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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 3, 2013 4:52:53 GMT -7
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 9, 2013 7:25:23 GMT -7
It took the British nearly 30 years to take down Roosevelt's Bretton Woods system, and over 40 years to erase the memory of Franklin Roosevelt from the minds of the citizenry. The question is, will we allow the ideas and values that Roosevelt represented to die?
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 14, 2013 3:08:23 GMT -7
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Oct 24, 2013 7:51:57 GMT -7
Why Can People Live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Now, But Not Chernobyl?On August 6 and 9, 1945, U.S. airmen dropped the nuclear bombs Little Boy and Fat Man on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On April 26, 1986, the number four reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine exploded. Today, over 1.6 million people live and seem to be thriving in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a 30 square kilometer area surrounding the plant, remains relatively uninhabited. Here’s why. Fat Man and Little Boy Dropped by the Enola Gay on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, Little Boy was a uranium- fueled bomb about 10 feet long and just over two feet across, that held 140 pounds of uranium and weighed nearly 10,000 pounds. When he exploded as planned nearly 2000 feet above Hiroshima, about two pounds of uranium underwent nuclear fission as it released nearly 16 kilotons of explosive force. Since Hiroshima was on a plain, Little Boy caused immense damage. Estimates vary but it is believed that approximately 70,000 people were killed and an equal number were injured on that day, and nearly 70% of the city’s buildings were destroyed. Since then, approximately 1,900 people, or about 0.5% of the post-bombing population, are believed to have died from cancers attributable to Little Boy’s radiation release. Squat and round, Fat Man, so named for its resemblance to Kasper Gutman from The Maltese Falcon, was dropped three days later on the city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. About two pounds of Fat Man’s 14 pounds of plutonium fissioned when it detonated about 1,650 feet above Nagasaki, releasing 21 kilotons of explosive force. Because the bomb exploded in a valley, much of the city was protected from the blast. Nonetheless, it is estimated that between 45,000 and 70,000 died immediately, and another 75,000 were injured. No data on subsequent cancer deaths attributable to radiation exposure from the bomb is readily available. ChernobylSadly, Chernobyl was likely preventable and, like other nuclear plant accidents, the result of decision-makers’ hubris and bad policy that encouraged shoddy practice. The design of the reactors at Chernobyl was significantly flawed. First, it had a “built-in instability.” When it came, this instability created a vicious cycle, where the coolant would decrease while the reactions (and heat) increased; with less and less coolant, it became increasingly difficult to control the reactions. Second, rather than having a top-notch containment structure consisting of a steel liner plate and post-tensioning and conventional steel reinforced concrete, at Chernobyl they only used heavy concrete. On August 26, 1986, engineers wanted to run a test of how long electrical turbines powered by the reactor would continue operating when the reactor was no longer producing power. To get the experiment to work, they had to disable many of the reactor’s safety systems. This included turning off most automatic safety controls and removing ever more control rods (which absorb neutrons and limit the reaction). In fact by the end of the test, only 6 of the reactor’s 205 control rods remained in the fuel. As they ran the experiment, less cooling water entered the reactor, and what was there began to turn to steam. As less coolant was available, the reaction increased to dangerous levels. To counteract this, the operators tried to reinsert the remaining control rods. Sadly, the rods also had a design flaw, graphite tips (remember, graphite encourages the nuclear reaction). When the nearly 200 graphite tips were inserted into the fuel, reactivity increased and the whole thing blew up. It is estimated that about seven to ten tons of nuclear fuel were released and at least 28 people died directly as a result of the explosion. It is further estimated that over 90,000 square miles of land was seriously contaminated with the worst effects being felt in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. However, radiation quickly spread in the wind and affected wide swaths of the northern hemisphere and Europe, including England, Scotland and Wales. Hard data on the number of people who died as a result of the radioactive release are difficult to find. It is known that of the 100 people exposed to super high radiation levels immediately after the accident, 47 are now deceased. Additionally, it has been reported that thyroid disease skyrocketed in those countries closest to Chernobyl; by 2005, 7,000 cases of thyroid cancer were recorded in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. Radiation Contamination Most experts agree that the areas in the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone are terribly contaminated with radioactive isotopes like caesium-137, strontium-90 and iodine-131, and, therefore, are unsafe for human habitation. Yet neither Nagasaki nor Hiroshima suffer these conditions. This difference is attributable to three factors: (1) the Chernobyl reactor had a lot more nuclear fuel; (2) that was much more efficiently used in reactions; and (3) the whole mess exploded at ground level. Consider: AmountLittle Boy had around 140 pounds of uranium, Fat Man contained about 14 pounds of plutonium and reactor number four had about 180 tons of nuclear fuel. Reaction Efficiency Only about two pounds of Little Boy’s uranium actually reacted. Likewise only about two pounds Fat Man’s plutonium underwent nuclear fission. However, at Chernobyl, at least seven tons of nuclear fuel escaped into the atmosphere; in addition, because the nuclear fuel melted, volatile radioisotopes were released including 100% of its xenon and krypton, 50% of its radioactive iodine and between 20-40% of its cesium. LocationBoth Fat Man and Little Boy were detonated in mid-air, hundreds of feet above the Earth’s surface. As a result, the radioactive debris was taken aloft and dispersed by the mushroom cloud rather than being drilled into the earth. On the other hand, when reactor number four melted down at ground level, the soil underwent neutron activation, where the already active neutrons in the burning fuel reacted with the soil causing it to become radioactive. Uncertain Future Lately, some weird reports have been coming from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – wild animals have returned, and, for the most part, they seem fine. Moose, deer, beaver, wild boar, otter, badger, horses, elk, ducks, swans, storks and more are now being hunted by bears, lynx and packs of wolves, all of which look physically normal (but test high for radioactive contamination). In fact, even early effects of mutations in plants, including malformations and even glowing are now mostly limited to the five most-contaminated places. Although not everyone is ready to agree that Chernobyl is proof that nature can heal herself, scientists agree that studying the unique ecosystem, and how certain species appear to be thriving, has produced data that will ultimately help our understanding of long term radiation effects. For example, wheat seeds taken from the site shortly after the accident produced mutations that continue to this day, yet soybeans grown near the reactor in 2009 seem to have adapted to the higher radiation. Similarly, migrant birds, like barn swallows, seem to struggle more with the radiation in the zone than resident species. As one expert explained, they’re studying the zone’s flora and fauna to learn the answer to a simple question: “Are we more like barn swallows or soybeans?“
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Nov 2, 2013 4:26:10 GMT -7
