How Deeply is the U.S. involved in the Afghan Drug Trade?

The answer is simple and dismaying. America’s local allies in Afghanistan, the politicians and warlords who overthrew Taliban in 2001, are up to their turbans in the heroin trade. Drug money is the blood that courses through Afghanistan’s veins and keeps the economy limping along. The U.S.-installed Karzai regime in Kabul propped up by US and NATO bayonets has only two sources of income: cash handouts from Washington, and the proceeds of drug dealing.

When Taliban ruled 90% of Afghanistan from 1996-2001, it almost totally stamped out poppy cultivation as un-Islamic. The UN’s drug control agency has confirmed this fact. >>>>>

Ethiopian troops to stay in Somalia

Ethiopian troops in Somalia are stay in that country until the AU deployed its full peacekeeping force. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told parliament in Addis Ababa. The African Union plans to send 8,000 peacekeepers but currently there are just about 3,000 of them from Uganda and Burundi. >>>>>

Kenya under attack threat from Somali Islamists

Following a recent offer by Kenya to train Somali forces, Islamists have responded with a threat to launch an attack on Kenyan territory if it goes ahead with plan.According to reports, Kenya had offered to train 10,000 Somali government troops in a bid to boost capacity to deal with insurgency and bring back law and order in that country.  >>>>>

10 Killed in Turkey – Kurd Clashes

The PKK has been fighting for Kurdish autonomy in southeastern Turkey since 1984. The violence has killed at least 37,000 people.  The PKK is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. >>>>>

Pak warns US against border violations

Pakistani Government sources were quoted by the Dawn News channel on Monday as saying that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari had told British officials on the same day that violations of Pakistan’s frontiers would not be tolerated...

Islamabad says the strikes are an infringement of its sovereignty and are counterproductive in the battle against militants. Pakistani civilian and military leaders have frequently protested over the US incursions into Pakistan’s tribal region, with Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani terming the attacks as an ‘act of terrorism’. >>>>>

Public At Last Guantánamo’s SERE Standard Operating Procedures

One of the most important documents of the U.S. torture program has just become publicly available for the first time. This is the JTF GTMO “SERE” Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure, now posted on the website of the new documentary, Torturing Democracy. This document clearly specifies that the abusive interrogation techniques to be used at Guantamo [JTF GTMO] are based upon the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape [SERE] program. The document is notable for its documentation of the extent to which abuse was bureaucratically standardized for routineuse. http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m47935&hd=&size=1&l=e

Taleban stage audacious ‘Tet-style’ attack on British HQ city

British and Afghan forces repulsed an attempt by hundreds of Taleban fighters to attack the provincial capital of Helmand, Lashkar Gah, on Saturday night in the most audacious Taliban attack in the province since 2006.

Up to 100 Taleban fighters were killed in a series of airstrikes and firefights around the city outskirts in fighting that began in the early evening as Taleban fighters were concentrating to attack the city of three sides and continued into the early hours of Sunday morning.  >>>>>

Iraq says time for British troops to go: report

LONDON (Reuters) – Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was quoted on Monday as saying it was time for British combat forces to leave the south of the country because they were no longer needed to maintain security and control.

Maliki told The Times newspaper in an interview there might still be a need for their experience in training Iraqi forces and on some technological issues, but the emphasis was now on business links.  >>>>>

Iran ‘bribing Iraqi politicians’

“We get reports of people coming in to pay off people to vote against it. Whether it’s true or not I have no specific proof, but there are many intelligence reports that say that activity is going on.”  >>>>>

Which means that this is rumor.  We have more than rumor saying that AIPAC has done far worse, and yet make no substantive move against them in the U.S.

Under Bush, US Influence in Latin America is Receding Before High Tide

The United States has also long served as chief educator to Latin America’s elite. Correa is among its presidents with a U.S. graduate degree – though that didn’t stop him from accusing the CIA of infiltrating his military, or refusing to renew a lease for U.S. counterdrug missions to fly out of Ecuador.

With the U.S. facing its own financial crisis, it’s unlikely to be able to leverage economic influence in Latin America anytime soon. Sen. Barack Obama’s senior adviser on Latin America, Dan Restrepo, acknowledges that his candidate is essentially proposing a symbolic shift in style – albeit adding a special White House envoy for the Americas. (In response to “US Influence in Latin America Wanes”):

Which is why false-flag operations would not be a surprise in the region aside from what has been conspired with regards to regional parties; for only the U.S. and Israel have a track record for containing the rise of the supposed “Islamo-Fascists.”  There are many Muslim and/or Arab enclaves in South and Central America.  The overwhelming majority have absolutely no Islamist-agenda within the respective countries they live.  Yet it would not take too much to get public opinion against this, while at the same time showing Latinos that the U.S. is still needed to champion ‘democracy and freedom’– just as the U.S. was needed to infiltrate and control select countries by way of the Drug Trade, and let’s not forget our own colonial history in the region.

JOEL BRINKLEY: Evidence grows that Israel, with U.S. aid, is preparing to attack Iran

For the last few weeks, all eyes have been on North Korea, as the nation’s idiosyncratic leadership began reopening a plant that manufactures weapons-grade plutonium. Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state, met, to no effect, with North Korea’s leaders in Pyongyang last week – a visit that would have been inconceivable while hawks still dominated the Bush administration.

But, as anyone might guess, the problems in Iran did not suddenly freeze while everyone looked east. In fact several recent developments leave the strong suggestion that Israel is preparing to attack Iran – with significant help from the United States. >>>>>

Iraq: US dropped nuclear bomb near Basra in 1991, claims veteran

An American veteran of the first Gulf War in Iraq claims that the United States dropped a five-kilotonne nuclear bomb in 1991 in a deserted area outside the southern city of Basra on the Iranian border.

The claim by US war veteran Jim Brown was made during an interview included in a 30-minute current affairs report to be broadcast by Italian state news channel RaiNews24 on Thursday.  Brown told the Italian news channel that the bombing took place on the last day of the war in Iraq on 27 February 1991. >>>>>

How ironic and despicable if true.  We attack a whole country and kill more civilians than a non-culpable military many times over in order to ’seek out weapons of mass destruction;’ only to find that there were no WMDs; and upon defeating the people we wrongfully attacked, we make our point by actually unnecessarily and criminally dropping a nuclear bomb.  When people around the world here this, it brings about a greater sense of urgency for justice and disdain for the cheerleaders for terms like “human rights,” “democracy,” “freedom,” “we only seek to offer humanitarian aid…”

French army chief rules out military victory in Afghanistan

PARIS (AFP) — The head of the French military General Jean-Louis Georgelin on Wednesday backed comments by a senior British military officer’s view that the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable.

A British officer “was saying that one cannot win this war militarily, that there is no military solution to the Afghan crisis and I totally share this feeling,” Georglin told French television channel Public Senat.  >>>>>

Iraq War Illegal Propaganda-Gate Links Fest

Federal regulators have launched an inquiry into whether broadcast networks and military analysts violated federal sponsorship identification rules as a result of an effort by the Pentagon to increase favorable news coverage of the Iraq war.  >>>>>

US, Pakistan torn apart over terror

Commencing with the enormous backlash in Pakistan in the aftermath of the raid by US special forces on Angoori Ada in the tribal area of South Waziristan on September 3; the disclosure by the New York Times that President George W Bush issued secret orders allowing US special forces to undertake operations inside Pakistan without prior notice; and the aggressive statements of several Pakistani leaders, the entire country has been gripped by a wave of anti-American sentiment which the country’s top civilian and military leadership has also been quick to echo. >>>>>

Operation Hollywood

MotherJones.com: How far back does collaboration between the U.S. military and Hollywood go?

David Robb: The current approval process was established right after World War II. Before that, the Pentagon used to help producers, but it wasn’t very formalized, like it is now. They helped producers going back to at least 1927. The very first movie that won an Oscar, “Wings,” — even that got military assistance. more >>>

French troops: We won’t go to Afghanistan

According to French media, troops in the 27th battalion stationed in a southern France military base said on Friday that they were unwilling to go to Afghanistan as part of France’s mission in the central Asian country…

Despite the fact that 50 percent of the French people oppose the deployment of thousands of troops to Afghanistan, French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced at the last NATO summit in April that he would send an additional 700 French soldiers to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, bringing the total to about 3,000.  Criticism of Sarkozy’s policies increased following the death of the 10 French soldiers. He has also faced severe criticism for being too close to US President George W. Bush’s administration.  >>>>>

What Nobody Wants To Know About Somalia And Why; And What That Means

When Chris Floyd writes, “Somalia is the invisible third front of the Terror War”, he’s probably counting chronologically starting from 9/11: in this sense Afghanistan is #1 (we started attacking in October of 2001; let’s forget about the summer of ‘79) and Iraq is #2 (officially March of 2003, but in reality January 1991, and long before then as a matter of fact), which would make Somalia #3 (December 2006, and long before then, too!) and the recently opened and more recently acknowledged, still partly-deniable war-against-our-ally Pakistan as #4. And then Iran would be #5, or maybe it already is? But — oops! — did we forget to count the Terror War against the Home Front?  >>>>>

The Dark Heart of the Guantánamo Trials

My ethical qualms about continuing to serve as a prosecutor relate primarily to the procedures for affording defense counsel discovery. I am highly concerned, to the point that I believe I can no longer serve as a prosecutor at the Commissions, about the slipshod, uncertain “procedure” for affording defense counsel discovery. One would have thought … six years since the Commissions had their fitful start, that a functioning law office would have been set up and procedures and policies not only put into effect, but refined.

Instead, what I found, and what I still find, is that discovery in even the simplest of cases is incomplete or unreliable. To take the Jawad case as only one example — a case where no intelligence agency had any significant involvement — I discovered just yesterday that something as basic as agents’ interrogation notes had been entered into a database, to which I do not have personal access … These and other examples too legion to list are not only appalling, they deprive the accused of basic due process and subject the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct. >>>>>

15 Soldiers Killed by Kurd Rebels

Ankara, Turkey – Fighting between Kurdish rebels and Turkey’s army and air force in southern Turkey and northern Iraq has killed 15 soldiers and at least 23 insurgents, the military said Saturday, in the deadliest battle between the long-time enemies this year. >>>>>

Muslim on Muslim fighting, neither particularly for any Islamic purpose; but both use Islamic rights as reasons to fight, not recognizing that both were setup by the very same countries and people(s) that claimed to be there allies/friends to begin with. This scenario is playing out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Caucus Region, and is spreading to a neighborhood near you.

Notice how the Iraqi resistance against Saddam Hussein were once labeled resistance? Today they are insurgents. Their usefulness as an ally is diminishing for the West. With gained

‘independence’ come gained notoriety. The same is happening to the Kurds at the moment. This is not an attack on Turkey. It’s just that the Kurds are the insurgents in this article. My point is that all is relative to who is reporting.

This relativity is what is ignored by the Western populous and is actually working against their favor by the very perpetrators of those who control the infrastructure of the media and the economy. It’s time to become more aware of how we’re being played by these and other forces.