₦airaland Forum

dam4sam: @Underground:
STOP posting this same article allover the place joor ...or are you selling the book sef?

Okay, back to Syria and Obama:

Please STOP begging America not to arm these terrorist now? STOP begging America not to go to war now?

I have only one phrase for them: WHAT YOU SOW IS WHAT YOU WILL REAP!
As a man lays his bed, so he will lie on it .... and what goes around (read: weapons to jihadist), will eventually come around!

America is buying a one-way ticket for all these terrorist, l wonder where they will fly to...and what they will do when they get there?

I really feel sorry for Americans ....because when the chickens come home to roost, Senator McCain or any of those war-mongers, including Obama, will be hunkered down in a secure bunker while Tom, Joe and Harry takes the hit.

I no sabi shout o, go figure the rest.

Lol...I no dey sell am o. I really do not like repeating that post but I have found it to be absolutely necessary. Getting through to people when they have been programmed to follow or believe a certain ideology is very difficult if not impossible. You present irrefutable evidence and discredit the smokescreen that has been created by the masters in the shadows and presented as the truth by showing these doubters facts to the contrary but yet, they are unwilling to accept and continue in denial....

And please no one should get back at me and tell me that what has been posted is all rubbish or propaganda (that article was in 2007)
No one should complain that it is too long either or that I should summarize it for them. LEARN TO READ!!

continuation...

TELLING CONGRESS



T he Bush Administration’s reliance on clandestine operations that have not been reported to Congress and its dealings with intermediaries with questionable agendas have recalled, for some in Washington, an earlier chapter in history. Two decades ago, the Reagan Administration attempted to fund the Nicaraguan contras illegally, with the help of secret arms sales to Iran. Saudi money was involved in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal, and a few of the players back then—notably Prince Bandar and Elliott Abrams—are involved in today’s dealings.

Iran-Contra was the subject of an informal “lessons learned” discussion two years ago among veterans of the scandal. Abrams led the discussion. One conclusion was that even though the program was eventually exposed, it had been possible to execute it without telling Congress. As to what the experience taught them, in terms of future covert operations, the participants found: “One, you can’t trust our friends. Two, the C.I.A. has got to be totally out of it. Three, you can’t trust the uniformed military, and four, it’s got to be run out of the Vice-President’s office”—a reference to Cheney’s role, the former senior intelligence official said.

I was subsequently told by the two government consultants and the former senior intelligence official that the echoes of Iran-Contra were a factor in Negroponte’s decision to resign from the National Intelligence directorship and accept a sub-Cabinet position of Deputy Secretary of State. (Negroponte declined to comment.)

The former senior intelligence official also told me that Negroponte did not want a repeat of his experience in the Reagan Administration, when he served as Ambassador to Honduras. “Negroponte said, ‘No way. I’m not going down that road again, with the N.S.C. running operations off the books, with no finding.’ ” (In the case of covert C.I.A. operations, the President must issue a written finding and inform Congress.) Negroponte stayed on as Deputy Secretary of State, he added, because “he believes he can influence the government in a positive way.”

The government consultant said that Negroponte shared the White House’s policy goals but “wanted to do it by the book.” The Pentagon consultant also told me that “there was a sense at the senior-ranks level that he wasn’t fully on board with the more adventurous clandestine initiatives.” It was also true, he said, that Negroponte “had problems with this Rube Goldberg policy contraption for fixing the Middle East.”

The Pentagon consultant added that one difficulty, in terms of oversight, was accounting for covert funds. “There are many, many pots of black money, scattered in many places and used all over the world on a variety of missions,” he said. The budgetary chaos in Iraq, where billions of dollars are unaccounted for, has made it a vehicle for such transactions, according to the former senior intelligence official and the retired four-star general.

“This goes back to Iran-Contra,” a former National Security Council aide told me. “And much of what they’re doing is to keep the agency out of it.” He said that Congress was not being briefed on the full extent of the U.S.-Saudi operations. And, he said, “The C.I.A. is asking, ‘What’s going on?’ They’re concerned, because they think it’s amateur hour.”

The issue of oversight is beginning to get more attention from Congress. Last November, the Congressional Research Service issued a report for Congress on what it depicted as the Administration’s blurring of the line between C.I.A. activities and strictly military ones, which do not have the same reporting requirements. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Senator Jay Rockefeller, has scheduled a hearing for March 8th on Defense Department intelligence activities.

Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, a Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee, told me, “The Bush Administration has frequently failed to meet its legal obligation to keep the Intelligence Committee fully and currently informed. Time and again, the answer has been ‘Trust us.’ ” Wyden said, “It is hard for me to trust the Administration.” ♦

ILLUSTRATION: GUY BILLOUT

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THE SHEIKH



O n a warm, clear night early last December, in a bombed-out suburb a few miles south of downtown Beirut, I got a preview of how the Administration’s new strategy might play out in Lebanon. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, who has been in hiding, had agreed to an interview. Security arrangements for the meeting were secretive and elaborate. I was driven, in the back seat of a darkened car, to a damaged underground garage somewhere in Beirut, searched with a handheld scanner, placed in a second car to be driven to yet another bomb-scarred underground garage, and transferred again. Last summer, it was reported that Israel was trying to kill Nasrallah, but the extraordinary precautions were not due only to that threat. Nasrallah’s aides told me that they believe he is a prime target of fellow-Arabs, primarily Jordanian intelligence operatives, as well as Sunni jihadists who they believe are affiliated with Al Qaeda. (The government consultant and a retired four-star general said that Jordanian intelligence, with support from the U.S. and Israel, had been trying to infiltrate Shiite groups, to work against Hezbollah. Jordan’s King Abdullah II has warned that a Shiite government in Iraq that was close to Iran would lead to the emergence of a Shiite crescent.) This is something of an ironic turn: Nasrallah’s battle with Israel last summer turned him—a Shiite—into the most popular and influential figure among Sunnis and Shiites throughout the region. In recent months, however, he has increasingly been seen by many Sunnis not as a symbol of Arab unity but as a participant in a sectarian war.

Nasrallah, dressed, as usual, in religious garb, was waiting for me in an unremarkable apartment. One of his advisers said that he was not likely to remain there overnight; he has been on the move since his decision, last July, to order the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid set off the thirty-three-day war. Nasrallah has since said publicly—and repeated to me—that he misjudged the Israeli response. “We just wanted to capture prisoners for exchange purposes,” he told me. “We never wanted to drag the region into war.”

Nasrallah accused the Bush Administration of working with Israel to deliberately instigate fitna, an Arabic word that is used to mean “insurrection and fragmentation within Islam.” “In my opinion, there is a huge campaign through the media throughout the world to put each side up against the other,” he said. “I believe that all this is being run by American and Israeli intelligence.” (He did not provide any specific evidence for this.) He said that the U.S. war in Iraq had increased sectarian tensions, but argued that Hezbollah had tried to prevent them from spreading into Lebanon. (Sunni-Shiite confrontations increased, along with violence, in the weeks after we talked.)

Nasrallah said he believed that President Bush’s goal was “the drawing of a new map for the region. They want the partition of Iraq. Iraq is not on the edge of a civil war—there is a civil war. There is ethnic and sectarian cleansing. The daily killing and displacement which is taking place in Iraq aims at achieving three Iraqi parts, which will be sectarian and ethnically pure as a prelude to the partition of Iraq. Within one or two years at the most, there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.”

He went on, “I can say that President Bush is lying when he says he does not want Iraq to be partitioned. All the facts occurring now on the ground make you swear he is dragging Iraq to partition. And a day will come when he will say, ‘I cannot do anything, since the Iraqis want the partition of their country and I honor the wishes of the people of Iraq.’ ”

Nasrallah said he believed that America also wanted to bring about the partition of Lebanon and of Syria. In Syria, he said, the result would be to push the country “into chaos and internal battles like in Iraq.” In Lebanon, “There will be a Sunni state, an Alawi state, a Christian state, and a Druze state.” But, he said, “I do not know if there will be a Shiite state.” Nasrallah told me that he suspected that one aim of the Israeli bombing of Lebanon last summer was “the destruction of Shiite areas and the displacement of Shiites from Lebanon. The idea was to have the Shiites of Lebanon and Syria flee to southern Iraq,” which is dominated by Shiites. “I am not sure, but I smell this,” he told me.

Partition would leave Israel surrounded by “small tranquil states,” he said. “I can assure you that the Saudi kingdom will also be divided, and the issue will reach to North African states. There will be small ethnic and confessional states,” he said. “In other words, Israel will be the most important and the strongest state in a region that has been partitioned into ethnic and confessional states that are in agreement with each other. This is the new Middle East.”

In fact, the Bush Administration has adamantly resisted talk of partitioning Iraq, and its public stances suggest that the White House sees a future Lebanon that is intact, with a weak, disarmed Hezbollah playing, at most, a minor political role. There is also no evidence to support Nasrallah’s belief that the Israelis were seeking to drive the Shiites into southern Iraq. Nevertheless, Nasrallah’s vision of a larger sectarian conflict in which the United States is implicated suggests a possible consequence of the White House’s new strategy.

In the interview, Nasrallah made mollifying gestures and promises that would likely be met with skepticism by his opponents. “If the United States says that discussions with the likes of us can be useful and influential in determining American policy in the region, we have no objection to talks or meetings,” he said. “But, if their aim through this meeting is to impose their policy on us, it will be a waste of time.” He said that the Hezbollah militia, unless attacked, would operate only within the borders of Lebanon, and pledged to disarm it when the Lebanese Army was able to stand up. Nasrallah said that he had no interest in initiating another war with Israel. However, he added that he was anticipating, and preparing for, another Israeli attack, later this year.

Nasrallah further insisted that the street demonstrations in Beirut would continue until the Siniora government fell or met his coalition’s political demands. “Practically speaking, this government cannot rule,” he told me. “It might issue orders, but the majority of the Lebanese people will not abide and will not recognize the legitimacy of this government. Siniora remains in office because of international support, but this does not mean that Siniora can rule Lebanon.”

President Bush’s repeated praise of the Siniora government, Nasrallah said, “is the best service to the Lebanese opposition he can give, because it weakens their position vis-à-vis the Lebanese people and the Arab and Islamic populations. They are betting on us getting tired. We did not get tired during the war, so how could we get tired in a demonstration?”

T here is sharp division inside and outside the Bush Administration about how best to deal with Nasrallah, and whether he could, in fact, be a partner in a political settlement. The outgoing director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, in a farewell briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee, in January, said that Hezbollah “lies at the center of Iran’s terrorist strategy. . . . It could decide to conduct attacks against U.S. interests in the event it feels its survival or that of Iran is threatened. . . . Lebanese Hezbollah sees itself as Tehran’s partner.”

In 2002, Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, called Hezbollah “the A-team” of terrorists. In a recent interview, however, Armitage acknowledged that the issue has become somewhat more complicated. Nasrallah, Armitage told me, has emerged as “a political force of some note, with a political role to play inside Lebanon if he chooses to do so.” In terms of public relations and political gamesmanship, Armitage said, Nasrallah “is the smartest man in the Middle East.” But, he added, Nasrallah “has got to make it clear that he wants to play an appropriate role as the loyal opposition. For me, there’s still a blood debt to pay”—a reference to the murdered colonel and the Marine barracks bombing.

Robert Baer, a former longtime C.I.A. agent in Lebanon, has been a severe critic of Hezbollah and has warned of its links to Iranian-sponsored terrorism. But now, he told me, “we’ve got Sunni Arabs preparing for cataclysmic conflict, and we will need somebody to protect the Christians in Lebanon. It used to be the French and the United States who would do it, and now it’s going to be Nasrallah and the Shiites.