Wow! What a revelation.................................... The REAL ‘Lone Ranger’ Was An African American Lawman Who Lived With Native American IndiansThe real “Lone Ranger,” it turns out, was an African American man named Bass Reeves, who the legend was based upon. Perhaps not surprisingly, many aspects of his life were written out of the story, including his ethnicity. The basics remained the same: a lawman hunting bad guys, accompanied by a Native American, riding on a white horse, and with a silver trademark. Historians of the American West have also, until recently, ignored the fact that this man was African American, a free black man who headed West to find himself less subject to the racist structure of the established Eastern and Southern states. While historians have largely overlooked Reeves, there have been a few notable works on him. Vaunda Michaux Nelson’s book, Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal, won the 2010 Coretta Scott King Award for best author. Arthur Burton released an overview of the man’s life a few years ago. Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves recounts that Reeves was born into a life of slavery in 1838. His slave-keeper brought him along as another personal servant when he went off to fight with the Confederate Army, during the Civil War. Reeves took the chaos that ensued during the war to escape for freedom, after beating his “master” within an inch of his life, or according to some sources, to death. Perhaps the most intruiging thing about this escape was that Reeves only beat his enslaver after the latter lost sorely at a game of cards with Reeves and attacked him. After successfully defending himself from this attack, he knew that there was no way he would be allowed to live if he stuck around. Reeves fled to the then Indian Territory of today’s Oklahoma and lived harmoniously among the Seminole and Creek Nations of Native American Indians. After the Civil War finally concluded, he married and eventually fathered ten children, making his living as a Deputy U.S. Marshall in Arkansas and the Indian Territory. If this surprises you, it should, as Reeves was the first African American to ever hold such a position. Burton explains that it was at this point that the Lone Ranger story comes in to play. Reeves was described as a “master of disguises”. He used these disguises to track down wanted criminals, even adopting similar ways of dressing and mannerisms to meet and fit in with the fugitives, in order to identify them. Reeves kept and gave out silver coins as a personal trademark of sorts, just like the Lone Ranger’s silver bullets. Of course, the recent Disney adaptation of the Lone Ranger devised a clever and meaningful explanation for the silver bullets in the classic tales. For the new Lone Ranger, the purposes was to not wantonly expend ammunition and in so doing devalue human life. But in the original series, there was never an explanation given, as this was simply something originally adapted from Reeves’ personal life and trademarking of himself. For Reeves, it had a very different meaning, he would give out the valuable coins to ingratiate himself to the people wherever he found himself working, collecting bounties. In this way, a visit from the real “Lone Ranger” meant only good fortune for the town: a criminal off the street and perhaps a lucky silver coin. Like the Lone Ranger, Reeves was also expert crack shot with a gun. According to legend, shooting competitions had an informal ban on allowing him to enter. Like the Lone Ranger, Reeves rode a white horse throughout almost all of his career, at one point riding a light grey one as well. Like the famed Lone Ranger legend Reeves had his own close friend like Tonto. Reeves’ companion was a Native American posse man and tracker who he often rode with, when he was out capturing bad guys. In all, there were close to 3000 of such criminals they apprehended, making them a legendary duo in many regions. The final proof that this legend of Bass Reeves directly inspired into the story of the Lone Ranger can be found in the fact that a large number of those criminals were sent to federal prison in Detroit. The Lone Ranger radio show originated and was broadcast to the public in 1933 on WXYZ in Detroit where the legend of Reeves was famous only two years earlier. Of course, WXYZ and the later TV and movie adaptations weren’t about to make the Lone Ranger an African American who began his career by beating a slave-keeper to death. But now you know. Spread the word and let people know the real legend of the Lone Ranger. (Article by Micah Naziri) Who would have imagined this truth?
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Post by kaima on Nov 2, 2013 6:03:22 GMT -7
Wow! What a revelation.................................... The REAL ‘Lone Ranger’ Was An African American Lawman Who Lived With Native American IndiansWho would have imagined this truth? I suspect the writer of making a good story better. If you consider catching 3000 criminals in one career, that is rather extraordinary. If you worked for 30 years that would be 100 criminals a year, or one every 3 or 4 days for 30 years! Then I have to think that gold and silver coins were not at all unusual then, so I would have to know what was special about his silver coins that made them unique. Kai tell me a story but make it a good one!
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Nov 2, 2013 12:12:20 GMT -7
How a war game brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster Former classified documents show how close the Soviet Union came to launching an attack in 1983 Jamie Doward The Observer, Saturday 2 November 2013 12.43 EDT Margaret ThatcherPrime minister Margaret Thatcher was alarmed by intelligence reports about the Soviet Union's reaction. Photograph: Jockel Fink/APChilling new evidence that Britain and America came close to provoking the Soviet Union into launching a nuclear attack has emerged in former classified documents written at the height of the cold war. Cabinet memos and briefing papers released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that a major war games exercise, Operation Able Art, conducted in November 1983 by the US and its Nato allies was so realistic it made the Russians believe that a nuclear strike on its territory was a real possibility. When intelligence filtered back to the Tory government on the Russians' reaction to the exercise, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, ordered her officials to lobby the Americans to make sure that such a mistake could never happen again. Anti-nuclear proliferation campaigners have credited the move with changing how the UK and the US thought about their relationship with the Soviet Union and beginning a thaw in relations between east and west. The papers were obtained by Peter Burt, director of the Nuclear Information Service (NIS), an organisation that campaigns against nuclear proliferation, who said that the documents showed just how risky the cold war became for both sides. "These papers document a pivotal moment in modern history – the point at which an alarmed Thatcher government realised that the cold war had to be brought to an end and began the process of persuading its American allies likewise," he said. "The Cold War is sometimes described as a stable 'balance of power' between east and west, but the Able Archer story shows that it was in fact a shockingly dangerous period when the world came to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe on more than one occasion." Able Archer, which involved 40,000 US and Nato troops moving across western Europe, co-ordinated by encrypted communications systems, imagined a scenario in which Blue Forces (Nato) defended its allies after Orange Forces (Warsaw Pact countries) sent troops into Yugoslavia following political unrest. The Orange Forces had quickly followed this up with invasions of Finland, Norway and eventually Greece. As the conflict had intensified, a conventional war had escalated into one involving chemical and nuclear weapons. Numerous UK air bases, including Greenham Common, Brize Norton and Mildenhall, were used in the exercise, much of which is still shrouded in secrecy. However, last month Paul Dibb, a former director of the Australian Joint Intelligence Organisation, suggested that the 1983 exercise posed a more substantial threat than the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. "Able Archer could have triggered the ultimate unintended catastrophe, and with prompt nuclear strike capacities on both the US and Soviet sides, orders of magnitude greater than in 1962," he said . The exercise took place amid heightened international tension. In September 1983 the Russians shot down a Korean Airlines Boeing 747, killing all 269 people on board, after the plane had mistakenly strayed into their airspace. There is evidence to suggest that the Russians thought the Boeing was an American spy plane. Earlier in the same year the US president, Ronald Reagan, made a high-profile speech describing the Soviet Union as "the evil empire" and announced plans to build the "Star Wars" strategic defence initiative. With distrust between the US and USSR at unparalleled levels, both sides were operating on a hair trigger. As Able Archer commenced, the Kremlin gave instructions for a dozen aircraft in East Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. In addition, around 70 SS-20 missiles were placed on heightened alert, while Soviet submarines carrying nuclear ballistic missiles were sent under the Arctic ice so that they could avoid detection. Nato and its allies initially thought the Soviet response was the USSR's own form of war-gaming. However, the classified documents obtained by the NIS reveal just how close the Russians came to treating the exercise as the prelude for a nuclear strike against them. A classified British Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report written shortly afterwards recorded the observation from one official that "we cannot discount the possibility that at least some Soviet officials/officers may have misinterpreted Able Archer 83 and possibly other nuclear CPXs [command post exercises] as posing a real threat." The cabinet secretary at the time, Sir Robert Armstrong, briefed Thatcher that the Soviets' response did not appear to be an exercise because it "took place over a major Soviet holiday, it had the form of actual military activity and alerts, not just war-gaming, and it was limited geographically to the area, central Europe, covered by the Nato exercise which the Soviet Union was monitoring". Armstrong told Thatcher that Moscow's response "shows the concern of the Soviet Union over a possible Nato surprise attack mounted under cover of exercises". Much of the intelligence for the briefings to Thatcher, suggesting some in the Kremlin believed that the Able Archer exercise posed a "real threat", came from the Soviet defector Oleg Gordievsky. Formerly classified files reveal Thatcher was so alarmed by the briefings that she ordered her officials to "consider what could be done to remove the danger that, by miscalculating western intentions, the Soviet Union would over-react". She ordered her officials to "urgently consider how to approach the Americans on the question of possible Soviet misapprehensions about a surprise Nato attack". Formerly secret documents reveal that, in response, the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence drafted a joint paper for discussion with the US that proposed "Nato should inform the Soviet Union on a routine basis of proposed Nato exercise activity involving nuclear play". Information from the JIC report and Gordievsky was shared with Reagan, who met the spy and was apparently so swayed by the arguments that he pushed for a new spirit of detente between the US and USSR. However, Burt stressed that the end of the cold war did not mean that the risks had gone away. "Even though the cold war ended more than 20 years ago, thousands of warheads are still actively deployed by the nuclear-armed states," Burt said. "We continue to face unacceptably high risks and will continue to do so until we have taken steps to abolish these exceptionally dangerous weapons." • This article was amended on 2 November. It originally said that the Korean Airlines plane shot down in September 1983 was a Boeing 737. This has been corrected.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Nov 13, 2013 6:50:23 GMT -7
Published on Jun 9, 2013 This is the only authentic video version of an historic meeting in October, 2011 in Washington entitled Peace For Germany. The participants at the meeting were Colonel Max Klaar, Bundeswehr, (retired); Major Merrit P. Drucker, United States Army, (retired) and James Bacque, author of Other Losses. Their sole interest is to publish the truth about the fate of Germans and Germany under Allied rule after World War Two. This video is the only one authorized by them. See book at: www.talonbooks.comI cannot accommodate the inhumanity that this depicts. It is beyond description. The only way I can even come close to understanding this is that war makes most men depraved. We, as a nation, are not without blemish in the history of mankind. It always comes back to haunt us. This never should have happened !!!My soul reaches out and apologizes to the German peoples for what we did to your helpless descendants.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Nov 21, 2013 7:59:43 GMT -7
Sinosphere - Dispatches From China
October 21, 2013, 7:04 pm
Remembering, and Forgetting, the Flying Tigers
By AUSTIN RAMZY
The decrepit state of a graveyard that is connected to one of the most famous World War II fighting forces in China has revived questions about the country’s ability to honor its veterans.
In August, the grave sites of several hundred Chinese military personnel who served with the force — the Flying Tigers — were rediscovered on a trash-strewn hillside in the southern city of Kunming. Researchers had reported on the cemetery in 2007, but despite official pledges to restore and protect it, little has been done.
World War II history remains a sensitive subject in East Asia, and China has frequently complained about what it sees as Japan’s insufficient contrition for the suffering it inflicted on its neighbors. At the same time, Beijing has ignored and underplayed parts of China’s own wartime history, particularly the contributions of the Nationalist government. In recent years, China’s Communist leaders have promoted greater recognition of the role of the Nationalists in fighting Japan, and volunteer groups have restored important sites and raised funds and other aid for the last surviving veterans.
Few wartime endeavors are as celebrated as the Flying Tigers. Officially known as the American Volunteer Group, discharged American pilots were organized with secret approval from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fight for the Chinese military in the months before the United States entered World War II. In aircraft emblazoned with an iconic shark’s maw, its pilots battled Japanese forces in China and Burma.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, left the United States reeling, the Flying Tigers’ early success against Japanese fighters provided a key morale boost to the Allies. “One shining hope has emerged from three catastrophic months of war,” Life magazine wrote of the unit in March 1942. Later that year, John Wayne played the group’s leader in the Hollywood film “Flying Tigers.”
In some ways, the Flying Tigers are experiencing a renaissance of that wartime fame in China. A Flying Tigers Heritage Park is under construction in the city of Guilin, a wartime base in Guangxi Province. Next year, John Woo, the Hong Kong director of action films like “The Killer,” “Red Cliff” and “Mission: Impossible 2,” is scheduled to begin shooting a film and miniseries on the Flying Tigers.
The Kunming Flying Tigers Museum opened in December 2012 in the capital of the southern province of Yunnan. In Lake Dian, a large body of water south of the city, researchers are searching for the wreckage of a Flying Tigers P-40 that crashed during a 1942 training run.
But less than 10 miles, or 16 kilometers, away, the graves of about 500 Chinese translators, ground crew members and other personnel associated with the unit sit ignored and neglected on Changchun Hill. The Kunming-based City Times newspaper reported on Aug. 12 that graves had been disturbed and remains scattered and that pieces of wooden coffins were rotting above ground.
The story circulated widely in Chinese newspapers and online in the days before the Aug. 15 anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia.
In Japan, some cabinet members marked their country’s defeat by visiting the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, where several war criminals are memorialized along with the country’s 2.5 million war dead. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did not attend, but he sent an offering and delivered a speech that offered no apologies for the widespread suffering caused by Japan’s war effort. Once again, the Chinese government voiced anger over Japanese leaders’ words and gestures.
But some Chinese said that while their government focused on Japan’s distortions, it was failing to respect China’s own history.
“Japanese Class A war criminals are enshrined as national heroes in the Yasukuni Shrine, but Chinese Flying Tigers war heroes are seen as trash to be discarded on a hillside,” wrote the Chinese poet and novelist Bei Cun. “Seven decades ago, China was a victor, but seven decades later, China has still lost, and lost more tragically, because this makes future generations doubt the nation’s values, the importance of sacrifice and the dignity of life.”
The neglect of the Kunming burial ground has roots in China’s calamitous postwar history. Japan’s surrender in 1945 ended the uneasy wartime alliance between the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists, and the two sides turned their guns on each other in earnest. The civil war ended with the Communist victory in 1949 and the Nationalist retreat to the island of Taiwan.
For decades, the Communist government portrayed the Nationalists not as compatriots but as enemies. Nationalist veterans who remained on the mainland suffered decades of persecution. Some settled in Burma, today also known as Myanmar, or hid in border regions of Yunnan Province. Even those who died fighting the Japanese were treated as foes. Graveyards in towns like Tengchong, which had seen heavy fighting during the war, were vandalized during the Cultural Revolution.
In recent years, China’s Communist Party leadership has begun to recognize the wartime efforts of the Nationalists. In a 2005 speech marking the 60th anniversary of the war’s end, China’s president at the time, Hu Jintao, acknowledged their contributions. Surviving Nationalist veterans in China were awarded a medal commemorating their World War II service. This summer, the government pledged to help them receive social security benefits.
“In the eyes of many, in addition to the low-key extension of social security to cover them, the government should offer the war veterans an official apology – a small step toward the long overdue recognition of their war efforts,” News China, the English-language edition of the mainland magazine China Newsweek, said in a story about the veterans in its November issue.
Volunteer groups have led efforts long before the government got involved. They’ve tracked down surviving Nationalist veterans, gathered donations to help with their living costs and searched for abandoned graveyards.
The Kunming cemetery was originally established near Wujiaba Airport and once contained about 800 graves. After the war, the remains of more than 200 Americans were removed to the United States, according to Chinese historians. In the early 1950s, the Chinese graves were pulled up. Peasants used oxcarts to move the caskets and headstones two and a half miles to make room for a storehouse, Sanlian Life magazine reported in 2010. Then, at the start of the Great Leap Forward in 1957, when the country embarked on a disastrous collectivization campaign, the headstones were removed for use in the construction of reservoirs.
“Due to the particular political environment at the time, the ‘air force cemetery’ was gradually abandoned and destroyed,” the magazine said.
After the cemetery’s rediscovery by volunteer researchers in 2007, the local government said it would build a suitable memorial site for the veterans’ remains. But a thorough restoration has been thwarted by development regulations and questions of who controls the land, The City Times reported this summer. “The mountainside is completely as it was before, and the state of the graveyard is an even bigger mess,” the newspaper said.
Members of the Kunming-based Yunnan Flying Tigers Research Institute, a volunteer group that publicized the poor state of the veterans’ cemetery, declined interview requests.
One Yunnan-based independent historical researcher, Ge Shuya, said the delays in restoring the site stemmed from a debate over just what to call the cemetery.
A cemetery with the name “Flying Tigers” would attract more attention, Mr. Ge said, but it would be incorrect. With the American war dead long ago removed, the site shouldn’t be considered a Flying Tigers cemetery, Mr. Ge said, but a Chinese Air Force cemetery, even if it that would mean a less storied name. “This is a Chinese cemetery. It should be protected. The government has already given money for it to be protected,” Mr. Ge said. “The reason it still hasn’t been protected, I believe, is there are people who still want to say this is a Flying Tigers cemetery.”
Li Yulian, a Kunming Civil Affairs Bureau district official, told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, on Aug. 15 that the government had taken basic steps in recent years to protect the cemetery but that it was still in a poor state because of decades of neglect. She promised that the government would speed up efforts to build a proper cemetery. However, it will be dedicated to the Chinese Air Force, she said, not the Flying Tigers.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Dec 9, 2013 9:15:59 GMT -7
Is this the beginning of a trend ?Germany’s President Joachim Gauck becomes first major political figure to boycott Sochi Winter Olympics By Philip Oltermann, The Guardian Sunday, December 8, 2013 9:24 EST German President Joachim Gauck The German president has become the first major political figure to boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics in February. According to German weekly Der Spiegel, Joachim Gauck last week informed the Kremlin of his decision, which is understood to be a response to the Russian government’s violations of human rights and harrassment of the opposition. Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor who played a key part in the East German protest movement before the fall of the Berlin Wall, has declined any official visits to Russia since coming to office in March 2012 and repeatedly criticised the country’s “deficit of rule of law” and “air of imperialism”. In June a scheduled meeting between Gauck and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, was cancelled – supposedly because of clashing schedules. Gauck had visited both the Olympics and the Paralympics in London last summer. The boycott is the first by a major political figure. So far, it has mainly been artists and activists such as Stephen Fry, Harvey Fierstein and Lady Gaga, who have called for a boycott of the Sochi Games in reaction to a new Russian law which criminalises gay “propaganda”. In an open letter to the British prime minister and the IOC in June, Fry said “an absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 in Sochi is simply essential”. David Cameron has ruled out a boycott, arguing that anti-gay prejudice would be better tackled by presence rather than absence. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has since echoed Cameron’s stance, pointing to the Eurovision song contest in Azerbaijan as proof that public attention could do more to change attitudes than boycotts. US senator Lindsey Graham also called for a US boycott of the Games in July, though his motives had been slightly different: the South Carolina Republican said Russia needed to be rebuked for offering asylum to Edward Snowden.
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Post by karl on Dec 9, 2013 15:11:25 GMT -7
Is this the beginning of a trend ?Germany’s President Joachim Gauck becomes first major political figure to boycott Sochi Winter Olympics By Philip Oltermann, The Guardian Sunday, December 8, 2013 9:24 EST German President Joachim Gauck The German president has become the first major political figure to boycott the Sochi Winter Olympics in February. According to German weekly Der Spiegel, Joachim Gauck last week informed the Kremlin of his decision, which is understood to be a response to the Russian government’s violations of human rights and harrassment of the opposition. Gauck, a former Lutheran pastor who played a key part in the East German protest movement before the fall of the Berlin Wall, has declined any official visits to Russia since coming to office in March 2012 and repeatedly criticised the country’s “deficit of rule of law” and “air of imperialism”. In June a scheduled meeting between Gauck and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, was cancelled – supposedly because of clashing schedules. Gauck had visited both the Olympics and the Paralympics in London last summer. The boycott is the first by a major political figure. So far, it has mainly been artists and activists such as Stephen Fry, Harvey Fierstein and Lady Gaga, who have called for a boycott of the Sochi Games in reaction to a new Russian law which criminalises gay “propaganda”. In an open letter to the British prime minister and the IOC in June, Fry said “an absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 in Sochi is simply essential”. David Cameron has ruled out a boycott, arguing that anti-gay prejudice would be better tackled by presence rather than absence. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has since echoed Cameron’s stance, pointing to the Eurovision song contest in Azerbaijan as proof that public attention could do more to change attitudes than boycotts. US senator Lindsey Graham also called for a US boycott of the Games in July, though his motives had been slightly different: the South Carolina Republican said Russia needed to be rebuked for offering asylum to Edward Snowden. Yes, the old activist, Herr Gauck is at it once again. The man is using the prestige of his postion in a manner not withstanding of his position. He is not of the street gang for this type of behaviour. The man is absolutly wrong in lowering hims self to this level. Herr Gauck is street smart, and very good in the manner of obtaining his currant postion. But, not so smart in political manoeuvre. For this was his opportunity to out manoeuvre Mr. Vladimir Putin by being the better gentleman with ignoring the past snubb provided by Vladimir Putin with the past years London games. This being to attend the Sochi games with good cheer and sportsmanship. What ever the Americans wish to do is thier own business. The games are for International competion, not a show boat for polictical game palying. This should be for the lesser unwashed crowd to play in their own arena of nonsense. Karl
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Jan 19, 2014 9:08:59 GMT -7
- The Daily Caller - dailycaller.com - EPA overrides Congress, hands over town to Indian tribesPosted By Michael Bastasch On 12:27 PM 01/08/2014 In | No Comments Have you heard the story of the residents of Riverton, Wyo.? One day they were Wyomingans, the next they were members of the Wind River tribes — after the Environmental Protection Agency declared the town part of the Wind River Indian Reservation, undoing a 1905 law passed by Congress and angering state officials. The surprise decision was made by officials of the EPA, the Department of Interior, and Department of Justice early last month, and has invoked the ire of Gov. Matt Mead, who has vowed not to honor the agency’s decision and is preparing to fight in court. “My deep concern is about an administrative agency of the federal government altering a state’s boundary and going against over 100 years of history and law,” Mead said in a statement. “This should be a concern to all citizens because, if the EPA can unilaterally take land away from a state, where will it stop?” The EPA declared that Riverton was part of the Wind River Indian Reservation after granting a “Treatment as a State” application from the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone tribes. The tribes submit such applications to get funding for air quality monitoring under the Clean Air Act. However, this seemingly innocuous application ended up undoing the tribal boundaries set by a 1905 congressional act. The EPA granted the tribes’ claim that the Wind River reservation extended over one million acres of land beyond what the 1905 Congressional Act established. By doing this, the agency effectively overruled an act of Congress, state officials charge. The worry by state officials is that turning Riverton, a town of over 10,000 people, over to the tribes will come with a slew of tax and law enforcement complications. Since Riverton is now part of the Wind River reservation, it is technically no longer eligible for state services and no longer falls under local law enforcement. Mead, however, has ordered that state agencies conduct “business as usual” in regards to Riverton, meaning state services, law enforcement and regulations will continue. “This is an alarming action when you have a federal agency step in and start to undo congressional acts that has really been our history for 108 years … with the stroke of a pen without talking to the biggest groups impacted,” state Sen. Leland Christensen told The Daily Caller News Foundation, “and that would be the city of Riverton and the state of Wyoming.” According to the Mead’s office, the EPA’s decision came as a surprise to him, and he only found about it from the media — not the EPA itself. This comes after Mead wrote to EPA administrator Gina McCarthy last August detailing his concerns about the implications of granting the tribes’ request to effectively override the 1905 act. The tribes remain adamant that Riverton and the one million acres of land is theirs, arguing that state officials once supported such a conclusion. Tribal officials have criticized tthe governor’s office for changing its tune on Riverton and the reservation’s boundaries. “Now that the [Interior Department] and EPA have issued their determinations, state officials have changed their tune, claiming to be outraged by the decision and suggesting that the federal government has no say in such matters,” the Northern Arapaho Business Council wrote in a letter to Mead, adding that the state’s shift in rhetoric could hurt tribe-state relations. The dispute has received little national attention as of yet, but the Wyoming congressional delegation has written the EPA on the issue. “The EPA’s decision has in effect overturned a law that has been governing land and relationships for more than 100 years,” wrote Wyoming Sens Mike Enzi and John Barrasso, along with Rep. Cynthia Lummis. “We are also very concerned about the political ramifications this decision could have for the tribes and the state of Wyoming.” The boundary dispute between Wyoming and the tribes has been going on for some time now. It arose from a 2009 tax case that the state urged the courts not to drop because of the “implications of ruling on a boundary without the federal government and Eastern Shoshone being involved in the case,” reports the Casper Star-Tribune. “We don’t have a fully binding decision,” Deputy Attorney General Marty Hardsocg in 2009. “We do in the state, but the state is then put in a position of having to rely on the federal government’s view for its direction.” “At the end, of the day state lawyers acknowledge that this determination is a federal question and must be determined to a final point in the federal courts,” Mark Howell, the lobbyist for the Northern Arapaho tribe, told the Star-Tribune. “That’s what this EPA decision will allow all parties to do.” State courts have heard at least two cases on the boundary in the last three decades — one 1980s Wyoming Supreme Court case found that Riverton was part of the reservation, and another state high court case in 2008, which found that the town was in Wyoming. The only problem is that the state court decisions don’t set a solid precedent, since neither case involves both tribes living on the reservation, nor the state and the federal government all at once, Howell told the Star-Tribune. The EPA did not immediately respond to TheDCNF’s request for comment.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Jan 19, 2014 9:14:30 GMT -7
For all you folks out there - - This is serious stuff !!!!!
Friday, 17 January 2014 19:15
Obama EPA Hands Control Over Wyoming City to Indian Tribes
Written by Alex Newman
In apparent defiance of federal law and U.S. court rulings, unelected bureaucrats at the increasingly out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other Obama administration departments unilaterally purported to grant control over the city of Riverton, Wyoming, to tribal authorities for the Wind River Indian tribes. At least two smaller towns are also affected.
The scheme appears to illustrate a growing United Nations-linked trend being witnessed across the United States and the world. In essence, vast amounts of private land and even entire towns are being taken over by authorities under various pretexts — UN agreements, Agenda 21 "sustainability," and supposed concerns about indigenous peoples — to advance a radical agenda targeting private property rights.
In Wyoming, the deeply controversial executive-branch machinations that purport to place Riverton, Kinnear, and Pavillion inside tribal boundaries have already sparked an outcry among residents and state officials. The battle, however, has only just begun, with Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead and his administration vowing to fight back.
“It is outrageous to me that a regulatory agency has proposed changing jurisdictional boundaries established by history and the courts,” Gov. Mead was quoted as saying in news reports. “I have asked the attorney general to challenge this decision and defend the existing boundaries of the reservation.”
