Prometheus 6

"Enter the water without raising a ripple, walk on the grass without bending a blade.

The difficult challenge now for the United States and other major powers is to come up with policies that give hope to the opposition and reinforce the doubts of Iran’s political elites — without provoking a backlash.

Our next trick will be to step off a cliff without hitting the ground.

U.S. Marines Try to Retake Afghan Valley From Taliban
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Almost 4,000 United States Marines, backed by helicopter gunships, pushed into the volatile Helmand River valley in southwestern Afghanistan Thursday morning to try to take back the region from Taliban fighters whose control of poppy harvests and opium smuggling in Helmand provides major financing for the Afghan insurgency.

Pakistan, meanwhile, said it deployed troops to a stretch of its largely porous and mountainous 1,600-mile border with Afghanistan to seal off a potential escape route for insurgents fleeing the American advance, The Associated Press reported. Both Pakistani and American officials had expressed worries that the American offensive could push militants into Pakistan, which is already confronting Taliban insurgents in several areas.

This gun thing reminds me of Brown vs. Board of Ed, in that the victory was more rooted in a need to mitigate foreign policy damage than morality.

Death and American Guns in Mexico

Drug-related murders in Mexico doubled last year, to 6,200, as cartels fight for the American addict’s dollar while relying on American gun dealers for their weapons. A new report to Congress traces over 90 percent of guns recovered in Mexican drug crimes in the last three years back across the border, where legal and illegal American dealers flout federal laws rife with loopholes.

The findings contradict gun rights groups’ claims that foreign dealers are supplying the cartels’ arms. In fact, 70 percent of 20,000 weapons recovered were traced to legal gun shops and unregulated gun shows in Texas, California and Arizona, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

With the knowledge that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which even Cheney acknowledges now, I wonder who has defied more U.N. resolutions...Iraq or Israel?

For all that right wingers say Israel has no one to negotiate with on the Palestinian side, the fact is the Palestinians have no one to negotiate with, either.

Clinton Rejects Israeli Claims of Accord on Settlements
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 6, 2009

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton forcefully rejected yesterday Israeli claims that the Bush administration had secretly agreed to expanding Jewish settlements on the West Bank, deepening the impasse between the two countries.

"We have the negotiating record, that is the official record, that was turned over to the Obama administration by the outgoing Bush administration," Clinton told reporters after meeting with her Turkish counterpart in Washington. "There is no memorialization of any informal and oral agreements."

Civil Wars: The Fights That Do Not Want to End
By GRAHAM BOWLEY

Last week, after more than 25 years of conflict, the Tamil separatists of Sri Lanka admitted defeat in their war for an independent homeland. And so ended Asia’s longest-running civil war, one of some 20 civil conflicts burning around the globe, from Colombia to Iraq to Pakistan.

Which raises some questions: How long do most civil wars last? What is a civil war, anyway? And how, finally, are they ended?

How the hell would WE know? Ours still isn't over.

If the North’s latest test was more successful, it could mean that North Korea has bolstered its atomic weapons capabilities — and its leverage over the United States, which has sought to denuclearize the North.

North Korea Announces 2nd Test of Nuclear Device
By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea announced on Monday that it had successfully conducted its second nuclear test, defying international warnings and dramatically raising the stakes in a global effort to persuade the recalcitrant Communist state to give up its weapons program.

The North’s official news agency, KCNA, said, “The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea successfully conducted one more underground nuclear test on May 25 as part of the measures to bolster up its nuclear deterrent for self-defense in every way as requested by its scientists and technicians.”

The current approach, which began in the last two years of the Bush administration and has gained momentum under Mr. Obama, is driven in part by court rulings and policy changes that have closed the secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency, and all but ended the transfer of prisoners from outside Iraq and Afghanistan to American military prisons.

U.S. Relies More on Allies in Questioning Terror Suspects
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The United States is now relying heavily on foreign intelligence services to capture, interrogate and detain all but the highest-level terrorist suspects seized outside the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, according to current and former American government officials.