“The most important story in the Middle East is the growth of Nasrallah from a street guy to a leader—from a terrorist to a statesman,” Baer added. “The dog that didn’t bark this summer”—during the war with Israel—“is Shiite terrorism.” Baer was referring to fears that Nasrallah, in addition to firing rockets into Israel and kidnapping its soldiers, might set in motion a wave of terror attacks on Israeli and American targets around the world. “He could have pulled the trigger, but he did not,” Baer said.

Most members of the intelligence and diplomatic communities acknowledge Hezbollah’s ongoing ties to Iran. But there is disagreement about the extent to which Nasrallah would put aside Hezbollah’s interests in favor of Iran’s. A former C.I.A. officer who also served in Lebanon called Nasrallah “a Lebanese phenomenon,” adding, “Yes, he’s aided by Iran and Syria, but Hezbollah’s gone beyond that.” He told me that there was a period in the late eighties and early nineties when the C.I.A. station in Beirut was able to clandestinely monitor Nasrallah’s conversations. He described Nasrallah as “a gang leader who was able to make deals with the other gangs. He had contacts with everybody.”

continuation......

JIHADIS IN LEBANON



T he focus of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, after Iran, is Lebanon, where the Saudis have been deeply involved in efforts by the Administration to support the Lebanese government. Prime Minister Fouad Siniora is struggling to stay in power against a persistent opposition led by Hezbollah, the Shiite organization, and its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has an extensive infrastructure, an estimated two to three thousand active fighters, and thousands of additional members.

Hezbollah has been on the State Department’s terrorist list since 1997. The organization has been implicated in the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed two hundred and forty-one military men. It has also been accused of complicity in the kidnapping of Americans, including the C.I.A. station chief in Lebanon, who died in captivity, and a Marine colonel serving on a U.N. peacekeeping mission, who was killed. (Nasrallah has denied that the group was involved in these incidents.) Nasrallah is seen by many as a staunch terrorist, who has said that he regards Israel as a state that has no right to exist. Many in the Arab world, however, especially Shiites, view him as a resistance leader who withstood Israel in last summer’s thirty-three-day war, and Siniora as a weak politician who relies on America’s support but was unable to persuade President Bush to call for an end to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon. (Photographs of Siniora kissing Condoleezza Rice on the cheek when she visited during the war were prominently displayed during street protests in Beirut.)

The Bush Administration has publicly pledged the Siniora government a billion dollars in aid since last summer. A donors’ conference in Paris, in January, which the U.S. helped organize, yielded pledges of almost eight billion more, including a promise of more than a billion from the Saudis. The American pledge includes more than two hundred million dollars in military aid, and forty million dollars for internal security.

The United States has also given clandestine support to the Siniora government, according to the former senior intelligence official and the U.S. government consultant. “We are in a program to enhance the Sunni capability to resist Shiite influence, and we’re spreading the money around as much as we can,” the former senior intelligence official said. The problem was that such money “always gets in more pockets than you think it will,” he said. “In this process, we’re financing a lot of bad guys with some serious potential unintended consequences. We don’t have the ability to determine and get pay vouchers signed by the people we like and avoid the people we don’t like. It’s a very high-risk venture.”

American, European, and Arab officials I spoke to told me that the Siniora government and its allies had allowed some aid to end up in the hands of emerging Sunni radical groups in northern Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and around Palestinian refugee camps in the south. These groups, though small, are seen as a buffer to Hezbollah; at the same time, their ideological ties are with Al Qaeda.

During a conversation with me, the former Saudi diplomat accused Nasrallah of attempting “to hijack the state,” but he also objected to the Lebanese and Saudi sponsorship of Sunni jihadists in Lebanon. “Salafis are sick and hateful, and I’m very much against the idea of flirting with them,” he said. “They hate the Shiites, but they hate Americans more. If you try to outsmart them, they will outsmart us. It will be ugly.”

Alastair Crooke, who spent nearly thirty years in MI6, the British intelligence service, and now works for Conflicts Forum, a think tank in Beirut, told me, “The Lebanese government is opening space for these people to come in. It could be very dangerous.” Crooke said that one Sunni extremist group, Fatah al-Islam, had splintered from its pro-Syrian parent group, Fatah al-Intifada, in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, in northern Lebanon. Its membership at the time was less than two hundred. “I was told that within twenty-four hours they were being offered weapons and money by people presenting themselves as representatives of the Lebanese government’s interests—presumably to take on Hezbollah,” Crooke said.

The largest of the groups, Asbat al-Ansar, is situated in the Ain al-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp. Asbat al-Ansar has received arms and supplies from Lebanese internal-security forces and militias associated with the Siniora government.

In 2005, according to a report by the U.S.-based International Crisis Group, Saad Hariri, the Sunni majority leader of the Lebanese parliament and the son of the slain former Prime Minister—Saad inherited more than four billion dollars after his father’s assassination—paid forty-eight thousand dollars in bail for four members of an Islamic militant group from Dinniyeh. The men had been arrested while trying to establish an Islamic mini-state in northern Lebanon. The Crisis Group noted that many of the militants “had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan.”

According to the Crisis Group report, Saad Hariri later used his parliamentary majority to obtain amnesty for twenty-two of the Dinniyeh Islamists, as well as for seven militants suspected of plotting to bomb the Italian and Ukrainian embassies in Beirut, the previous year. (He also arranged a pardon for Samir Geagea, a Maronite Christian militia leader, who had been convicted of four political murders, including the assassination, in 1987, of Prime Minister Rashid Karami.) Hariri described his actions to reporters as humanitarian.

In an interview in Beirut, a senior official in the Siniora government acknowledged that there were Sunni jihadists operating inside Lebanon. “We have a liberal attitude that allows Al Qaeda types to have a presence here,” he said. He related this to concerns that Iran or Syria might decide to turn Lebanon into a “theatre of conflict.”

The official said that his government was in a no-win situation. Without a political settlement with Hezbollah, he said, Lebanon could “slide into a conflict,” in which Hezbollah fought openly with Sunni forces, with potentially horrific consequences. But if Hezbollah agreed to a settlement yet still maintained a separate army, allied with Iran and Syria, “Lebanon could become a target. In both cases, we become a target.”

The Bush Administration has portrayed its support of the Siniora government as an example of the President’s belief in democracy, and his desire to prevent other powers from interfering in Lebanon. When Hezbollah led street demonstrations in Beirut in December, John Bolton, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., called them “part of the Iran-Syria-inspired coup.”

Leslie H. Gelb, a past president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that the Administration’s policy was less pro democracy than “pro American national security. The fact is that it would be terribly dangerous if Hezbollah ran Lebanon.” The fall of the Siniora government would be seen, Gelb said, “as a signal in the Middle East of the decline of the United States and the ascendancy of the terrorism threat. And so any change in the distribution of political power in Lebanon has to be opposed by the United States—and we’re justified in helping any non-Shiite parties resist that change. We should say this publicly, instead of talking about democracy.”

Martin Indyk, of the Saban Center, said, however, that the United States “does not have enough pull to stop the moderates in Lebanon from dealing with the extremists.” He added, “The President sees the region as divided between moderates and extremists, but our regional friends see it as divided between Sunnis and Shia. The Sunnis that we view as extremists are regarded by our Sunni allies simply as Sunnis.”

I n January, after an outburst of street violence in Beirut involving supporters of both the Siniora government and Hezbollah, Prince Bandar flew to Tehran to discuss the political impasse in Lebanon and to meet with Ali Larijani, the Iranians’ negotiator on nuclear issues. According to a Middle Eastern ambassador, Bandar’s mission—which the ambassador said was endorsed by the White House—also aimed “to create problems between the Iranians and Syria.” There had been tensions between the two countries about Syrian talks with Israel, and the Saudis’ goal was to encourage a breach. However, the ambassador said, “It did not work. Syria and Iran are not going to betray each other. Bandar’s approach is very unlikely to succeed.”

Walid Jumblatt, who is the leader of the Druze minority in Lebanon and a strong Siniora supporter, has attacked Nasrallah as an agent of Syria, and has repeatedly told foreign journalists that Hezbollah is under the direct control of the religious leadership in Iran. In a conversation with me last December, he depicted Bashir Assad, the Syrian President, as a “serial killer.” Nasrallah, he said, was “morally guilty” of the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the murder, last November, of Pierre Gemayel, a member of the Siniora Cabinet, because of his support for the Syrians.

Jumblatt then told me that he had met with Vice-President Cheney in Washington last fall to discuss, among other issues, the possibility of undermining Assad. He and his colleagues advised Cheney that, if the United States does try to move against Syria, members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood would be “the ones to talk to,” Jumblatt said.

The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, a branch of a radical Sunni movement founded in Egypt in 1928, engaged in more than a decade of violent opposition to the regime of Hafez Assad, Bashir’s father. In 1982, the Brotherhood took control of the city of Hama; Assad bombarded the city for a week, killing between six thousand and twenty thousand people. Membership in the Brotherhood is punishable by death in Syria. The Brotherhood is also an avowed enemy of the U.S. and of Israel. Nevertheless, Jumblatt said, “We told Cheney that the basic link between Iran and Lebanon is Syria—and to weaken Iran you need to open the door to effective Syrian opposition.”

There is evidence that the Administration’s redirection strategy has already benefitted the Brotherhood. The Syrian National Salvation Front is a coalition of opposition groups whose principal members are a faction led by Abdul Halim Khaddam, a former Syrian Vice-President who defected in 2005, and the Brotherhood. A former high-ranking C.I.A. officer told me, “The Americans have provided both political and financial support. The Saudis are taking the lead with financial support, but there is American involvement.” He said that Khaddam, who now lives in Paris, was getting money from Saudi Arabia, with the knowledge of the White House. (In 2005, a delegation of the Front’s members met with officials from the National Security Council, according to press reports.) A former White House official told me that the Saudis had provided members of the Front with travel documents.

Jumblatt said he understood that the issue was a sensitive one for the White House. “I told Cheney that some people in the Arab world, mainly the Egyptians”—whose moderate Sunni leadership has been fighting the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood for decades—“won’t like it if the United States helps the Brotherhood. But if you don’t take on Syria we will be face to face in Lebanon with Hezbollah in a long fight, and one we might not win.”

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PRINCE BANDAR’S GAME


T he Administration’s effort to diminish Iranian authority in the Middle East has relied heavily on Saudi Arabia and on Prince Bandar, the Saudi national-security adviser. Bandar served as the Ambassador to the United States for twenty-two years, until 2005, and has maintained a friendship with President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. In his new post, he continues to meet privately with them. Senior White House officials have made several visits to Saudi Arabia recently, some of them not disclosed.

Last November, Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia for a surprise meeting with King Abdullah and Bandar. The Times reported that the King warned Cheney that Saudi Arabia would back its fellow-Sunnis in Iraq if the United States were to withdraw. A European intelligence official told me that the meeting also focussed on more general Saudi fears about “the rise of the Shiites.” In response, “The Saudis are starting to use their leverage—money.”

In a royal family rife with competition, Bandar has, over the years, built a power base that relies largely on his close relationship with the U.S., which is crucial to the Saudis. Bandar was succeeded as Ambassador by Prince Turki al-Faisal; Turki resigned after eighteen months and was replaced by Adel A. al-Jubeir, a bureaucrat who has worked with Bandar. A former Saudi diplomat told me that during Turki’s tenure he became aware of private meetings involving Bandar and senior White House officials, including Cheney and Abrams. “I assume Turki was not happy with that,” the Saudi said. But, he added, “I don’t think that Bandar is going off on his own.” Although Turki dislikes Bandar, the Saudi said, he shared his goal of challenging the spread of Shiite power in the Middle East.

The split between Shiites and Sunnis goes back to a bitter divide, in the seventh century, over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad. Sunnis dominated the medieval caliphate and the Ottoman Empire, and Shiites, traditionally, have been regarded more as outsiders. Worldwide, ninety per cent of Muslims are Sunni, but Shiites are a majority in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain, and are the largest Muslim group in Lebanon. Their concentration in a volatile, oil-rich region has led to concern in the West and among Sunnis about the emergence of a “Shiite crescent”—especially given Iran’s increased geopolitical weight.