Among other major problems, the EPA ruling, made in consultation with the Obama administration’s Department of Interior and the disgraced Justice Department, reportedly makes the city of Riverton ineligible for many state and local services, including law enforcement and emergency response. It also raises numerous concerns over taxation, regulation, and other issues involving jurisdiction.
For now, though, state officials have been instructed by the governor to continue operating as usual while the state government prepares to battle the Obama administration in court if necessary. The implications of the case, of course, extend far beyond the fate of the 10,000 or so residents now supposedly residing on Indian land.
While the boundary dispute has been ongoing for decades, Wyoming officials and experts say Congress settled the question more than a century ago — along with the courts in subsequent rulings. The Obama administration, however, apparently did not agree, handing over more than a million acres to the tribes.
According to an analysis of government documents, the EPA decision stemmed from a request by Wind River Indian tribes to be “treated as a state” under environmental regulatory schemes. Once approved, the ruling allows tribal authorities to receive more federal taxpayer dollars under the guise of implementing and enforcing various EPA regulations. Everything from water and air to land use is involved.
“My deep concern is about an administrative agency of the federal government altering a state’s boundary and going against over 100 years of history and law,” Gov. Mead said in a statement. “This should be a concern to all citizens because, if the EPA can unilaterally take land away from a state, where will it stop?”
The governor also thanked the Wyoming attorney general and his staff for urgently preparing a thorough review of the historical record on the issue. “This analysis shows how flawed the EPA was in its legal justification for its decision,” Mead said, adding that all avenues would be pursued. “The federal government clearly had a predetermined outcome it sought to uphold.”
In a petition to EPA bosses asking the agency to reconsider and stay its decision, Wyoming Attorney General Peter Michael said the Obama administration’s scheme depends on “a host of faulty factual and legal conclusions.” The document cites a broad range of statutes, treaties, and court decisions, arguing that the EPA essentially cherry-picked arguments in a manner “more akin to advocacy” to reach a determination that is simply “wrong.”
The attorney general said that the decision would strip the state of its sovereign right to exercise jurisdiction over lands “rightly within its control” and that it must be overturned — or at least delayed until the courts can review it. “A failure to do so will likely lead to civil and criminal jurisdictional turmoil, irreparably harming the public interest,” he warned, echoing widespread concerns.
State lawmakers also spoke out about the EPA scheming and vowed to resist. “This is an alarming action when you have a federal agency step in and start to undo congressional acts that has really been our history for 108 years ... with the stroke of a pen without talking to the biggest groups impacted,” state Sen. Leland Christensen told The Daily Caller. Those affected, of course, “would be the city of Riverton and the state of Wyoming,” the lawmaker added.
Wyoming’s delegation to the U.S. Congress has also expressed deep concerns. “The EPA’s decision has in effect overturned a law that has been governing land and relationships for more than 100 years,” wrote Sen. Mike Enzi, Sen. John Barrasso, and Rep. Cynthia Lummis. “We are also very concerned about the political ramifications this decision could have for the tribes and the state of Wyoming.”
In a separate statement, Sen. Barrasso blasted the Obama administration for again thinking it “can ignore the law of the land when it suits their agenda.” Just this week, in fact, Obama publicly announced that he would no longer wait for Congress or legislation to impose his agenda, vowing to govern by executive decree instead.
Also this month, the EPA, itself created by an executive order, announced drastic new regulations supposedly aimed at reducing “pollution” from power plants in Wyoming, drawing outrage. Nationwide, meanwhile, the out-of-control agency is facing increasing scrutiny after its most highly paid bureaucrat and chief “global warming” propagandist was sentenced to prison for fraud. Its top bosses were also facing multiple accusations of criminal activity.
However, the agency continues to issue gargantuan amounts of new “regulations,” including new schemes that would purport to put virtually every body of water under federal control. Separately, the EPA is under fire for radical new decrees that will shut down hundreds of power plants across America under the guise of fighting “global warming” and “carbon pollution” — also known as CO2, or human breath.
Other arms of the Obama administration are engaged in similar shenanigans. In November, for example, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell brazenly threatened that Obama would bypass Congress and start seizing even more land under the guise of creating “national monuments.” Jewell, who is currently waging a witch-hunt against “climate deniers” in the bureaucracy she runs, vowed that the administration would not “hold its breath forever” waiting for Congress to obey.
“The president will not hesitate,” she told the Los Angeles Times last November. “I can tell you that there are places that are ripe for setting aside, with a tremendous groundswell of public support.” Of course, the U.S. government already claims ownership over some 650 million acres of land — about a third of America’s total landmass.
Members of Congress, however, are fighting back on that front as well. “Any action that has the potential to impact land management must be locally driven, and not spearheaded in Washington by the stroke of a President’s pen,” said Rep. Steve Daines (R-Mont.), who joined with dozens of lawmakers in sending Jewell a letter about the scheme. “It is deeply troubling that the Administration is willing to move forward unilaterally on these important decisions.”
Similar machinations have been accelerating in other parts of the world, too — especially Latin America. In Brazil, for example, The New American reported last year that federal troops wearing UN logos, acting under executive decrees from radical President Dilma Rousseff, were evicting entire towns at gun point.
The atrocities were being perpetrated under the guise of returning land to Indians, many of whom said the territory had never been theirs to begin with. In Panama, the UN has also been demanding that authorities surrender more land to Indian tribes — all of which are expected to adhere to planetary decrees under the UN “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.”
At the UN, of course, a wide range of pretexts are being used to advance an agenda that is deeply and openly hostile to property rights — with Agenda 21 and so-called “sustainable development” among the key mechanisms. The ultimate goals, however, have already been made clear by the UN itself.
In its Habitat I Conference Report, for example, the UN claimed: “[Land] cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes… Public control of land use is therefore indispensable.”
As The New American magazine documented last year, Indians and indigenous people are also becoming an important component of the anti-property rights agenda. In 2012, the UN “Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People,” James Anaya, even claimed that Americans should return vast tracts of land to Native Americans — including the iconic Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
Such a move, he claimed, would help put the U.S. government closer into compliance with the so-called UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — a controversial scheme that Obama endorsed in 2010 after the U.S. government had originally rejected it. The EPA machinations appear to fit in nicely with the broader agenda.