The change represents a significant loosening of the reins for the United States, which has worked closely with allies to combat violent extremism since the 9/11 attacks but is now pushing that cooperation to new limits.

Canadian Judge Convicts Rwandan in Genocide
By IAN AUSTEN

OTTAWA — A Rwandan who entered Canada more than a decade ago claiming to be a refugee was convicted Friday on seven charges related to the 1994 genocide.

The conviction was the first under a Canadian war crimes law introduced nine years ago and followed an unusually complex, two-year trial that involved hearings in Africa and Europe as well as Montreal. The accused, Désiré Munyaneza, a Hutu and the son of a wealthy businessman, was 27 at the time of the massacres. Justice André Denis of the Quebec Superior Court found him guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide for his participation in murders and rapes in the Butare region.

“The accused’s criminal intent was demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt, as was his culpable violence,” Justice Denis wrote in his 210-page decision, adding that Mr. Munyaneza “generally treated Tutsi inhumanely and degradingly.”

There's two more parts on the other side of the link.

Breach of Trust: Army Responds To Soldiers Buying Fake Diplomas
WHNT NEWS 19 uncovers soldiers, defense contractors and civilians who bought fake diplomas in order to get promotions; Army responds
Wendy Halloran WHNT NEWS 19 Chief Investigative Reporter
May 12, 2009

I just shut off the television because I have no stomach for either Cheney or Obama today.

Oh, yeah. Here. And this is kind of similar too.

Arms Sent by U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands
By C. J. CHIVERS

KABUL — Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

Study Urges Using Neuroscience To Improve Soldiers' Performance
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 18, 2009

A blue-ribbon committee of the National Academy of Sciences is recommending that the Army expand its research into how a soldier's brain, blood and nerves work so it can develop futuristic applications that can increase performance and survivability in combat.

"The Army should monitor the progress of research in these areas and evaluate the results for promising Army-relevant applications," the committee says in a report on neuroscience and the Army that was released last week.

Neuroimaging technologies now becoming available will allow "visualization of brain regions that are activated during action-guiding cognitive processes such as decision-making," the study says.

Fear can harm an individual soldier or an entire unit. The report suggests incorporating fear-invoking situations in training, then comparing "before" and "after" brain scans "to determine which environments elicit fear-correlated neural activity patterns."

AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty
By Robert Draper

On the morning of Thursday, April 10, 2003, Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon prepared a top-secret briefing for George W. Bush. This document, known as the Worldwide Intelligence Update, was a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House. The briefing’s cover sheet generally featured triumphant, color images from the previous days’ war efforts: On this particular morning, it showed the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down in Firdos Square, a grateful Iraqi child kissing an American soldier, and jubilant crowds thronging the streets of newly liberated Baghdad. And above these images, and just below the headline secretary of defense, was a quote that may have raised some eyebrows. It came from the Bible, from the book of Psalms: “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him…To deliver their soul from death.”

This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. On March 31, a U.S. tank roared through the desert beneath a quote from Ephesians: “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.” On April 7, Saddam Hussein struck a dictatorial pose, under this passage from the First Epistle of Peter: “It is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish men.” (To see these and more Bush-administration intelligence cover sheets, visit GQ.com’s exclusive slideshow)....

But one government official was disturbed enough by these biblically seasoned sheets to hold on to copies, which I obtained recently while debriefing the past eight years with those who lived them inside the West Wing and the Pentagon. Over the past several months, the battle to define the Bush years has begun taking shape: As President Obama has rolled back his predecessor’s foreign and economic policies, Dick Cheney, Ari Fleischer, and former speechwriters Michael Gerson and Marc Thiessen have all taken to the airwaves or op-ed pages to cast the Bush years in a softer light. My conversations with more than a dozen Bush loyalists, including several former cabinet-level officials and senior military commanders, have revealed another element of this legacy-building moment: intense feelings of ill will toward Donald Rumsfeld. Though few of these individuals would speak for the record (knowing that their former boss, George W. Bush, would not approve of it), they believe that Rumsfeld’s actions epitomized the very traits—arrogance, stubbornness, obliviousness, ineptitude—that critics say drove the Bush presidency off the rails.