“The Saudis still see the world through the days of the Ottoman Empire, when Sunni Muslims ruled the roost and the Shiites were the lowest class,” Frederic Hof, a retired military officer who is an expert on the Middle East, told me. If Bandar was seen as bringing about a shift in U.S. policy in favor of the Sunnis, he added, it would greatly enhance his standing within the royal family.

The Saudis are driven by their fear that Iran could tilt the balance of power not only in the region but within their own country. Saudi Arabia has a significant Shiite minority in its Eastern Province, a region of major oil fields; sectarian tensions are high in the province. The royal family believes that Iranian operatives, working with local Shiites, have been behind many terrorist attacks inside the kingdom, according to Vali Nasr. “Today, the only army capable of containing Iran”—the Iraqi Army—“has been destroyed by the United States. You’re now dealing with an Iran that could be nuclear-capable and has a standing army of four hundred and fifty thousand soldiers.” (Saudi Arabia has seventy-five thousand troops in its standing army.)

Nasr went on, “The Saudis have considerable financial means, and have deep relations with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis”—Sunni extremists who view Shiites as apostates. “The last time Iran was a threat, the Saudis were able to mobilize the worst kinds of Islamic radicals. Once you get them out of the box, you can’t put them back.”

The Saudi royal family has been, by turns, both a sponsor and a target of Sunni extremists, who object to the corruption and decadence among the family’s myriad princes. The princes are gambling that they will not be overthrown as long as they continue to support religious schools and charities linked to the extremists. The Administration’s new strategy is heavily dependent on this bargain.

Nasr compared the current situation to the period in which Al Qaeda first emerged. In the nineteen-eighties and the early nineties, the Saudi government offered to subsidize the covert American C.I.A. proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Hundreds of young Saudis were sent into the border areas of Pakistan, where they set up religious schools, training bases, and recruiting facilities. Then, as now, many of the operatives who were paid with Saudi money were Salafis. Among them, of course, were Osama bin Laden and his associates, who founded Al Qaeda, in 1988.

This time, the U.S. government consultant told me, Bandar and other Saudis have assured the White House that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.’ It’s not that we don’t want the Salafis to throw bombs; it’s who they throw them at—Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran, and at the Syrians, if they continue to work with Hezbollah and Iran.”

The Saudi said that, in his country’s view, it was taking a political risk by joining the U.S. in challenging Iran: Bandar is already seen in the Arab world as being too close to the Bush Administration. “We have two nightmares,” the former diplomat told me. “For Iran to acquire the bomb and for the United States to attack Iran. I’d rather the Israelis bomb the Iranians, so we can blame them. If America does it, we will be blamed.”

I n the past year, the Saudis, the Israelis, and the Bush Administration have developed a series of informal understandings about their new strategic direction. At least four main elements were involved, the U.S. government consultant told me. First, Israel would be assured that its security was paramount and that Washington and Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states shared its concern about Iran.

Second, the Saudis would urge Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian party that has received support from Iran, to curtail its anti-Israeli aggression and to begin serious talks about sharing leadership with Fatah, the more secular Palestinian group. (In February, the Saudis brokered a deal at Mecca between the two factions. However, Israel and the U.S. have expressed dissatisfaction with the terms.)

The third component was that the Bush Administration would work directly with Sunni nations to counteract Shiite ascendance in the region.

Fourth, the Saudi government, with Washington’s approval, would provide funds and logistical aid to weaken the government of President Bashir Assad, of Syria. The Israelis believe that putting such pressure on the Assad government will make it more conciliatory and open to negotiations. Syria is a major conduit of arms to Hezbollah. The Saudi government is also at odds with the Syrians over the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, in Beirut in 2005, for which it believes the Assad government was responsible. Hariri, a billionaire Sunni, was closely associated with the Saudi regime and with Prince Bandar. (A U.N. inquiry strongly suggested that the Syrians were involved, but offered no direct evidence; there are plans for another investigation, by an international tribunal.)

Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, depicted the Saudis’ coöperation with the White House as a significant breakthrough. “The Saudis understand that if they want the Administration to make a more generous political offer to the Palestinians they have to persuade the Arab states to make a more generous offer to the Israelis,” Clawson told me. The new diplomatic approach, he added, “shows a real degree of effort and sophistication as well as a deftness of touch not always associated with this Administration. Who’s running the greater risk—we or the Saudis? At a time when America’s standing in the Middle East is extremely low, the Saudis are actually embracing us. We should count our blessings.”

The Pentagon consultant had a different view. He said that the Administration had turned to Bandar as a “fallback,” because it had realized that the failing war in Iraq could leave the Middle East “up for grabs.”

This is a must read for all of you. As far back 2007, award winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his article "The Re-direction" had reported what laid in wait for Syria. All you see is as a result of collusion between the United States, Israel, Saudi, Qatar and Turkey. Quite a lot of these rebels are foreign backed jihadists shipped and flown in en-masse from Libya and other Arab countries via Turkey and surrounding countries by the United States, trained in Turkey and Jordan by the United States, supported logistically and intelligence wise by the Israelis and Turks and heavily funded by the autocratic Saudi regime.

This is not about the much used excuse of "establishing democracy" or protecting the Syrian people or coming to their aid in the form of a "humanitarian" exercise . This is about the lust for power and resources, about hegemony and dominance,about control and keeping at bay the aspirations of countries that stand up to the Americans and Israelis....It is about what has ultimately been behind all conflicts and turmoil : GREED... Take note of the name Bandar Ibn Sultan (Bandar Bush) cos there will be more on him later....

Lengthy but absolutely worth the read....

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/03/05/070305fa_fact_hersh


Annals of National Security

THE REDIRECTION

Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
by Seymour M. Hersh March 5, 2007


Efforts to curb Iran’s influence have involved the United States in worsening Sunni-Shiite tensions.


Keywords
Middle East Strategies;
Policy Shifts;
Bush Administration;
Iran;
Saudi Arabia;
Sunnis;
Cheney, Dick (Vice-President)

A STRATEGIC SHIFT

https://www.newyorker.com/images/2007/03/05/p233/070305_r15984_p233.jpg
I n the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.”

After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.


The new American policy, in its broad outlines, has been discussed publicly. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that there is “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East,” separating “reformers” and “extremists”; she pointed to the Sunni states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were “on the other side of that divide.” (Syria’s Sunni majority is dominated by the Alawi sect.) Iran and Syria, she said, “have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize.”

https://randomcartoon.s3.amazonaws.com/127494.JPG
from the issue|cartoon bank


Some of the core tactics of the redirection are not public

Scientist controls colleague's hand in first human brain-to-brain interface

University of Washington researcher Rajesh Rao sends a brain signal to Andrea Stocco via the Internet, causing Stocco's right hand to move on a keyboard.


Dan Farber
by Dan Farber
August 27, 2013 12:09 PM PDT


https://asset0.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2013/08/27/Screen_Shot_2013-08-27_at_10.44.15_AM_610x325.png
University of Washington researcher Rajesh Rao, left, plays a computer game with his mind, while across campus, researcher Andrea Stocco wears a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of his brain.
(Credit: University of Washington)


The telepathic cyborg lives, sort of. University of Washington scientists Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco claim that they are the first to demonstrate human brain-to-brain communication. Rao sent a signal into a Stocco's brain via the Internet that caused him to move his right hand. Brain-to-brain communication has previously been demonstrated between rats and from humans to rats.

"The experiment is a proof in concept. We have tech to reverse engineer the brain signal and transmit it from one brain to another via computer," said Chantel Prat, an assistant professor of psychology who worked on the project.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNRDc714W5I&feature=player_embedded
In a press release, the experiment was described as follows:

The team had a Skype connection set up so the two labs could coordinate, though neither Rao nor Stocco could see the Skype screens. Rao looked at a computer screen and played a simple video game with his mind. When he was supposed to fire a cannon at a target, he imagined moving his right hand (being careful not to actually move his hand), causing a cursor to hit the "fire" button. Almost instantaneously, Stocco, who wore noise-canceling earbuds and wasn't looking at a computer screen, involuntarily moved his right index finger to push the space bar on the keyboard in front of him, as if firing the cannon. Stocco compared the feeling of his hand moving involuntarily to that of a nervous tic.

The mind-meld between the researchers wasn't seamless. Rao spent time training his mind, with feedback from the computer, to emit the brainwave for moving the right hand so that it could be detected by the computer. "The intention can be as detectable as the movement itself," Prat said. "Brain-computer interfaces have been capturing this with increasing accuracy over the last decade."

When the software sees the right signal it is sent via the Internet to a computer connected to a transcranial magnetic stimulation device, which is positioned on the exact spot of the brain that controls the right hand. "It uses simple physics," Prat said. "When the magnetic field changes, it induces an electrical current, so a signal is sent through the cortex of the brain and excites the neurons, simulating what happens naturally."

https://asset1.cbsistatic.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2013/08/27/Screen_Shot_2013-08-27_at_10.48.18_AM.png
The schematic diagram shows how the brainwave signal was transferred from one brain to another.
(Credit: University of Washington)

Where does human brain-to-brain communication go from this simple experiment? "It's very much a first step, but it shows what is possible," Prat said.

"Right now the only way to transfer information from one brain to another is with words," she said. With advances in computer science and neuroscience, people could eventually perform complicated tasks, such as flying an airplane, and dancing the tango, by transferring information in a noninvasive way from one brain to another. "You can imagine all complex motor skills, which are difficult to verbalize, are just chains of procedures," Prat said.

More complex cognitive skills, such as understanding algebra and physics could also benefit from the technology. "Ultimately, it's important education and training, especially when knowledge cannot be easily translatable into words." she said.

Prat noted that some people might be nervous about this technology being used to control minds against their will. "The signal is being transmitted remotely through the Internet, but the humans are connected to physical equipment and must be trained to create the right signals. There is no way to control minds without their willingness," Prat said.

At least for now, your mind is safe, but who knows where technology leads.

Police; Same in every country

Pump and pray: Tepco might have to pour water on Fukushima wreckage forever

Professor Christopher Busby
Russia Today


Fukushima is a nightmare disaster area, and no one has the slightest idea what to do. The game is to prevent the crippled nuclear plant from turning into an “open-air super reactor spectacular” which would result in a hazardous, melted catastrophe. On April 25, 2011 – one month after the explosions at the Fukushima nuclear plant and the anniversary of Chernobyl - I was interviewed by RT and asked to compare Chernobyl and Fukushima. The clip, which you can find on YouTube, was entitled, “Can’t seal Fukushima like Chernobyl - it all goes into the sea.” Since then, huge amounts of radioactivity have flowed from the wrecked reactors directly into the Pacific Ocean. Attempts to stop the flow of contaminated water from Fukushima into the sea were always unlikely to succeed. It is like trying to push water uphill. Now they all seem to have woken up to the issue and have begun to panic.

The problem is this: the fission process in a reactor creates huge amounts of heat. Of course, that is the whole point of the machine - the heat makes steam which runs turbines. Water is pumped through channels between the fuel rods and this cools them and heats the water. If there is no water, or the channels are blocked, the heat actually melts the fuel into a big blob which falls to the bottom of the steel vessel in which all this occurs - the pressure vessel - and then melts its way through the steel, into the ground, and down in the direction of China. Well, not China in this case, but actually Buenos Aires, Argentina (I figured out).

