to change the rules of the game.

It may have been different had the Saur coup-makers enjoyed widespread popular support. Their influence, however, was restricted largely to the Kabul intelligentsia. Well aware of their compatriots' confessional tendencies, Nur Mohammed Taraki and his ilk went out of their way to insinuate that their government was neither un-Islamic nor anti-Islamic. But it was a futile effort, damned by the communist tag. It is quite possible that the cold warriors in Washington were even quicker than the bamboozled apparatchiks in Moscow in deciding to exploit the situation.

The US did its level best to create a situation whereby it just might be able to avenge its humiliation in Vietnam. The effort rapidly paid dividends – although it's well worth noting that the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan, notwithstanding the absence of bourgeois democracy, was preceded by a spirited debate within the communist hierarchy in which sceptics such as KGB chief Yuri Andropov and rising star Mikhail Gorbachev were overruled by the Brezhnevite majority.

That offers a striking contrast with the virtual absence of discussion that preceded the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and even Iraq in 2003. The American entanglement in Afghanistan, from the late 1970s, was supposedly surreptitious, although by the early 1980s it had become an open secret as the CIA operation expanded into the largest covert war since Vietnam, with Pakistan reprising with greater gusto than ever before its chosen role as an agent for Uncle Sam – personified in those crucial years by the recklessly delusional Ronald Reagan.

In those days, the US was a prime source of jihadi literature, alongside Pakistan under Gen Ziaul Haq and Saudi Arabia. The motley bands of Mujahideen were schooled, inter alia, in slitting the throats of those who dared to teach in coeducational institutions. More or less every sign of progress on the economic or social front was painted as a communist conspiracy. The trend appealed, inevitably, to those who were least inclined to take progressive developments in their stride. They may have been wary of the Americans, but they were more than willing to accept the assistance of perceived infidels in the crusade against Moscow's godless agents.

This included, crucially, the shoulder-fired Stinger missiles, liberally supplied by the CIA, that effectively knocked Soviet helicopter gunships out of the equation. Once they had achieved their purpose, the US devoted some energy to buying back unused Stingers, often from arms bazaars in Pakistan. The absence of equivalent weaponry has helped to keep the western death toll relatively low in Afghanistan, although last month proved to be the deadliest since 2001, amid the battle for Helmand – in greeting whose purported conclusion, Gordon Brown sounded much like one of his distant predecessors would have in the Victorian era.

His foreign secretary, David Miliband, meanwhile, has once more mooted the idea of negotiations with second-tier Taliban. At least one of his cabinet colleagues has at the same time pointed out that the terrorist threat to Britain emanates more from Pakistan than from Helmand.

As they did under the command of Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, American and British troops are today once more involved in offering combat training to Afghans, albeit this time with the intention of tackling the offspring of their previous pupils, the Mujahideen. Gen Stanley McChrystal, the head of American and Nato forces in the country, is reportedly working on a 'new' strategy that involves doubling the Anglo-American presence as well as boosting the numbers and capabilities of the official Afghan security forces. And attempts to buy off sections of the resistance – including familiar figures such as the infamous CIA and Zia favourite Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – evidently enjoy Washington's imprimatur.

Barack Obama, before he became president, was taken aback when he discovered that the Pentagon lacked an exit strategy in Afghanistan. However, none has thus far become apparent during his incumbency either. It is unlikely that the Afghan presidential election scheduled for Aug 20 will produce any dramatic change. The neocolonial adventure embarked upon in the wake of 9/11 is ultimately doomed to failure in the absence of the realisation that the long-term future of Afghanistan must be determined by Afghans, rather than by interlopers, well-intentioned or otherwise, from near or afar.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

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