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Post by JustJohn or JJ on Jan 20, 2014 2:39:15 GMT -7
The special ops surge: America’s secret war in 134 countriesNick Turse, TomDispatch.com Fri Jan 17, 2014 4:53PM GMT A US Special Forces soldier instructs Malian troops in counterterrorism tactics through a translator. They operate in the green glow of night vision in Southwest Asia and stalk through the jungles of South America. They snatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and shoot it out with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They feel the salty spray while skimming over the tops of waves from the turquoise Caribbean to the deep blue Pacific. They conduct missions in the oppressive heat of Middle Eastern deserts and the deep freeze of Scandinavia. All over the planet, the Obama administration is waging a secret war whose full extent has never been fully revealed -- until now. Since September 11, 2001, U.S. Special Operations forces have grown in every conceivable way, from their numbers to their budget. Most telling, however, has been the exponential rise in special ops deployments globally. This presence -- now, in nearly 70% of the world’s nations -- provides new evidence of the size and scope of a secret war being waged from Latin America to the backlands of Afghanistan, from training missions with African allies to information operations launched in cyberspace. In the waning days of the Bush presidency, Special Operations forces were reportedly deployed in about 60 countries around the world. By 2010, that number had swelled to 75, according to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. In 2011, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told TomDispatch that the total would reach 120. Today, that figure has risen higher still. In 2013, elite U.S. forces were deployed in 134 countries around the globe, according to Major Matthew Robert Bockholt of SOCOM Public Affairs. This 123% increase during the Obama years demonstrates how, in addition to conventional wars and a CIA drone campaign, public diplomacy and extensive electronic spying, the U.S. has engaged in still another significant and growing form of overseas power projection. Conducted largely in the shadows by America’s most elite troops, the vast majority of these missions take place far from prying eyes, media scrutiny, or any type of outside oversight, increasing the chances of unforeseen blowback and catastrophic consequences. Growth Industry Formally established in 1987, Special Operations Command has grown steadily in the post-9/11 era. SOCOM is reportedly on track to reach 72,000 personnel in 2014, up from 33,000 in 2001. Funding for the command has also jumped exponentially as its baseline budget, $2.3 billion in 2001, hit $6.9 billion in 2013 ($10.4 billion, if you add in supplemental funding). Personnel deployments abroad have skyrocketed, too, from 4,900 “man-years” in 2001 to 11,500 in 2013. A recent investigation by TomDispatch, using open source government documents and news releases as well as press reports, found evidence that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in or involved with the militaries of 106 nations around the world in 2012-2013. For more than a month during the preparation of that article, however, SOCOM failed to provide accurate statistics on the total number of countries to which special operators -- Green Berets and Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews, boat teams, and civil affairs personnel -- were deployed. “We don’t just keep it on hand,” SOCOM’s Bockholt explained in a telephone interview once the article had been filed. “We have to go searching through stuff. It takes a long time to do that.” Hours later, just prior to publication, he provided an answer to a question I first asked in November of last year. “SOF [Special Operations forces] were deployed to 134 countries” during fiscal year 2013, Bockholt explained in an email. Globalized Special Ops Last year, Special Operations Command chief Admiral William McRaven explained his vision for special ops globalization. In a statement to the House Armed Services Committee, he said: “USSOCOM is enhancing its global network of SOF to support our interagency and international partners in order to gain expanded situational awareness of emerging threats and opportunities. The network enables small, persistent presence in critical locations, and facilitates engagement where necessary or appropriate...” While that “presence” may be small, the reach and influence of those Special Operations forces are another matter. The 12% jump in national deployments -- from 120 to 134 -- during McRaven’s tenure reflects his desire to put boots on the ground just about everywhere on Earth. SOCOM will not name the nations involved, citing host nation sensitivities and the safety of American personnel, but the deployments we do know about shed at least some light on the full range of missions being carried out by America’s secret military. Last April and May, for instance, Special Ops personnel took part in training exercises in Djibouti, Malawi, and the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. In June, U.S. Navy SEALs joined Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, and other allied Mideast forces for irregular warfare simulations in Aqaba, Jordan. The next month, Green Berets traveled to Trinidad and Tobago to carry out small unit tactical exercises with local forces. In August, Green Berets conducted explosives training with Honduran sailors. In September, according to media reports, U.S. Special Operations forces joined elite troops from the 10 member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -- Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Brunei, Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar (Burma), and Cambodia -- as well as their counterparts from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, India, and Russia for a US-Indonesian joint-funded counterterrorism exercise held at a training center in Sentul, West Java. In October, elite U.S. troops carried out commando raids in Libya and Somalia, kidnapping a terror suspect in the former nation while SEALs killed at least one militant in the latter before being driven off under fire. In November, Special Ops troops conducted humanitarian operations in the Philippines to aid survivors of Typhoon Haiyan. The next month, members of the 352nd Special Operations Group conducted a training exercise involving approximately 130 airmen and six aircraft at an airbase in England and Navy SEALs were wounded while undertaking an evacuation mission in South Sudan. Green Berets then rang in the new year with a January 1st combat mission alongside elite Afghan troops in Bahlozi village in Kandahar province. Deployments in 134 countries, however, turn out not to be expansive enough for SOCOM. In November 2013, the command announced that it was seeking to identify industry partners who could, under SOCOM’s Trans Regional Web Initiative, potentially “develop new websites tailored to foreign audiences.” These would join an existing global network of 10 propaganda websites, run by various combatant commands and made to look like legitimate news outlets, including CentralAsiaOnline.com, Sabahi which targets the Horn of Africa; an effort aimed at the Middle East known as Al-Shorfa.com; and another targeting Latin America called Infosurhoy.com. SOCOM’s push into cyberspace is mirrored by a concerted effort of the command to embed itself ever more deeply inside the Beltway. “I have folks in every agency here in Washington, D.C. -- from the CIA, to the FBI, to the National Security Agency, to the National Geospatial Agency, to the Defense Intelligence Agency,” SOCOM chief Admiral McRaven said during a panel discussion at Washington’s Wilson Center last year. Speaking at the Ronald Reagan Library in November, he put the number of departments and agencies where SOCOM is now entrenched at 38. 134 Chances for Blowback Although elected in 2008 by many who saw him as an antiwar candidate, President Obama has proved to be a decidedly hawkish commander-in-chief whose policies have already produced notable instances of what in CIA trade-speak has long been called blowback. While the Obama administration oversaw a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq (negotiated by his predecessor), as well as a drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan (after a major military surge in that country), the president has presided over a ramping up of the U.S. military presence in Africa, a reinvigoration of efforts in Latin America, and tough talk about a rebalancing or “pivot to Asia” (even if it has amounted to little as of yet). The White House has also overseen an exponential expansion of America’s drone war. While President Bush launched 51 such strikes, President Obama has presided over 330, according to research by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Last year, alone, the U.S. also engaged in combat operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. Recent revelations from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have demonstrated the tremendous breadth and global reach of U.S. electronic surveillance during the Obama years. And deep in the shadows, Special Operations forces are now annually deployed to more than double the number of nations as at the end of Bush’s tenure. In recent years, however, the unintended consequences of U.S. military operations have helped to sow outrage and discontent, setting whole regions aflame. More than 10 years after America’s “mission accomplished” moment, seven years after its much vaunted surge, the Iraq that America helped make is in flames. A country with no al-Qaeda presence before the U.S. invasion and a government opposed to America’s enemies in Tehran now has a central government aligned with Iran and two cities flying al-Qaeda flags. A more recent U.S. military intervention to aid the ouster of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi helped send neighboring Mali, a U.S.