I have been keeping an eye on developments, and it is quite clear that the reactors are no longer containing the molten fuel - some proportion of which is now in the ground underneath them. Both this material and the remaining material in what was the containment are very hot and are fissioning. Tepco is quite aware - and so is everyone else in the know - that the only hope of preventing what could become an open-air super reactor spectacular is to cool the fuel, the lumps of fuel distributed throughout the system, mainly in the holed pressure vessels, and also in the spent fuel tanks and in the ground under the reactors. That all this is fissioning away merrily (though at a low level) is clear from the occasional reports of short half life nuclides like the radioXenons. The game is to prevent it all turning into the open air super reactor located somewhere under the ground. To do this, they have to pump vast amounts of water into the reactors, the fuel pond and generally all over the area where they think the stuff is or might be. This means seawater since luckily they are near the sea. But they are also unluckily near the sea - since you cannot pump the sea onto the land without it wanting to flow back into the sea.

Now a good proportion of the radioactive elements, the radionuclides, are soluble in water. The Caesiums 137 and 134, Strontiums 89 and 90, Barium 140, Radium 226, Lead 210, Rutheniums and Rhodiums, Silvers and Mercuries, Carbons and Tritiums, Iodines and noble gases Kryptons and Xenons merrily dissolve in the hot seawater. There is also a likelihood that the normally insoluble Uraniums, Plutoniums and Neptuniums will dissolve in seawater to some extent, because of the chloride ions. And if they don’t, the micron and nano-particles of these materials will disperse in the water as colloidal suspensions. So a lot of this stuff gets into the sea. Of course, most of the fuss is being made by the Americans who are on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. How unfair that the USA should suffer from the Japanese affair, they think. And also feel a level of fear, underneath all this. As perhaps they should since it is their crappy reactors that blew up.

We hear that 400 tons of highly radioactive water is now escaping the barriers that Tepco erected and is reaching the sea. Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said on August 7 that “stabilizing Fukushima is our challenge.” Tepco said, “This is extremely serious — we are unable to control radioactive water seeping out of the Fukushima plant.” CNN quoted “industry experts” saying that “Tepco has failed to address the problem...[the experts] question Tepco’s ability to safely decommission the plant.”

There are some things I want to say about all this. First is the inevitable discourse manipulation - something that we have seen in the media ever since this disaster occurred. “Decommission the plant” suggests some calm and ordered scientific process akin to shutting down and defueling an old reactor which has reached the end of its design life. It sparks images of a wise nuclear engineer in a lab coat consulting a document, discussing some issue with a worker in brilliant white overalls with a Tepco logo, wearing a white hard-hat. The reality is that this is a nightmare disaster area where no one has the slightest idea what to do and which has always been out of control. All that they can do is continue to pump in the seawater to hope that the various lumps of molten fuel will not increase their rate of fissioning. And pray. The water will then pick up the radionuclides and flow downhill back to the sea. Of course, they can put up a barrier; surround the plant with a wall. But eventually the water will fill up the pond and flow over the wall. All that water will create a soggy marsh and destabilize the foundations of the reactor buildings which will then collapse and prevent further cooling. Then the Spectacular. All this is predictable enough.

Let us look at some numbers. Four hundred tons of seawater a day are flowing into the sea. That is 400 cubic meters. In one year, that is 146,000 cubic meters. That is a pond 10 meters deep and 120 meters square. This will have to go on forever, a new pond every year, unless they can get the radioactive material out. But here is the other problem. They can’t get close enough because the radiation levels are too high. The water itself is lethally radioactive. Gamma radiation levels tens of meters from the water are enormously high. No one can approach without being fried.

'Anyone living within 1km of the coast near Fukushima should get out'

But I want to make two other points. The first is that the Pacific Ocean is big enough for this level of release not to represent the global catastrophe that some are predicting. Let’s get some scoping perspective on this. The volume of the North Pacific is 300 million cubic kilometers. The total inventory of the four Fukushima Daiichi reactors, including their spent fuel pools, is 732 tons of Uranium and Plutonium fuel which is largely insoluble in sea water. The inventory in terms of the medium half-life nuclides of radiological significance Cs-137, Cs-134 and Strontium-90, is 3 x 1018 becquerels (Bq) each. Adding these up gives about 1019 Bq. If we dissolve that entire amount into the Pacific, we get a mean concentration of 33 Bq per cubic meter - not great, but not lethal. Of course this is ridiculous since the catastrophe released less than 1017 Bq of these combined nuclides and even if all of this ends up in the sea (which it may do), the overall dilution will result in a concentration of 1 Bq per cubic meter. So the people in California can relax. In fact, the contamination of California and indeed the rest of the planet from the global weapons test fallout of 1959-1962 was far worse, and resulted in the cancer epidemic which began in 1980. The atmospheric megaton explosions drove the radioactivity into the stratosphere and the rain brought it back to earth to get into the milk, the food, the air, and our children’s bones. Kennedy and Kruschev called a halt in 1963, saving millions.

What we have here in Fukushima is more local, but still very deadly and certainly worse than Chernobyl since the populations are so large. And this brings me to my second point, and a warning to the Japanese people. The contamination of the sea results in adsorption of the radionuclides by the sand and silt on the coast and river estuaries. The east coast of Japan, the sediment and sand on the shores, will now be horribly radioactive. This material is re-suspended into the air through a process called sea-to-land transfer. The coastal air they inhale is laden with radioactive particles. I know about this since I was asked in 1998 by the Irish State to carry out a two-year study of the cancer effects of releases into the Irish Sea by the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield. We looked at small area data leaked to us by the Welsh Cancer Registry covering the period of 1974-1989, when Sellafield was releasing significant amounts of radio-Caesium, radio-Strontium, and Plutonium. Results showed a remarkable and sharp 30 per cent increase in cancer rates in those living within 1km of the coast. The effect was very local and dropped away sharply at 2km. In trying to discover the cause, we came across measurements made by the UK Atomic Energy Research Establishment. Using special cloth filters, they had measured Plutonium in the air by distance from the contaminated coast. The trend was the same as the cancer trend, increasing sharply in the 1km strip near the coast. We later examined cancer rates in a higher resolution questionnaire study in Carlingford, Ireland. This clearly showed the effect increasing inside the 1km radius in the same way. The results were never published in scientific literature but were presented to the UK CERRIE committee and eventually made it into a book which I wrote in 2007 entitled, “Wolves of Water.” Make no mistake, this is a deadly effect. By 2003, we had found 20-fold excess risk of leukemia and brain tumours in the population of children on the north Wales coast. The children were denied of course by the Welsh Cancer Intelligence Unit that supplanted the old Welsh Cancer Registry - which had been shut down immediately after the data was released to us. We did publish this in scientific literature.

Nevertheless, the sea-to-land effect is real. And anyone living within 1km of the coast to at least 200km north or south of Fukushima should get out. They should evacuate inland. It is not eating the fish and shellfish that gets you - it’s breathing. And what about the future? The future is bleak. I see no way of resolving the catastrophe. They will either have to pour water on the wreckage forever, and thus continue to contaminate the local sea, or find some more drastic immediate solution. I was told that US experts had the idea at the beginning of bombing the reactors into the harbour. Not so stupid in my opinion. That at least may enable them to get sufficiently close to the pieces to pick them up, and should also solve the cooling problem. Apparently (my contact said) the French argued them out of it because of the negative effect on nuclear energy (and Uranium shares).

Professor Christopher Busby from the European Committee on Radiation Risks for RT.

Pretty impressive photos. I love anything military or military hardware related. Too bad I can't contribute to this thread with pictures but you guys are already doing a darn good job
Never knew Nigeria had those mine resistant vehicles in it's arsenal

[size=24pt]Are You Absolutely Certain That You Know The Truth About What Happened On 9/11?[/size]
By Michael Snyder, on September 11th, 2013



https://thetruthwins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/9-11-Flight-175-Hits-The-World-Trade-Center-450x391.jpeg
9-11 Flight 175 Hits The World Trade Center

Do you believe that you know precisely what happened on 9/11/2001? Are you absolutely certain that you know the truth? If so, what you are about to see might shake you up quite a bit. The events that happened 12 years ago on this day shocked the world and will certainly never be forgotten. Thousands of innocent people died needlessly, and that day fundamentally changed the course of history. But what if it could be proven that the “official story” that the government has been telling us about 9/11 is a lie? Are you willing to use logic and reason to evaluate new evidence that has emerged, or do you have such an emotional attachment to your current beliefs that you are going to blindly believe whatever the government tells you to believe? In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. For the next few minutes, please be very skeptical as you read the rest of this article. Be skeptical of what I am claiming, be skeptical of what the experts are claiming and be skeptical of what the government is claiming. Evaluate the evidence for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

More than 2,000 architects and engineers are supporting a massive worldwide advertising campaign entitled ReThink911. You can find the official website right here . According to these architects and engineers, the government’s version of what happened on 9/11/2001 is absolutely impossible.

And it turns out that an increasing percentage of the American population is agreeing with them. The following is an excerpt from a ReThink911 press release about new polling that has just been released…

—–

On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, a new national survey by the polling firm YouGov reveals that one in two Americans have doubts about the government’s account of 9/11, and after viewing video footage of World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse, 46% suspect that it was caused by a controlled demolition. Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper, collapsed into its own footprint late in the afternoon on 9/11.

The poll was sponsored by ReThink911 , a global public awareness campaign launched on September 1. The campaign includes a 54-foot billboard in Times Square and a variety of transit and outdoor advertising in 11 other cities, all posing the question, “Did you know a third tower fell on 9/11?”

Among the poll’s findings:

38% of Americans have some doubts about the official account of 9/11, 10% do not believe it at all, and 12% are unsure about it;
46%, nearly one in two, are not aware that a third tower collapsed on 9/11. Of those who are aware of Building 7’s collapse, only 19% know the building’s name;
After seeing video footage of Building 7′s collapse:
46% are sure or suspect it was caused by controlled demolition, compared to 28% who are sure or suspect fires caused it, and 27% who don’t know;
By a margin of nearly two to one, 41% support a new investigation of Building 7′s collapse, compared to 21% who oppose it.

—–

Even though Americans have been hearing about 9/11 endlessly for the past 12 years, nearly half of them still don’t know that a third building fell on that day. A 47-story building named “Building 7″ collapsed perfectly into its own footprint at freefall speed, but no plane ever hit it.

So why did it fall?

The following is the official ReThink911 video about Building 7…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNR6Kbg5jJ8&feature=player_embedded

And of course the collapse of the other two World Trade Center towers would have been impossible as well without the help of controlled demolition.

But for many Americans, the implications of accepting that reality would just be too painful to accept. It would mean that someone wired those buildings for controlled demolition ahead of time, and for many very patriotic Americans such a notion is absolutely unthinkable.

However, we owe it to future generations of Americans to put our emotions aside and to search out the truth. Whoever was responsible for the events of 9/11 needs to be brought to justice, no matter who they might be.

And the families of those that were killed on that day deserve to know exactly what happened and why it happened. The following is an excerpt from a great editorial by Dennis Maley in the Bradenton Times…

[center]For too long, government officials have been able to successfully leverage the emotional components of the tragedy to deflect questions they painted as either disrespectful to the victims and their families or crackpot conspiracies. But with over 2,000 architects and engineers having signed the 9/11 truth petition, most of whom have offered credible and detailed reasons why their expertise has left them at odds with root elements of the official version of events, there remain too many unanswered questions for us to continue to ignore those raising them.

Perhaps the most noted event of that day, in terms of skepticism, is the implausible “collapse” of building seven, the third tower to fall, which reached free-fall speeds and fell in its own footprint in the way that a controlled demolition does – despite the fact that it was not hit by a plane. Building seven’s improbable collapse was not explained by the 9/11 Commission and has been routinely described by demolition experts as something which could have only occurred through a well-planned, coordinated demolition, aided by pre-placed explosives.

The two main towers also fell at near free-fall speeds, with concrete floors being pulverized to dust almost immediately (before the required force would be present) while the necessary deceleration that would be needed to generate the force to continuously penetrate each floor below was obviously absent. Quite simply, a building of that size and structural integrity would not seem capable of falling at such speed, while simultaneously expelling such tremendous energy in obliterating each floor – which was nearly 4-ft. thick and topped with 4 inches of poured concrete above and lined with interlocking steel trusses beneath.