Trust me, you'll understand the title if you watch the whole clip.

Want a twofer?

Parts two and three after the jump.

Just wait until the first American guardsman is killed in a confrontation with drug lords.

Anti-Drug Effort Could Send National Guard to U.S.-Mexico Border
By Mary Beth Sheridan, Spencer S. Hsu and Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, April 24, 2009 5:04 PM

The Pentagon and Homeland Security Department are developing contingency plans to send National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexican border under a $350 million initiative that would expand the U.S. military's role in the war on drugs, according to Obama administration officials.

The circumstances under which the troops could be deployed have not been determined, the officials said. They said the proposal was designed to give President Obama additional flexibility to respond to drug-related violence that has threatened to spill into the United States from Mexico and to curb southbound smuggling of cash and weapons.

Their situation parallels our racial issues. It is exactly what happened here with regard to American Indians, except no one was watching when we did it.

A core contradiction inhabits Israeli policy. While talking about a two-state solution — at least until Netanyahu redux — Israel has gone on building the West Bank settlements that render a peace agreement impossible by atomizing the 23 percent of the land theoretically destined for Palestine.

As Ehud Barak, now the defense minister, remarked in 1999: “Every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a non-democratic or a non-Jewish state, because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don’t vote it is an apartheid state ...”

That’s right. The population of Arabs in the Holy Land, at about 5.4 million, will one day overtake the number of Jews. So a two-state solution is essential to Israel’s survival as a Jewish state. Persisting in the 42-year-old occupation and the building of settlements gnaws at the very foundations of the Zionist dream.

Roger Cohen points out a big difference, though. With the USofA, it was pure acquisitiveness, pure imperialism, pure greed that drove both our national expansion and our internal relations. With Israel, it's mostly fear.

Will you stay there if they secede? I ask because it looks like Reconstruction II will be followed by Civil War II.

Five More States Invoke the 10th
by A.W.R. Hawkins
Posted 03/04/2009 ET
Updated 03/05/2009 ET

Last week, HUMAN EVENTS reported that eleven states, Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas, had all “all introduced bills and resolutions” declaring their sovereignty over Obama’s actions in light of the 10th Amendment.

These actions are in response to the Obama administration’s faux-“stimulus” legislation which directly assaults the rights of states to reject the money coming from the federal government. So far, several Republican governors -- among them South Carolina’s Mark Sanford and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal -- have said they would refuse all or part of the stimulus money because of the constitutional infringements and because of the additional unfunded liabilities they impose on the states.

Probably try to cash in on it.

U.S. Stymied as Guns Flow to Mexican Cartels
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

Noting there are about 1,500 licensed gun dealers in the Houston area, Mr. Webb added, “You can come to Houston and go to a different gun store every day for several months and never alert any one.”

The case highlights a major obstacle facing the United States as it tries to meet a demand from Mexico to curb the flow of arms from the states to drug cartels. The federal system for tracking gun sales, crafted over the years to avoid infringements on Second Amendment rights, makes it difficult to spot suspicious trends quickly and to identify people buying for smugglers, law enforcement officials say.

Above the Fold: Colin Powell, American Coward
The general continues to debunk the myth of his own greatness
By Charles Kaiser

At just about every crucial juncture in his career, Colin Powell has failed his country, and himself.

This sorry record goes all the way back to his time as a young U.S. Army Major posted in Saigon, when, after the My Lai Massacre, he was asked to investigate a soldier’s letter describing atrocities against the Vietnamese people. Powell rejected the charges and famously wrote, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.”

On May 4, 2004, when Powell was Secretary of State, he told Larry King, “I mean, I was in a unit that was responsible for My Lai. I got there after My Lai happened. So, in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again, but they are still to be deplored.”