-supported bulwark against regional terrorism, into a downward spiral, saw a coup there carried out by a U.S.-trained officer, ultimately led to a bloody terror attack on an Algerian gas plant, and helped to unleash nothing short of a terror diaspora in the region. And today South Sudan -- a nation the U.S. shepherded into being, has supported economically and militarily (despite its reliance on child soldiers), and has used as a hush-hush base for Special Operations forces -- is being torn apart by violence and sliding toward civil war. The Obama presidency has seen the U.S. military’s elite tactical forces increasingly used in an attempt to achieve strategic goals. But with Special Operations missions kept under tight wraps, Americans have little understanding of where their troops are deployed, what exactly they are doing, or what the consequences might be down the road. As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, has noted, the utilization of Special Operations forces during the Obama years has decreased military accountability, strengthened the “imperial presidency,” and set the stage for a war without end. “In short,” he wrote at TomDispatch, “handing war to the special operators severs an already too tenuous link between war and politics; it becomes war for its own sake.” Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11. Strangely enough, those at the other primary attack site that day, the Pentagon, seem not to have learned the obvious lessons from this lethal blowback. Even today in Afghanistan and Pakistan, more than 12 years after the U.S. invaded the former and almost 10 years after it began conducting covert attacks in the latter, the U.S. is still dealing with that Cold War-era fallout: with, for instance, CIA drones conducting missile strikes against an organization (the Haqqani network) that, in the 1980s, the Agency supplied with missiles. Without a clear picture of where the military’s covert forces are operating and what they are doing, Americans may not even recognize the consequences of and blowback from our expanding secret wars as they wash over the world. But if history is any guide, they will be felt -- from Southwest Asia to the Mahgreb, the Middle East to Central Africa, and, perhaps eventually, in the United States as well. In his blueprint for the future, SOCOM 2020, Admiral McRaven has touted the globalization of U.S. special ops as a means to “project power, promote stability, and prevent conflict.” Last year, SOCOM may have done just the opposite in 134 places. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ What could possibly go wrong? A tale of America at warTom Engelhardt, TomDispatch.com Sun Jan 19, 2014 6:36AM GMT Today, 12 years later, that long-gone world looks like an arc of stability, while the US has left the Greater Middle East.These days, when I check out the latest news on Washington’s global war-making, I regularly find at least one story that fits a new category in my mind that I call: What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Take last Saturday's Washington Post report by Craig Whitlock on the stationing of less than two dozen US “military advisers” in war-torn Somalia. They’ve been there for months, it turns out, and their job is “to advise and coordinate operations with African troops fighting to wrest control of the country from the al-Shabab militia.” If you leave aside the paramilitarized CIA (which has long had a secret base and prison in that country), those advisers represent the first US military boots on the ground there since the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident of 1993. As soon as I read the piece, I automatically thought: Given the history of the US in Somalia, including the encouragement of a disastrous 2006 Ethiopian invasion of that country, what could possibly go wrong? Some days when I read the news, I can’t help but think of the late Chalmers Johnson; on others, the satirical newspaper the Onion comes to mind. If Washington did it -- and by “it,” I mean invade and occupy a country, intervene in a rebellion against an autocrat, intervene in a civil war, launch a drone campaign against a terror outfit, or support and train local forces against some group the US doesn’t like -- you already know all you need to know. Any version of the above has repeatedly translated into one debacle or disaster after another. In the classic term of CIA tradecraft that Johnson took for the title of a book -- a post-9/11 bestseller -- send a drone over Yemen with the intent to kill, kick down doors in Afghanistan or Iraq, put US boots back on the ground in Somalia and you’re going to be guaranteed “unintended consequences” and undoubtedly some form of “blowback” as well. To use a sports analogy, if since 9/11 Washington has been the globe’s cleanup hitter, it not only hasn’t managed to knock a single ball out of the park, it’s struck out enough times to make those watching dizzy, and it’s batting .000. You would think that someone in the nation’s capital might have drawn a lesson or two from such a record, something simple like: Don’t do it! But -- here’s where the Onion should be able to run riot -- there clearly is no learning curve in Washington. Tactics change, but the ill-conceived, ill-begotten, ill-fated Global War on Terror (GWOT), which long ago outran its own overblown name, continues without end, and without either successes of any lasting sort or serious reconsideration. In this period, al-Qaeda, a small-scale organization capable of immodest terror acts every couple of years and, despite the fantasies of Homeland and Fox News, without a sleeper cell in the United States, managed, with Washington’s help, to turn itself into a global franchise. The more the Bush and Obama administrations went after it, the more al-Qaeda wannabe organizations sprang up across the Greater Middle East and north Africa like mushrooms after a soaking rain. The earliest GWOTsters, all Onion-style satirists, believed that the US was destined to rule the world till Hell froze over. Their idea of a snappy quip was “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran,” and they loved to refer to the Greater Middle East as “the arc of instability.” That, mind you, was before they sent in the US military. Today, 12 years later, that long-gone world looks like an arc of stability, while the US has left the Greater Middle East, from North Africa to Syria, from Yemen to Afghanistan, a roiling catastrophe zone of conflict, refugees, death, and destruction. As it happened, the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be the only genuine weapons of mass destruction around, loosing, among other things, what could prove to be the great religious war of modern times. And the lessons drawn? As Nick Turse, author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, suggests in his latest piece, “The Special Ops Surge,” the Obama administration has overseen the reorganization of the Global War on Terror as a vast secret operation of unrivaled proportions. It now oversees a planetary surveillance network of staggering size and reach (itself leading to historic blowback) and the spread of a secret military spawned inside the US military and now undergoing typically mindless expansion on a gargantuan scale. What could possibly go wrong?
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Post by karl on Jan 20, 2014 15:44:54 GMT -7
J.J. The USA is very highly diverisified in the manner of deployment global wide, for in this manner is an irritation to the Russian command. For as a residual effect, creates some issues to us. For the Americans have such nine commands, one on our land of Stuttgart of: Kelly Barracks. Whilst the remainder are on USA soil. This would be the United States Africa Command. Or more correctly: USAFRICOM www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R42077.pdfIt would be quite nice to relocate this one {Stuttgart} to Poland for them to deal with. It is enough for the Americans to have their nuclear weapons based upon our soil. For in this manner, in time of conflict, we are targeted, in this manner, is simply unacceptable to our security and safety. Please, Americans,,get the hell off our land and create your own island of devestiation...The war has long been past and all that was, is no more.. Karl
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