The documented phenomenon of extreme-high temperatures at the twin tower sites, which inexplicably reached levels capable of melting iron and structural steel when a normal open air fire is not capable of reaching such ranges, also warrants a closer look, as does eyewitness accounts of “molten metal.” Iron-laden spheres in residual dust at the site that suggest temperatures had to reach more than 2,700 degrees fahrenheit (the melting point of iron and structural steel) is also suspect. The use of thermite would be one possible explanation, though the pyrotechnic compound was not tested for at the site, a standard protocol when investigating such an explosion.[/center]


Why are so many Americans still so resistant to asking such hard questions?

Shouldn’t we allow the evidence to lead us to the truth instead of allowing the government to define what the truth is for us?

Posted below is video from investigative reporter Ben Swann asking some more questions about the collapse of Building 7…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tSfwkKaUo&feature=player_embedded

Why aren’t there more reporters out there like Ben Swann?

Today, we live in a society where certain kinds of questions are considered to be “off limits”. But that should not be the case. As Americans, we should all be “truth seekers”.

After all, the truth will set us free, right?

I want to share another video with you, but this one doesn’t have anything to do with Building 7. Instead, it shows well-known footage of Flight 175 hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. The incredible thing about this video is that it apparently shows a very obvious “CGI glitch” that I have absolutely no explanation for. Watch this video for yourself and see what you think…


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL-rU3CCPkc

Can you explain that very blatant CGI glitch?

I can’t.

Perhaps there is a rational explanation. If so, I would love to hear it.

But wait a minute, wasn’t al-Qaeda supposed to be behind 9/11? Wasn’t that the reason why we have been chasing them around the Middle East for over a decade?

Well, these days the U.S. government is actually allied with al-Qaeda. The Obama administration has been supplying Syrian rebel groups that are openly affiliated with al-Qaeda with weapons and supplies even though they are slaughtering Christians , using chemical weapons and dismembering little girls .

And now Obama is telling us that we need the U.S. military to get directly involved in the civil war in Syria so that we can help al-Qaeda take over Syria and set up a radical jihadist Sunni government in that nation. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson…

[center]The Obama administration’s insistence that the United States intervene militarily on the side of Syrian rebels, who are being led by Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, which the report states is the “most effective fighting force in Syria,” has led to charges by the likes of Senator Ted Cruz that the White House is acting as “Al-Qaeda’s Air Force.”

The BPC report also warns that chemical weapons falling into the hands of jihadists in Syria could subsequently be used against the west.

“Potential jihadi access to the vast stockpile of chemical weapons assembled by the Assad regime and scattered across Syria is a potential game-changer though—not only because they could be used there, but because they could be smuggled out of the country as well,” states the report.

The report highlights how Jabhat al-Nusra is under the control of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who “personally intervened to settle a dispute between Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaeda in Iraq….and declared the Syrian group to be under his direction.”[/center]

If you doubt any of this, just watch the video posted below . It shows Syrian rebels singing a victory song about the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, praising Osama bin Laden, and calling him their leader…


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsq5ZRir-0k

Does that video make you angry?

It should.

12 years after 9/11, the U.S. government is allied with the very forces that supposedly conducted the terror attacks in the first place.

Something does not add up here.

For much more on all of this, and especially if you are new to this information about 9/11, I encourage you to watch the award-winning documentary Loose Change which is posted below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsRm8M-qOjQ&feature=player_embedded

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

War hungry America. The indispensable and exceptional country. The morally upright country, the bastion of freedom and democracy and defender of the weak and downtrodden.... "Tailored, limited, narrow, unbelievably small attack" my @$$.... The end game is to unseat Assad and then move unto Iran all at the behest of their Israeli masters!

[size=24pt]Are You Absolutely Certain That You Know The Truth About What Happened On 9/11?[/size]
By Michael Snyder, on September 11th, 2013



https://thetruthwins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/9-11-Flight-175-Hits-The-World-Trade-Center-450x391.jpeg
9-11 Flight 175 Hits The World Trade Center

Do you believe that you know precisely what happened on 9/11/2001? Are you absolutely certain that you know the truth? If so, what you are about to see might shake you up quite a bit. The events that happened 12 years ago on this day shocked the world and will certainly never be forgotten. Thousands of innocent people died needlessly, and that day fundamentally changed the course of history. But what if it could be proven that the “official story” that the government has been telling us about 9/11 is a lie? Are you willing to use logic and reason to evaluate new evidence that has emerged, or do you have such an emotional attachment to your current beliefs that you are going to blindly believe whatever the government tells you to believe? In this day and age, it is absolutely imperative that we all learn to think for ourselves. For the next few minutes, please be very skeptical as you read the rest of this article. Be skeptical of what I am claiming, be skeptical of what the experts are claiming and be skeptical of what the government is claiming. Evaluate the evidence for yourself and come to your own conclusions.

More than 2,000 architects and engineers are supporting a massive worldwide advertising campaign entitled ReThink911. You can find the official website right here . According to these architects and engineers, the government’s version of what happened on 9/11/2001 is absolutely impossible.

And it turns out that an increasing percentage of the American population is agreeing with them. The following is an excerpt from a ReThink911 press release about new polling that has just been released…

—–
On the 12th anniversary of 9/11, a new national survey by the polling firm YouGov reveals that one in two Americans have doubts about the government’s account of 9/11, and after viewing video footage of World Trade Center Building 7’s collapse, 46% suspect that it was caused by a controlled demolition. Building 7, a 47-story skyscraper, collapsed into its own footprint late in the afternoon on 9/11.

The poll was sponsored by ReThink911 , a global public awareness campaign launched on September 1. The campaign includes a 54-foot billboard in Times Square and a variety of transit and outdoor advertising in 11 other cities, all posing the question, “Did you know a third tower fell on 9/11?”

Among the poll’s findings:

38% of Americans have some doubts about the official account of 9/11, 10% do not believe it at all, and 12% are unsure about it;
46%, nearly one in two, are not aware that a third tower collapsed on 9/11. Of those who are aware of Building 7’s collapse, only 19% know the building’s name;
After seeing video footage of Building 7′s collapse:
46% are sure or suspect it was caused by controlled demolition, compared to 28% who are sure or suspect fires caused it, and 27% who don’t know;
By a margin of nearly two to one, 41% support a new investigation of Building 7′s collapse, compared to 21% who oppose it.

—–
Even though Americans have been hearing about 9/11 endlessly for the past 12 years, nearly half of them still don’t know that a third building fell on that day. A 47-story building named “Building 7″ collapsed perfectly into its own footprint at freefall speed, but no plane ever hit it.

So why did it fall?

The following is the official ReThink911 video about Building 7…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNR6Kbg5jJ8&feature=player_embedded

And of course the collapse of the other two World Trade Center towers would have been impossible as well without the help of controlled demolition.

But for many Americans, the implications of accepting that reality would just be too painful to accept. It would mean that someone wired those buildings for controlled demolition ahead of time, and for many very patriotic Americans such a notion is absolutely unthinkable.

However, we owe it to future generations of Americans to put our emotions aside and to search out the truth. Whoever was responsible for the events of 9/11 needs to be brought to justice, no matter who they might be.

And the families of those that were killed on that day deserve to know exactly what happened and why it happened. The following is an excerpt from a great editorial by Dennis Maley in the Bradenton Times…

[center]For too long, government officials have been able to successfully leverage the emotional components of the tragedy to deflect questions they painted as either disrespectful to the victims and their families or crackpot conspiracies. But with over 2,000 architects and engineers having signed the 9/11 truth petition, most of whom have offered credible and detailed reasons why their expertise has left them at odds with root elements of the official version of events, there remain too many unanswered questions for us to continue to ignore those raising them.

Perhaps the most noted event of that day, in terms of skepticism, is the implausible “collapse” of building seven, the third tower to fall, which reached free-fall speeds and fell in its own footprint in the way that a controlled demolition does – despite the fact that it was not hit by a plane. Building seven’s improbable collapse was not explained by the 9/11 Commission and has been routinely described by demolition experts as something which could have only occurred through a well-planned, coordinated demolition, aided by pre-placed explosives.

The two main towers also fell at near free-fall speeds, with concrete floors being pulverized to dust almost immediately (before the required force would be present) while the necessary deceleration that would be needed to generate the force to continuously penetrate each floor below was obviously absent. Quite simply, a building of that size and structural integrity would not seem capable of falling at such speed, while simultaneously expelling such tremendous energy in obliterating each floor – which was nearly 4-ft. thick and topped with 4 inches of poured concrete above and lined with interlocking steel trusses beneath.

The documented phenomenon of extreme-high temperatures at the twin tower sites, which inexplicably reached levels capable of melting iron and structural steel when a normal open air fire is not capable of reaching such ranges, also warrants a closer look, as does eyewitness accounts of “molten metal.” Iron-laden spheres in residual dust at the site that suggest temperatures had to reach more than 2,700 degrees fahrenheit (the melting point of iron and structural steel) is also suspect. The use of thermite would be one possible explanation, though the pyrotechnic compound was not tested for at the site, a standard protocol when investigating such an explosion.[/center]


Why are so many Americans still so resistant to asking such hard questions?

Shouldn’t we allow the evidence to lead us to the truth instead of allowing the government to define what the truth is for us?

Posted below is video from investigative reporter Ben Swann asking some more questions about the collapse of Building 7…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7tSfwkKaUo&feature=player_embedded

Why aren’t there more reporters out there like Ben Swann?

Today, we live in a society where certain kinds of questions are considered to be “off limits”. But that should not be the case. As Americans, we should all be “truth seekers”.

After all, the truth will set us free, right?

I want to share another video with you, but this one doesn’t have anything to do with Building 7. Instead, it shows well-known footage of Flight 175 hitting one of the World Trade Center towers. The incredible thing about this video is that it apparently shows a very obvious “CGI glitch” that I have absolutely no explanation for. Watch this video for yourself and see what you think…


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eL-rU3CCPkc

Can you explain that very blatant CGI glitch?

I can’t.

Perhaps there is a rational explanation. If so, I would love to hear it.

But wait a minute, wasn’t al-Qaeda supposed to be behind 9/11? Wasn’t that the reason why we have been chasing them around the Middle East for over a decade?

Well, these days the U.S. government is actually allied with al-Qaeda. The Obama administration has been supplying Syrian rebel groups that are openly affiliated with al-Qaeda with weapons and supplies even though they are slaughtering Christians , using chemical weapons and dismembering little girls .

And now Obama is telling us that we need the U.S. military to get directly involved in the civil war in Syria so that we can help al-Qaeda take over Syria and set up a radical jihadist Sunni government in that nation. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson…

[center]The Obama administration’s insistence that the United States intervene militarily on the side of Syrian rebels, who are being led by Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, which the report states is the “most effective fighting force in Syria,” has led to charges by the likes of Senator Ted Cruz that the White House is acting as “Al-Qaeda’s Air Force.”

The BPC report also warns that chemical weapons falling into the hands of jihadists in Syria could subsequently be used against the west.

“Potential jihadi access to the vast stockpile of chemical weapons assembled by the Assad regime and scattered across Syria is a potential game-changer though—not only because they could be used there, but because they could be smuggled out of the country as well,” states the report.

The report highlights how Jabhat al-Nusra is under the control of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who “personally intervened to settle a dispute between Jabhat al-Nusra and al-Qaeda in Iraq….and declared the Syrian group to be under his direction.”[/center]

If you doubt any of this, just watch the video posted below . It shows Syrian rebels singing a victory song about the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, praising Osama bin Laden, and calling him their leader…


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsq5ZRir-0k

Does that video make you angry?

It should.

12 years after 9/11, the U.S. government is allied with the very forces that supposedly conducted the terror attacks in the first place.

Something does not add up here.

For much more on all of this, and especially if you are new to this information about 9/11, I encourage you to watch the award-winning documentary Loose Change which is posted below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsRm8M-qOjQ&feature=player_embedded

About the author: Michael T. Snyder is a former Washington D.C. attorney who now publishes The Truth. His new thriller entitled “The Beginning Of The End” is now available on Amazon.com.

[size=24pt]Syria: US starts delivering weapons to rebels[/size]
The United States has reportedly started funneling weapons and technical equipment to rebel fighters in Syria.
https://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02667/syria_2667248b.jpg
A man walking through a destroyed residential area of the Syrian city of Saraqib, southwest of Aleppo, on September 9, following repeated airstrikes by government jets Photo: AFP/GETTY

AFP

4:29AM BST 12 Sep 2013



Citing US and Syrian sources, the Washington Post wrote that the CIA had begun delivering shipments of lethal aid in the past fortnight.

The newspaper reported on its website that the US State Department has sent separate shipments of vehicles and other materials, including new types of non-lethal gear, sophisticated communications equipment and advanced combat medical kits.

The CIA said it had no comment on the Washington Post report.

The arms shipments - which the daily said are limited to light weapons and other munitions that can be tracked - arrive at a crucial moment in the bloody standoff between the rebels and the Damascus government.

The Post cited US officials who said the goal of the non-lethal assistance is to help foster cohesion among units of Syria's disjointed armed opposition.

US President Barack Obama on Tuesday agreed to give international diplomacy a chance to resolve the conflict before unleashing military strikes.

The long-awaited military aid comes one day after the US president told the American people in a nationally broadcast address that he was deferring taking military action in Syria in order to study a Russian initiative which would see Damascus relinquish its chemical weapons.

He made his appeal to US lawmakers after a weeks long build up to war in which he sought congressional approval for military strikes against Syria for using chemical weapons on its own people.

Mr Obama made his threats of strikes in response to the August 21 attack, when Syrian forces allegedly killed 1,400 people in rebel-held areas near Damascus using sarin gas, according to US estimates.

But the US leader in his speech late Tuesday gave assurances that there would be no military force for the moment, given the Russian plan.

"This initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force, particularly because Russia is one of Assad's strongest allies."

Edited by Bonnie Malkin

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10303636/Syria-US-starts-delivering-weapons-to-rebels.html

In the words of my friend:

"I guess Apple has finally found a clever way to get a data base of biometric data of users of its products. Next thing you know it will be iris scan to unlock your phone & in 3 years you'll find out NSA has biometric data of all cell phone users in the world."


I personally feel all your biometric data (finger print, iris scan, etc) will eventually - under the almost always assured blessing of the FISA courts - be handed over to the NSA/CIA which in turn can be used not only to breach the security of any other account your may have on other sites or technology/security dependent platforms such as iTunes, Gmail, Facebook, your online banking, etc, which are also gradually transiting to biometric security but to also steal your identity, perpetrate fraud in your name and even be used to blackmail you after some unlawful or compromising act has been committed in your name..

That isn't fiction. Mossad agents in 2010 in Dubai, if your remember, used a similar to assassinate a Palestinian militant by using fake or fraudulently obtained passports from several European countries and Australia. Providing your biometric data just makes these a whole lot easier..



[size=24pt]How iPhone 5S makes your finger into a password[/size]

By Doug Gross, CNN
September 11, 2013 -- Updated 0510 GMT (1310 HKT)


https://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/130910145631-bts-apple-fingerprint-technology-00000029-story-top.jpg
(CNN) -- The most impressive feature of the new iPhone 5S may be its ability to turn your finger into a password.

Touch ID is Apple's name for a new fingerprint scanner that would act as a security tool for log-ins and for making purchases from iTunes and other Apple stores.

"Your fingerprint is one of the best passwords in the world," said Dan Riccio, a senior vice president for hardware design at Apple, in a promotional video. "It's always with you and no two are exactly alike."

Apple unveiled the iPhone 5S, along with a cheaper, simpler iPhone 5C, at an event Tuesday at the company's California headquarters.

Read: Hands-on impressions of the new iPhones

On the new 5S, the Home button will be made of sapphire crystal and act as a reader. According to Apple a fingerprint -- up to five prints from different users, depending on who else shares your phone -- can be read by the sensor from any angle to give access the same way a password does currently.

The fingerprint data is encrypted, Riccio said, and stored internally on the phone.

"It's never available to other software and it's never stored on Apple's servers or backed up to iCloud," he said.
iPhone 5S to come in gold, gray, silver
Check out Apple's new iPhone 5C

The iPhone isn't the first phone to have a fingerprint sensor. In 2011, the Motorola ATRIX 4G included one, though adoption among users wasn't particularly high and the company eventually discontinued the feature. And at least one Android phone to be released this year also will have the technology, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Some laptops and PCs have had fingerprint readers for several years now. But the technology has never really caught on, with users often complaining about them being balky and unreliable.

Maybe Apple can change that.

"Fingerprint sensors have come a long way," said Michael Barrett, president of the Fast Identity Online Alliance, an industry group advocating for universal security authentication tools. "They are by and large much better quality now and very readily able to detect 'Is this just an image of a finger or a real-life finger?'"

But while he called Touch ID "an exciting announcement," Barrett still sees some problems.
Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller speaks about security features of the new iPhone 5S.
Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller speaks about security features of the new iPhone 5S.

First, he said, fingerprint scanning still isn't perfect. He mentioned his wife, an artist, who has trouble accessing her PC with a fingerprint scanner when she's been working with plaster, which dries out her hands.

"Like many biometrics, it falls slightly into 'your mileage may vary,'" he said. "If it works for you, great. But it may not work for you all the time."

The former chief information security officer at PayPal, Barrett also sees limitations to using the system for online purchases. While it may work fine on iTunes or in the App Store, it's not likely other Web retailers are going to spend millions of dollars to make their systems accommodate an Apple feature used on fewer than 17 percent of the world's smartphones.

That means iPhone 5S owners who used Touch ID for purchases inside Apple's "walled garden" would still need to use other security tools to shop elsewhere with the same phone.

David Rogers, director of the Columbia Business School's Digital Marketing program and executive director of its Center for Global Brand Leadership, called Touch ID one of several "nice," but ultimately underwhelming, features on the iPhone 5S.

"Touch ID ... could have been that killer app. But so far, it's just a feature that saves you a couple seconds logging in," he said.

"If they can manage to link it to multiple profiles on a device, like the new Google Nexus tablets, or make it a password to controlling smart devices in the home -- your stereo, thermostat, etc. -- that could make for a truly killer feature. But they just didn't get there today."

Paco Hope, principal consultant at software security firm Cigital, said that, if nothing else, Apple will widely expand the public's understanding of the use of biometrics in the digital world.

"People's ideas about biometrics were as informed by Hollywood as they were by real products and experiences," he said. "Now, when someone asks the value of a fingerprint scanner, we can point to the iPhone and use it as a reference, for better or worse.

"Esoteric and academic theories of usability, reliability, false positives, false negatives, and so on will suddenly be tested by millions of real users in real situations."

Even from CNN, the government's mouthpiece:



He (Obama) faces a public that is deeply skeptical of attacking another Arab/Muslim country; a divided and skeptical Congress; and an international community that fears military action. And he confronts this environment with a military option that he himself doesn't really believe in either. There's no real sense of urgency or emergency, partly because the president has willfully downplayed that sense of crisis.

Built2last: Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul delivered these remarks after Obama concluded in response to Obama's speech. The text was provided by his office.

Twelve years after we were attacked by al-Qaida, 12 years after 3,000 Americans were killed by al-Qaida, President Obama now asks us to be allies with al-Qaida.
Americans by a large majority want nothing to do with the Syrian civil war. We fail to see a national security interest in a war between a leader who gasses his own citizens and Islamic rebels who are killing Christians.
Some argue that American credibility is on the line, that because President Obama drew a red line with chemical weapons, America must act or lose credibility. I would argue that America's credibility does not reside in one man.
If our enemies wish to know if America will defend herself, let them look no farther than our response to 9/11. When attacked, we responded with overwhelming force and with the military objective of complete victory over our attackers.
The Reagan Doctrine grew out of his experience in the Middle East. Reagan's defense secretary spelled out a systematic approach to our involvement in Middle Eastern conflicts. First, the American people must be supportive - overwhelmingly supportive - but most importantly our mission must be to win.
There is no clearly defined mission in Syria, no clearly defined American interest. In fact, the Obama Administration has specifically stated that "no military solution" exists. They have said the war will be "unbelievably small and limited."
To me that sounds like they are pre-announcing that the military strikes will not punish Assad personally or effect regime change.
It is said that America must act to prevent Assad from using chemical weapons again. But it is unknown whether attacking Assad encourages him or discourages him. It is equally likely that Assad could feel cornered and resort to chemical weapons in an expanded fashion.
It is equally likely that the bombing could de-stabilize Assad and he could lose control of the chemical weapons. The Obama Administration has indicated that it would take 75,000 ground troops to secure the weapons and that they are prepared to do just that despite the resolution's admonition against ground troops.
The question must be asked, "Would a U.S. bombing campaign make it more or less likely that Assad loses control of the chemical weapons?"
The same question can be asked of a series of bad outcomes. "Would a US bombing campaign make it more or less likely that Assad attacks Israel with chemical weapons?"
Would a bombing campaign make it more or less likely that refugees stream into Jordan? Just the threat of bombing has increased the flow of refugees.
Would a bombing campaign in Syria make the region more or less stable? Would it make it more or less likely that Iran or Russia becomes more involved?
Just about any bad outcome you can imagine is made more likely by U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war.
In the past 24 hours, Russia has offered to broker a deal with Syria to have their chemical weapons put under international control. Diplomacy, if sincere, would be a welcome resolution. The Syrian foreign minister has indicated an interest in the proposal.
Can we trust the participants in this plan?
Diplomacy is always a mixture of trust, distrust, and watchfulness. We should not be naïve, and we should have a solid plan and safeguards in place as part of any solution.
As Reagan put it we must "trust, but verify."
Some will say that only the threat of force brought Russia and Syria to the negotiating table. In fact, Russian has been negotiating with the US for over a year to find a peaceful resolution to the Syrian civil war.
The possibility of a diplomatic solution is a good thing, though we must proceed with caution on the details.
But one thing is for certain, the chance for diplomacy would not have occurred without strong voices against an immediate bombing campaign. If we had simply gone to war last week or the week before, as many advocated, we wouldn't be looking at a possible solution today.
The voices of those in Congress and the overwhelming number of Americans who stood up and said "slow down" allowed this possible solution to take shape.
Will diplomacy win the day? No one can tell for certain. But on a broader issue, it is an important day, though, in the sense that a President recognized his Constitutional duty and came to seek Congressional authority for war.
If the vote occurs, I will vote no and encourage my colleagues to vote no as well. The President has not made a compelling case that American interests are at risk in Syria. The threshold for war should be a significant one.
The President maintains that he still has the power to initiate war. This is untrue. The Constitution gave the power to declare war to Congress. James Madison wrote that the "Constitution supposes, what history demonstrates, that the executive is the branch most prone to war. Therefore the Constitution, with studied care, vested the power to declare war in the legislature."
This is no small question. I see the vote on whether to go to war in very personal terms. I will not vote to send my son, your son, or anyone's daughter to war unless a compelling American interest is present. I am not convinced that we have a compelling interest in the Syrian civil war.
May God help us make the wise decision here and avoid an unnecessary war.

Thank you O jare! It is senators such as Rand Paul, Justin Amash and co that are the sensible ones. They are the ones that choose peace over war, conversation over confrontation and common sense over nonsense. Others such as McCain and Graham are obviously pawns of the Military Industrial Complex and Mega Corporations that have an insatiable appetite for wars even if America falls under no threat and even if such wars is to the detriment of their economy; but they do not care cos their pockets are getting lined.

Here, outgoing US president, in his farewell speech, foresaw the dangers that the Military Industrial Complex presented and found it needful to warn the American people.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
Video: Dwight D. Eisenhower exit speech on January 17, 1961, warning us of the military industrial complex.
....

And for those of you that fail to see and haven't been studying this Syria crisis for a while, Obama really isn't in favour of a strike on Syria. The Israelis, the so-called opposition, the Saudis, have all voiced their frustrating with how he has dragged his feet with regards to dealing with Syria and Iran. But of course, he as president is really just a figure head and cannot possibly hold out for long. His true masters: the Israel Lobby, the Military Industrial Complex, Banksters and Corporations would see to it that their agenda is fulfilled.....

By the way, if you think war isn't profitable, look no further than how Raytheon's share price spiked on the day the US announced plans to attack Syria.


War Is a Racket - retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two time Medal of Honor recipient Smedley D. Butler.

Dygeasy: Started From The Bottom Now I'm Here...

I love that song. It inspires me

(AINA) -- A top secret memo sent by the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia reveals the Saudi Kingdom sent death-row inmates, sentenced to execution by decapitation, to Syria to fight Jihad against the Syrian government in exchange for commuting their sentences.

According to the memo, dated April 17, 2012, the Saudi Kingdom negotiated with a total of 1239 inmates, offering them a full pardon and a monthly salary for their families, who were to remain in the Kingdom, in exchange for "...their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria."

The memo was signed by Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan, the "Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior."

According to the memo, prisoners were of the following nationalities: Yemenis, Palestinians, Saudis, Sudanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Somalis, Afghanis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Iraqis, and Kuwaitis.

There were 23 Iraqi prisoners.

A former member of the Iraqi parliament, who spoke to AINA on condition of anonymity, confirmed the authenticity of the document and said most of the Iraqi prisoners Saudi Arabia sent to Syria returned to Iraq and admitted that they had agreed to the deal offered by the Saudi Kingdom, and requested the Iraqi government to petition the Saudi government to release their families, who were being held hostage in Saudi Arabia.

Yemeni nationals who were sent to Syria also returned to Yemen and asked their government to secure the release of their families, according to the former Iraqi MP, who said there are many more documents, like the one shown below, about Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Initially Saudi Arabia denied the existence of this program. But the testimony of the released prisoners forced the Saudi government to admit, in private circles, its existence.

According to the former Iraqi MP, the Russians threatened to bring this issue to the United Nations if the Saudis continued working against President Bashar al-Assad. The Saudis agreed to stop their clandestine activities and work towards finding a political solution on condition that knowledge of this program would not be made public.

Here is the translation of the memo:
This is a document issued by

Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Ministry of Interior
Follow-up LOGO Number: 71466/J/H
Attachments:
Date: 25/5/1433 H. [April /17/2012 AD]

(Top Secret)

His Excellency General Suood Al-Thnayyan
The Classified [Secret] Office at the Ministry of Interior May Allah protect him

Peace be upon you and Allah's mercy and blessings

In reference to the Royal Court telegram No. 112, dated on 04/19/1433 H [March 3, 2012], referring to those held in the Kingdom jails accused with crimes to which Islamic Sharia law of execution by sword [decapitation] applies, we inform you that we are in dialogue with the accused criminals who have been convicted with smuggling drugs, murder, rape, from the following nationalities: 110 Yemenis, 21 Palestinians, 212 Saudis, 96 Sudanese, 254 Syrians, 82 Jordanians, 68 Somalis, 32 Afghanis, 94 Egyptians, 203 Pakistanis, 23 Iraqis, and 44 Kuwaitis.

We have reached an agreement with them that they will be exempted from the death sentence and given a monthly salary to their families and loved ones, who will be prevented from traveling outside Saudi Arabia in return for rehabilitation of the accused and their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria.

Please accept my greetings.

[Signed]
Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior
Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan

CC:
Authority of enforcement of the common good and prevention of forbidden
Copy for general intelligence

Here is the original memo in Arabic:

https://www.aina.org/images/saudiinmatesdecree.jpg

http://www.aina.org/news/20130120160624.htm

Let the likes of Horus weigh in on this one...Lol Good observation though

,

.

mr_king: Only a Jobless person would sit and read all this crap you've copied and paste here! Why don't you summarise this poo in just a paragraph? No one will be patient enough to read this long piece!

So let me get this straight? You don't want the long boring crap but you want me to make that same crap available to you in an abridged form? Ok na....

A Big Base Gets Bigger

While that sum is sizeable, it’s surpassed by spending on the lone official U.S. base on the African continent, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. That former French Foreign Legion post has been on a decade-long growth spurt.

In 2002, the U.S. dispatched personnel to Africa as part of Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). The next year, CJTF-HOA took up residence at Camp Lemonnier, where it resides to this day. In 2005, the U.S. struck a five-year land-use agreement with the Djiboutian government and exercised the first of two five-year renewal options in late 2010. In 2006, the U.S. signed a separate agreement to expand the camp’s boundaries to 500 acres.

According to AFRICOM’s Benson, between 2009 and 2012, $390 million was spent on construction at Camp Lemonnier. In recent years, the outpost was transformed by the addition of an electric power plant, enhanced water storage and treatment facilities, a dining hall, more facilities for Special Operations Command, and the expansion of aircraft taxiways and parking aprons.

A briefing prepared earlier this year by the Naval Facilities Engineering Command lists a plethora of projects currently underway or poised to begin, including an aircraft maintenance hangar, a telecommunications facility, a fire station, additional security fencing, an ammunition supply facility, interior paved roads, a general purpose warehouse, maintenance shelters for aircraft, an aircraft logistics apron, taxiway enhancements, expeditionary lodging, a combat aircraft loading apron, and a taxiway extension on the east side of the airfield.

Navy documents detail the price tag of this year’s proposed projects, including $7.5 million to be spent on containerized living units and workspaces, $22 million for cold storage and the expansion of dining facilities, $27 million for a fitness center, $43 million for a joint headquarters facility, and a whopping $220 million for a Special Operations Compound, also referred to as “Task Force Compound.”

According to a 2012 briefing by Lieutenant Colonel David Knellinger, the Special Operations Compound will eventually include at least eighteen new facilities, including a two-story joint operations center, a two-story tactical operations center, two five-story barracks, a large motor pool facility, a supply warehouse, and an aircraft hangar with an adjacent air operations center.

A document produced earlier this year by Lieutenant Troy Gilbert, an infrastructure planner with AFRICOM’s engineer division, lists almost $400 million in “emergency” military construction at Camp Lemonnier, including work on the special operations compound and more than $150 million for a new combat aircraft loading area. Navy documents, for their part, estimate that construction at Camp Lemonnier will continue at $70 million to $100 million annually, with future projects to include a $20 million wastewater treatment plant, a $40 million medical and dental center, and more than $150 million in troop housing.

Rules of Engagement

In addition, the U.S. military has been supporting construction all over Africa for its allies. A report by Hugh Denny of the Army Corps of Engineers issued earlier this year references seventy-nine such projects in thirty-three countries between 2011 and 2013, including Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Chad, Cote D’Ivoire, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Tunisia, The Gambia, Togo, Uganda, and Zambia. The reported price-tag: $48 million.

Senegal has, for example, received a $1.2 million “peacekeeping operations training center” under the auspices of the U.S. Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance (ACOTA) program. ACOTA has also supported training center projects in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Niger, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Togo, and Uganda.

The U.S. is planning to finance the construction of barracks and other facilities for Ghana’s armed forces. AFRICOM’s Benson also confirmed to TomDispatch that the Army Corps of Engineers has plans to “equip and refurbish five military border security posts in Djibouti along the Somalia/Somaliland border.” In Kenya, U.S. Special Operations Forces have “played a crucial role in infrastructure investments for the Kenyan Special Operations Regiment and especially in the establishment of the Kenyan Ranger school,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume Beaurpere of the 3rd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group.

AFRICOM’s “humanitarian assistance” program is also expansive. A 2013 Navy briefing lists $7.1 million in humanitarian construction projects—like schools, orphanages, and medical facilities—in nineteen countries from Comoros and Guinea-Bissau to Rwanda. Hugh Denny’s report also lists nine Army Corps of Engineers “security assistance” efforts, valued at more than $12 million, carried out during 2012 and 2013, as well as fifteen additional “security cooperation” projects worth more than $22 million in countries across Africa.

A Deluge of Deployments

In addition to creating or maintaining bases and engaging in military construction across the continent, the U.S. is involved in near constant training and advisory missions. According to AFRICOM’s Colonel Tom Davis, the command is slated to carry out fourteen major bilateral and multilateral exercises by the end of this year. These include Saharan Express 2013, which brought together forces from Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Liberia, Mauritania, Morocco, Senegal, and Sierra Leone, among other nations, for maritime security training; Obangame Express 2013, a counter-piracy exercise involving the armed forces of many nations, including Benin, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Togo; and Africa Endeavor 2013, in which the militaries of Djibouti, Burundi, Cote d’Ivoire, Zambia, and 34 other African nations took part.

Counting countries in which it has bases or outposts or has done construction, and those with which it has conducted military exercises, advisory assignments, security cooperation, or training missions, the U.S. military is involved with more than 90% of Africa’s fifty-four nations.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. As Davis told TomDispatch, “We also conduct some type of military training or military-to-military engagement or activity with nearly every country on the African continent.” A cursory look at just some of U.S. missions this spring drives home the true extent of the growing U.S. engagement in Africa.

In January, for instance, the U.S. Air Force began transporting French troops to Mali to counter Islamist forces there. At a facility in Nairobi, Kenya, AFRICOM provided military intelligence training to junior officers from Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Sudan. In January and February, Special Operations Forces personnel conducted a joint exercise code-named Silent Warrior with Cameroonian soldiers. February saw South African troops travel all the way to Chiang Mai, Thailand, to take part in Cobra Gold 2013, a multinational training exercise cosponsored by the U.S. military.

In March, Navy personnel worked with members of Cape Verde’s armed forces, while Kentucky National Guard troops spent a week advising soldiers from the Comoros Islands. That same month, members of Special-Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Africa deployed to the Singo Peace Support Training Center in Uganda to work with Ugandan soldiers prior to their assignment to the African Union Mission in Somalia. Over the course of the spring, members of the task force would also mentor local troops in Burundi, Cameroon, Ghana, Burkina Faso, the Seychelles, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Liberia.

In April, members of the task force also began training Senegalese commandos at Bel-Air military base in Dakar, while Navy personnel deployed to Mozambique to school civilians in demining techniques. Meanwhile, Marines traveled to Morocco to conduct a training exercise code-named African Lion 13 with that country’s military. In May, Army troops were sent to Lomé, Togo, to work with members of the Togolese Defense Force, as well as to Senga Bay, Malawi, to instruct soldiers there.

That same month, Navy personnel conducted a joint exercise in the Mediterranean Sea with their Egyptian counterparts. In June, personnel from the Kentucky National Guard deployed to Djibouti to advise members of that country’s military on border security methods, while Seabees teamed up with the Tanzanian People’s Defense Force to build maritime security infrastructure. That same month, the Air Force airlifted Liberian troops to Bamako, Mali, to conduct a six-month peacekeeping operation.

Limited or Limitless?

Counting countries in which it has bases or outposts or has done construction, and those with which it has conducted military exercises, advisory assignments, security cooperation, or training missions, the U.S. military, according to TomDispatch’s analysis, is involved with more than 90% of Africa’s fifty-four nations. While AFRICOM commander David Rodriguez maintains that the U.S. has only a “small footprint” on the continent, following those small footprints across the continent can be a breathtaking task.

It’s not hard to imagine why the U.S. military wants to maintain that “small footprint” fiction. On occasion, military commanders couldn’t have been clearer on the subject. “A direct and overt presence of U.S. forces on the African continent can cause consternation… with our own partners who take great pride in their post-colonial abilities to independently secure themselves,” wrote Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume Beaurpere earlier this year in the military trade publication Special Warfare. Special Operations Forces, he added, “must train to operate discreetly within these constraints and the cultural norms of the host nation.”

On a visit to the Pentagon earlier this summer, AFRICOM’s Rodriguez echoed the same point in candid comments to Voice of America: “The history of the African nations, the colonialism, all those things are what point to the reasons why we should… just use a small footprint.”

And yet, however useful that imagery may be to the Pentagon, the U.S. military no longer has a small footprint in Africa. Even the repeated claims that U.S. troops conduct only short-term. intermittent missions there has been officially contradicted. This July, at a change of command ceremony for Naval Special Warfare Unit 10, a spokesman noted the creation and implementation of “a five-year engagement strategy that encompassed the transition from episodic training events to regionally-focused and persistent engagements in five Special Operations Command Africa priority countries.”

In a question-and-answer piece in Special Warfare earlier this year, Colonel John Deedrick, the commander of the 10th Special Forces Group, sounded off about his unit’s area of responsibility. “We are widely employed throughout the continent,” he said. “These are not episodic activities. We are there 365-days-a-year to share the burden, assist in shaping the environment, and exploit opportunities.”

Exploitation and “persistent engagement” are exactly what critics of U.S. military involvement in Africa have long feared, while blowback and the unforeseen consequences of U.S. military action on the continent have already contributed to catastrophic destabilization.

Despite some candid admissions by officers involved in shadowy operations, however, AFRICOM continues to insist that troop deployments are highly circumscribed. The command will not, however, allow independent observers to make their own assessments. Benson said AFRICOM does not “have a media visit program to regularly host journalists there.”

My own requests to report on U.S. operations on the continent were, in fact, rejected in short order. “We will not make an exception in this case,” Benson wrote in a recent email and followed up by emphasizing that U.S. forces are deployed in Africa only “on a limited and temporary basis.” TomDispatch’s own analysis — and a mere glance at the map of recent missions—indicates that there are, in fact, very few limits on where the U.S. military operates in Africa.

While Washington talks openly about rebalancing its military assets to Asia, a pivot to Africa is quietly and unmistakably underway. With the ever-present possibility of blowback from shadowy operations on the continent, the odds are that the results of that pivot will become increasingly evident, whether or not Americans recognize them as such. Behind closed doors, the military says: “Africa is the battlefield of tomorrow, today.” It remains to be seen just when they’ll say the same to the American people.

Key to the Map of the U.S. Military’s Pivot to Africa, 2012-2013
Green markers: U.S. military training, advising, or tactical deployments during 2013
Yellow markers: U.S. military training, advising, or tactical deployments during 2012
Purple marker: U.S. “security cooperation”
Red markers: Army National Guard partnerships
Blue markers: U.S. bases, forward operating sites (FOSes), contingency security locations (CSLs), contingency locations (CLs), airports with fueling agreements, and various shared facilities
Green push pins: U.S. military training/advising of indigenous troops carried out in a third country during 2013
Yellow push pins: U.S. military training/advising of indigenous troops carried out in a third country during 2012

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch and a fellow at the Nation Institute. An award-winning journalist, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and regularly at TomDispatch. He is the author most recently of the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. You can catch his conversation with Bill Moyers about that book by clicking here. His website is NickTurse.com.

Special Ops in Africa

Ouagadougou is just one site for expanding U.S. air operations in Africa. Last year, the 435th Military Construction Flight (MCF)—a rapid-response mobile construction team—revitalized an airfield in South Sudan for Special Operations Command Africa, according to the unit’s commander, Air Force lieutenant Alexander Graboski. Before that, the team also “installed a runway lighting system to enable twenty-four-hour operations” at the outpost. Graboski states that the Air Force’s 435th MCF “has been called upon many times by Special Operations Command Africa to send small teams to perform work in austere locations.” This trend looks as if it will continue. According to a briefing prepared earlier this year by Hugh Denny of the Army Corps of Engineers, plans have been drawn up for Special Operations Command Africa “operations support” facilities to be situated in “multiple locations.”

AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson refused to answer questions about SOCAFRICA facilities, and would not comment on the locations of missions by an elite, quick-response force known as Naval Special Warfare Unit 10 (NSWU 10). But according to Captain Robert Smith, the commander of Naval Special Warfare Group Two, NSWU 10 has been engaged “with strategic countries such as Uganda, Somalia, [and] Nigeria.”

Captain J. Dane Thorleifson, NSWU 10’s outgoing commander, recently mentioned deployments in six “austere locations” in Africa and “every other month contingency operations—Libya, Tunisia, [and] POTUS,” evidently a reference to President Obama’s three-nation trip to Africa in July. Thorleifson, who led the unit from July 2011 to July 2013, also said NSWU 10 had been involved in training “proxy” forces, specifically “building critical host nation security capacity; enabling, advising, and assisting our African CT [counterterror] partner forces so they can swiftly counter and destroy al-Shabab, AQIM [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], and Boko Haram.”

Nzara in South Sudan is one of a string of shadowy forward operating posts on the continent where U.S. Special Operations Forces have been stationed in recent years. Other sites include Obo and Djema in the Central Africa Republic and Dungu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to Lieutenant Colonel Guillaume Beaurpere, the commander of the 3rd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group, “advisory assistance at forward outposts was directly responsible for the establishment of combined operations fusion centers where military commanders, local security officials, and a host of international and non-governmental organizations could share information about regional insurgent activity and coordinate military activities with civil authorities.”

Drone bases are also expanding. In February, the U.S. announced the establishment of a new drone facility in Niger. Later in the spring, AFRICOM spokesman Benjamin Benson confirmed to TomDispatch that U.S. air operations conducted from Base Aerienne 101 at Diori Hamani International Airport in Niamey, Niger’s capital, were providing “support for intelligence collection with French forces conducting operations in Mali and with other partners in the region.” More recently, the New York Times noted that what began as the deployment of one Predator drone to Niger had expanded to encompass daily flights by one of two larger, more advanced Reaper remotely piloted aircraft, supported by 120 Air Force personnel. Additionally, the U.S. has flown drones out of the Seychelles Islands and Ethiopia’s Arba Minch Airport.

All told, the U.S. military now has twenty-nine agreements to use international airports in Africa as refueling centers.

When it comes to expanding U.S. outposts in Africa, the Navy has also been active. It maintains a forward operating location—manned mostly by Seabees, Civil Affairs personnel, and force-protection troops—known as Camp Gilbert in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia. Since 2004, U.S. troops have been stationed at a Kenyan naval base known as Camp Simba at Manda Bay. AFRICOM’s Benson portrayed operations there as relatively minor, typified by “short-term training and engagement activities.” The 60 or so “core” troops stationed there, he said, are also primarily Civil Affairs, Seabees, and security personnel who take part in “military-to-military engagements with Kenyan forces and humanitarian initiatives.”

An AFRICOM briefing earlier this year suggested, however, that the base is destined to be more than a backwater post. It called attention to improvements in water and power infrastructure and an extension of the runway at the airfield, as well as greater “surge capacity” for bringing in forces in the future. A second briefing, prepared by the Navy and obtained by TomDispatch, details nine key infrastructure upgrades that are on the drawing board, underway, or completed.

In addition to extending and improving that runway, they include providing more potable water storage, latrines, and lodgings to accommodate a future “surge” of troops, doubling the capacity of washer and dryer units, upgrading dining facilities, improving roadways and boat ramps, providing fuel storage, and installing a new generator to handle additional demands for power. In a March article in the National Journal, James Kitfield, who visited the base, shed additional light on expansion there. “Navy Seabee engineers,” he wrote, “…have been working round-the-clock shifts for months to finish a runway extension before the rainy season arrives. Once completed, it will allow larger aircraft like C-130s to land and supply Americans or African Union troops.”

AFRICOM’s Benson tells TomDispatch that the U.S. military also makes use of six buildings located on Kenyan military bases at the airport and seaport of Mombasa. In addition, he verified that it has used Léopold Sédar Senghor International Airport in Senegal for refueling stops as well as the “transportation of teams participating in security cooperation activities” such as training missions. He confirmed a similar deal for the use of Addis Ababa Bole International Airport in Ethiopia.

While Benson refused additional comment, official documents indicate that the U.S. has similar agreements for the use of Nsimalen Airport and Douala International Airport in Cameroon, Amílcar Cabral International Airport and Praia International Airport in Cape Verde, N’Djamena International Airport in Chad, Cairo International Airport in Egypt, Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and Moi International Airport in Kenya, Kotoka International Airport in Ghana, ‎ Marrakech-Menara Airport in Morocco, Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Nigeria, Seychelles International Airport in the Seychelles, Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Botswana, Bamako-Senou International Airport in Mali, and Tunis-Carthage International Airport in Tunisia. All told, according to Sam Cooks, a liaison officer with the Defense Logistics Agency, the U.S. military now has twenty-nine agreements to use international airports in Africa as refueling centers.

In addition, U.S. Africa Command has built a sophisticated logistics system, officially known as the AFRICOM Surface Distribution Network, but colloquially referred to as the “new spice route.” It connects posts in Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya, Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda, Dire Dawa in Ethiopia, as well as crucial port facilities used by the Navy’s CTF-53 (“Commander, Task Force, Five Three”) in Djibouti, which are collectively referred to as “the port of Djibouti” by the military. Other key ports on the continent, according to Lieutenant Colonel Wade Lawrence of U.S. Transportation Command, include Ghana’s Tema and Senegal’s Dakar.

The U.S. maintains ten marine gas and oil bunker locations in eight African nations, according to the Defense Logistics Agency. AFRICOM’s Benjamin Benson refuses to name the countries, but recent military contracting documents list key fuel bunker locations in Douala, Cameroon; Mindelo, Cape Verde; Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire; Port Gentil, Gabon; Sekondi, Ghana; Mombasa, Kenya; Port Luis, Mauritius; Walvis Bay, Namibia; Lagos, Nigeria; Port Victoria, Seychelles; Durban, South Africa; and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.

The U.S. also continues to maintain a long-time Naval Medical Research Unit, known as NAMRU-3, in Cairo, Egypt. Another little-noticed medical investigation component, the U.S. Army Research Unit – Kenya, operates from facilities in Kisumu and Kericho.

(In and) Out of Africa

When considering the scope and rapid expansion of U.S. military activities in Africa, it’s important to keep in mind that certain key “African” bases are actually located off the continent. Keeping a semblance of a “light footprint” there, AFRICOM’s headquarters is located at Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart-Moehringen, Germany. In June, Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the base in Stuttgart and the U.S. Air Force’s Air Operations Center in Ramstein were both integral to drone operations in Africa.

In addition to creating or maintaining bases and engaging in military construction across the continent, the U.S. is involved in near constant training and advisory missions.

Key logistics support hubs for AFRICOM are located in Rota, Spain; Aruba in the Lesser Antilles; and Souda Bay, Greece, as well as at Ramstein. The command also maintains a forward operating site on Britain’s Ascension Island, located about 1,000 miles off the coast of Africa in the South Atlantic, but refused requests for further information about its role in operations.

Another important logistics facility is located in Sigonella on the island of Sicily. Italy, it turns out, is an especially crucial component of U.S. operations in Africa. Special-Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force Africa, which provides teams of Marines and sailors for “small-footprint theater security cooperation engagements” across the continent, is based at Naval Air Station Sigonella. It has, according to AFRICOM’s Benjamin Benson, recently deployed personnel to Botswana, Liberia, Djibouti, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Tunisia, and Senegal.

In the future, U.S. Army Africa will be based at Caserma Del Din in northern Italy, adjacent to the recently completed home of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team. A 2012 U.S. Army Africa briefing indicates that construction projects at the Caserma Del Din base will continue through 2018. The reported price-tag for the entire complex: $310 million.