Extra! July/August 1995
Talk Radio on Oklahoma City:
Don't Look at Us
By Jim Naureckas

"Talk radio was ahead of the pack because it's tied into the people," Michael Harrison of the National Association of Radio Talk Show Hosts (NARTSH) told John Tierney of the New York Times (4/30/95). "The mainstream press is out of touch.... That's why it didn't see the Waco connection right away."

According to Harrison, who edits the talk radio publication Talkers, while mainstream media were blaming the deaths in Oklahoma City on Arab terrorists, nearly as many talk radio callers were citing the Branch Davidian debacle as the probable motivation for the bombing.

“We, the leaders of Russia and the United States, are ready to move beyond cold war mentalities,” the two men said in the statement. “In just a few months we have worked hard to establish a new tone in our relations. Now it is time to get down to business and translate our warm words into actual achievements of benefit to Russia, the United States and all those around the world interested in peace and prosperity.”

Seeking New Start, U.S. and Russia Press Arms Talks
By HELENE COOPER

LONDON —President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, in their historically symbolic first meeting, vowed a “fresh start” in relations and announced their intention to cooperate on a wide swath of issues, beginning with negotiations on a new arms control treaty.

In seeking to “push the reset button” in a relationship that has been teetering on the brink of a new cold war, the two leaders also promised to work together on the war in Afghanistan and efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Appearing side-by-side after a 70-minute session at the American ambassador’s residence here, the two men struck a warm tone.

“What we’re seeing today is the beginning of new progress in the U.S.-Russian relations,” Mr. Obama said. “And I think that President Medvedev’s leadership is, and has been, critical in allowing that progress to take place.”

Pakistani and Afghan Taliban Unify in Face of U.S. Influx
By CARLOTTA GALL

In interviews, several Taliban fighters based in the border region said preparations for the anticipated influx of American troops were already being made. A number of new, younger commanders have been preparing to step up a campaign of roadside bombings and suicide attacks to greet the Americans, the fighters said.

The refortified alliance was forged after the reclusive Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, sent emissaries to persuade Pakistani Taliban leaders to join forces and turn their attention to Afghanistan, Pakistani officials and Taliban members said.

The overture by Mullah Omar is an indication that with the prospect of an American buildup, the Taliban feel the need to strengthen their own forces in Afghanistan and to redirect their Pakistani allies toward blunting the new American push.

I have a bad feeling it's too late for us in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We actually had the opportunity to eliminate the Taliban and its support for terrorism but we left. Again.

They're ready for us this time. And we don't have the universal support we had after 9/11 (thank you, Dubya...).

He's right, and if the pattern of the last two or three decades holds I strongly suggest the State Department start reaching out to Mr. Sharif.

“This is the first time in the history of Pakistan that the police and civil administration have defied orders by the government to control public demonstrations,” said Ashtar Ali, a corporate lawyer who supports the Pakistan Muslim League-N. “The writ of the government has failed.”

Something along the lines of, "We support the current government of Pakistan. However, as the leading democracy in the world (P6: don't hit me, I'm writing rhetoric here) we understand a people will choose the leadership they desire. If the people of Pakistan decide their government needs reorganization, we will acknowledge that and, when they are done and after the appropriate discussions, we will be prepared to continue a productive relationship with Pakistan and her people" ought to do it.

Mass Demonstration Defies Pakistani Government
By JANE PERLEZ

LAHORE, Pakistan — A crackdown by the Pakistani government to prevent a national demonstration and detain the country’s leading opposition figure collapsed on Sunday, and what had been a clash between the police and protesters transformed into a huge anti-government rally.

In what analysts here called an unprecedented reversal by security forces, phalanxes of riot policemen here in Lahore melted away rather than continue to confront protesters who had rallied around the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, when he defied a house arrest order early Sunday.

Senators slam plan for wounded vets to use private insurance
By Adam Levine
CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance.

But the proposal would be "dead on arrival" if it's sent to Congress, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said.

Murray used that blunt terminology when she told Shinseki that the idea would not be acceptable and would be rejected if formally proposed. Her remarks came during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs about the 2010 budget.

No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama voicing their opposition to the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration.