U.S. cruise missiles are far from "precision-guided" By The Wayne Madsen Report

 U.S. cruise missiles are far from "precision-guided" 

By The Wayne Madsen Report

The Pentagon is claiming that the 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles it fired on the Shayrat airbase in Homs province, Syria were precision-guided from the moment they left their launchers on two U.S. Navy guided missile destroyers, the USS Porter (DDG-78) and USS Ross (DDG-71), on station in the eastern Mediterranean. The Pentagon also claimed that the cruise missiles did not target an area of the base that was being used by Russian forces that were conducting anti-Islamic State operations in Palmyra, 50 miles away, with helicopter gunships. It is also known that Iranian military advisers were bivouacked at the Shayrat base. The Pentagon insisted that it "minimized casualties among third-country nationals," typical DoD language meant to indicate that it could not rule out casualties among Russians, Iranians, members of Lebanese Hezbollah, or Iraqi Shi'as who may have been at the base at the time of the attack.

The Tomahawks used in the attack were manufactured by Raytheon and were armed with 1000-pound conventional warheads. Raytheon and its bought-and-paid for members of Congress and media outlets, including CNN, Fox News, NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and MS-NBC, claim the Tomahawk is "precision-guided," a Pentagon meme used to avoid accusations of collateral civilian casualties resulting from U.S. cruise missile attacks. These missiles are anything but "precision-guided," a term that, like "military intelligence," is misused by the Pentagon.

During the 1991 Desert Storm operations against Iraq, 288 Tomahawks were fired from U.S. Navy ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf. One, targeting the Zafraniyah Nuclear Fabrication Facility outside of Baghdad, crashed into the Al Rasheed Hotel in downtown Baghdad, killing two civilians.

In June 1993, 23 Tomahawks were fired into downtown Baghdad as the result of a phony story about former President George H. W. Bush being targeted by Iraqi agents in an assassination plot during his visit to Kuwait. Although the story was false, the Tomahawks, said to have been targeted on Iraqi Intelligence headquarters, struck three civilian homes, killing nine civilians.

In 1995, During NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, the USS Normandy, a cruiser, fired 13 Tomahawks at Bosnian Serb communications facilities near Banja Luka. Instead of striking communications facilities only, the Tomahawks destroyed water treatment facilities and power plants, killing a number of civilians.


The Pentagon's much-prized Tomahawk "precision-guided" cruise missile has killed thousands of civilians in "collateral damage."

On August 20, 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered 79 missiles fired on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. While there was no indication that Operation Infinite Reach interfered with Al Qaeda's ability to bomb U.S. embassies, as what had just occurred in Kenya and Tanzania and was used as justification for the attack, 13 of the cruise missiles destroyed a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, killing a civilian guard. As far as the attack on a supposed Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan was concerned, Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden revealed that a "few camels and chickens" died in the attack.

In early December 1998, Clinton authorized 415 Tomahawks to be fired on Iraqi targets in Operation Desert Fox. Targets included were six Iraqi presidential palaces, a number of Republican Guard Barracks, and the Ministry of Defense. Critics claimed the attack was conducted to draw away the public's attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal surrounding Clinton. The "precision-guided" attack on only "military" targets, resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths, including those at the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry in central Baghdad, at Baghdad Museum of Natural History and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and at another university in northern Iraq, and at an oil installation in Basra.

In early 1999, 218 Tomahawks were fired against Serbia and Montenegro in Operation Allied Force. Some 528 civilians were killed by the "precision-guided" missiles, including 201 in Serbia, 5 in Vojvodina, and 8 in Montenegro. The civilian dead included rescue and medical personnel. Among the civilian targets were cross-Danube bridges (including the Marshal Tito bridge in Novi Sad), civilian buses and trains, police stations, factories, the Belgrade Heating Plant, civilian semi-trucks, the Yugoslav Radio and Television headquarters in Belgrade, the Pathology building of the Nis Medical Center, the Nis central market, a Nis car dealership, the "Nis Express" parking garage, and the Dubrava penitentiary complex in Kosovo. NATO Commander General Wesley Clark spent most of the time during press briefings "apologizing" for "collateral damage" from his precision-guided munitions. In May 1999, other U.S. "precision-guided" munitions, "smart bombs," dropped by B-2 bombers and which, were supposedly targeted the Yugoslav Federal Supply and Procurement directorate, hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade instead. Three Chinese journalists were killed at the embassy.


U.S. "precision-guided" munitions struck the Chinese embassy in 1999, killing three Chinese journalists. Will Donald Trump boast about U.S. "precision guided" weapons technology used against Shayrat airbase in Syria while talking to visiting Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in Florida?

On October 7, 2001, 50 Tomahawks were fired into Afghanistan in the initial stages of Operation Enduring Freedom. Some 76 civilians were reportedly killed by the cruise missiles. In 2003, more than 803 Tomahawks were fired into Iraq. A number of targets were civilian in nature and thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed by the cruise missiles. In March 2008, two Tomahawks were fired into Somalia, killing six civilians. In December 2009, two Tomahawks were fired into Abyan province Yemen, killing 21 children and 14 women. In March 2011, 124 Tomahawks were fired into Libya. Hundreds of civilians were killed in the attacks.


In 2011, America's precision-guided missiles struck the Tripoli home of Muammar Qaddafi, killing children. NATO insisted the home was a "command-and-control" center. Really, with an advanced foosball table at the ready? WMR's editor saw, first-hand, the ridiculous by-product of the Pentagon's "smart weapons" in the hands of dumb commanders-in-chief and flag officers.

This 26-year old Libyan civilian was severely injured when a U.S. precision-guided missile hit his home in Tadjoura, west of Tripoli. Still unconscious, he was not aware that the attack killed two members of his family.

On September 24, 2014, 14 Tomahawks were fired into Syria by the USS Arleigh Burke and the USS Philippine Sea. At least seven civilians were killed in the village of Kafr Deryan in northern Idlib province. On October 13, 2016, five Tomahawks were launched into northern Yemen from the USS Nitze. Civilian deaths were reported in the barrage.

Neocons in the U.S. Congress praised the most recent Tomahawk attack on Syria, as did the Wahhabist Islamic governments of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and the Islamist dictatorship of Turkey. The Trump administration has gone full neocon, with national security decisions now being made by Trump's cadre of military interventionists, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Adviser General H. R. McMaster, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo, National Security Council deputies K.T. McFarland and Dina Powell, staff advisers Sebastian Gorka and Stephen Miller, and White House economics adviser and Goldman Sachs alum Gary Cohn.

North Korea wasn't first to pursue nuke weapons on the Korean peninsula By The Wayne Madsen Report

North Korea wasn't first to pursue nuke weapons on the Korean peninsula

By The Wayne Madsen Report
North Korea was not the first power on the Korean peninsula to pursue the acquisition of nuclear weapons. That distinction goes to U.S. ally South Korea under the dictatorship of Park Chung Hee. Ironically, as the U.S. corporate media joins the Pentagon in rattling war sabers against North Korea, the daughter of the South Korean leader who gave the green light to a South Korean nuclear arsenal, Park Geun-hye, was recently placed in prison on criminal fraud charges following her impeachment and removal from the South Korean presidency.

Currently, U.S. news networks are sending crews to South Korea to file reports on the U.S. military readiness to repel an attack from the North. Along with those reports come advertisements from such war contractors as Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin.

A Confidential cable from the U.S. embassy in Seoul to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on July 30, 1974, just a little over a week before the resignation of President Richard Nixon, set off quiet alarms in Washington. A South Korean official told the U.S. ambassador in Seoul that word reached Seoul that North Korea was preparing to ratify the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). While such a move would have been welcomed in the region as a step toward de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula, the South Korean government waffled on whether it would follow Pyongyang's lead in acceding to the NPT.

In fact, as a series of U.S. State Department cables indicate, the South Koreans had no intention of following Pyongyang on ratifying the NPT. The reason was simple: the Park dictatorship had secretly been developing its own nuclear arsenal.

Seoul began letting its nuclear cat out of the bag in an editorial in the July 12, 1974, edition of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA)-dominated newspaper Kyunghyang Shinmun. The editorial thought it unwise for South Korea to pursue non-proliferation under the American nuclear protection umbrella. The cable from Seoul to Kissinger stated that the editorial was unambiguous about Seoul's intentions: "the ROK [Republic of Korea] can no longer take a negative attitude on the spread of nuclear capability out of humanitarian or sentimental concerns." The cable contained a stark warning for Washington: "Most senior ROK defense planners desire to obtain capability eventually to produce nuclear weapons." The cable added that U.S. pressure on Seoul could be expected to be met by "growing independence" by South Korea on defense matters.

The year 1974 presented a "perfect storm" for South Korea to embark on a nuclear weapons program. The skyrocketing of oil prices that year propelled South Korea's nuclear power industry, which was bolstered by two Westinghouse nuclear power plants then under construction and contracts for Canada to supply South Korea with two CANDU reactors. In addition, Seoul was talking to Gulf General Atomics about obtaining three 800-megawatt reactors that used highly-enriched uranium fuel. Moreover, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), believing South Korea to be "loyal" to the cause of nuclear non-proliferation, heartily endorsed the South's obtaining additional nuclear power plants through 1985.

The highly-enriched uranium obtained by the South was also necessary for the development of nuclear weapons. South Korea also had a separate covert program to develop weapons-grade plutonium. As seen from its acquisition of "dual use" nuclear technology, Seoul's nuclear weapons program had gone far beyond the planning stages when the U.S. embassy in Seoul first alerted Kissinger about Seoul's nuclear ambitions.

The Canadian ambassador in Seoul informed his U.S. counterpart that Canada was aware that South Korea might decide to divert its CANDU nuclear reactor technology to nuclear weapons production. In August 1974, Park, obviously aware that Washington was preoccupied with the resignation of Nixon and was not looking closely at Korea, privately told South Korean journalists that he ordered South Korean scientists to develop atom bombs by 1977. The CIA then believed that South Korea could develop its own nuclear bomb by 1980 by diverting technology for its nuclear power plants and secretly acquiring nuclear fuel reprocessing equipment from France. Park's agents also approached McDonnell-Douglas to acquire 200-mile range ballistic missiles capable of reaching Pyongyang from South Korean territory.

Under tremendous pressure from the Gerald Ford administration, South Korea, which had signed the NPT in 1968, finally ratified it in 1975. However, it is believed that work never actually stopped on South Korea's nuclear weapons program. Like that of Japan, it was buried deep within the "peaceful" nuclear power program. During the Jimmy Carter administration, when it was announced that the U.S. would withdraw its ground troops from South Korea, Park resumed the covert South Korean nuclear weapons program by secretly trying to obtain nuclear fuel reprocessing technology and materials from France. South Korea was not the only country with nuclear weapons aspirations to have approached the French for reprocessing capabilities. The French were negotiating a similar agreement with Pakistan.

It was South Korea's pursuit of nuclear weapons that resulted in North Korea pressuring China and the Soviet Union for a similar capability. Pyongyang's intention of ratifying the NPT was a casualty of Seoul's intentions. There is no evidence that either Beijing or Moscow provided the North with nuclear weapons technology, decisions that prompted the North to look elsewhere.

In 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, North and South Korea signed the "Joint Declaration of South and North Korea on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula." Although the North had not signed the NPT, it agreed with Seoul to not seek to "possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities." Furthermore, North and South vowed that they would not "test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons." North Korea proceeded to violate the North-South accord by continuing to develop a nuclear weapons capability. It tested an underground nuclear weapon at the Punggye-ri Test Site in 2006.

In 2004, the South Koreans had a surprise for the IAEA. It declared to the agency that it had conducted uranium enrichment and conversion and plutonium separation experiments at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). The IAEA considered the South's breach a severe violation of the NPT. The South Korean government said the experiments had been conducted "without the knowledge or authorization of the government." In a structured society like South Korea, the claim by Seoul was laughable, if it had not been so serious a move to acquire weapons-grade nuclear material.

   
It takes a certain amount of tact, patience, and experience to deal with North Korea: Jimmy Carter with Kim Il Sung, 1994 [left], Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Kim Jong Il, 2000 [center], Bill Clinton with Kim Jong Il, 2009 [right]. Trump misses out on all three requirements.
Today, the war mongers inside the Trump administration are hankering for a military showdown with North Korea. Such brinkmanship comes at a potential deadly cost to the United States. There are over 130,000 American citizens, including military forces, living in South Korea. Most live within range of North Korean artillery, which, in the first stages of a military conflict, will rain down their shells on metropolitan Seoul.

The Trump administration appears to be as befuddled and incompetent on Korea as was the Ford administration. For example, a February 28, 1975, National Security Council memo to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who also served as National Security Adviser, stated that South Korea's "initial stage of nuclear weapons development . . . would have a decidedly stabilizing effect in Northeast Asia," when the exact opposite was the case.

South Korea's covert nuclear weapons program under Park came to a halt in 1979 after the South Korean president was shot to death by his own KCIA chief. Although the KCIA's founding organization, the U.S. CIA, denied any role in the assassination, it was noted that the normal CIA complement of between 40 and 50 agents at the CIA station in Seoul doubled to over a 100 just prior to the assassination. Most of the agents worked out of the U.S. embassy's 5th floor, in what was called the CIA's "Research Unit."



North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un, is an unstable character. However, he was schooled in Switzerland and is the first in three generations of Kim leaders to have lived in a Western country, becoming familiar with Western "culture," good and bad. Kim's grandfather Kim Il Sung and father Kim Jong Il were experienced Communist Party functionaries and were capable of diplomacy while not always abiding by international agreements. Kim Il Sung met in Pyongyang in 1994 with former President Jimmy Carter. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with Kim Jong Il in 2000 in Pyongyang, a meeting that was followed by one between Kim Jong Il and former President Bill Clinton in 2009. Kim Il Jong's sudden death in 2011, which may not have been by natural causes, ended high-level contacts between Pyongyang and Washington.

Kim Jong Un is a loose cannon, as seen with his ordering the assassination by VX nerve agent of his half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. However, even a loose cannon can be lured with the dangling of lucrative "carrots." However, the Trump administration and its neanderthal thinkers like CIA director Mike Pompeo lack the gravitas to come up with a unique way to deal with Kim Jong Un without setting the Korean peninsula ablaze with a nuclear fire.

One thing is for certain. Neither China nor Russia will permit the U.S. Pacific Command to extend its territory to the Yalu River border with China or the Tumen River border with Russia. Unlike West Germany's unification with East Germany, there is no great desire among most South Koreans to absorb North Korea. An exception is the very elderly who still have relatives in the North. Therefore, any move to eliminate Kim from the scene will only have the support of China and Russia if a new North Korean regime adheres to a strict neutrality, guaranteed by all the powers in the region, including Japan and the United States.

There is likely an anti-Kim faction within the North Korean military that would move against the Kims if they were guaranteed leadership of a neutral North Korea in return for abandoning the North's nuclear weapons program. The best the U.S. can hope for is the emergence of a North Korean version of Marshal Tito, someone that will keep his country stable as a strictly neutral power in exchange for a guarantee of non-aggression from all regional powers, including the United States and a rapidly re-militarizing Japan. However, the North will need an insurance policy and that is its continued possession of short- and intermediate-range conventional missiles, not the intercontinental ballistic missiles like the one just test-fired by North Korea.

Trump considers himself the ultimate deal maker. However, given the presence of James Mattis at the Pentagon, Pompeo at the CIA, and right-wing lunatic Stephen Bannon always at Trump's side, Trump will not be able to deal with Pyongyang because he frankly lacks the intelligence and education to carry off such a feat. While "only Nixon could go to China," Trump does not have the wherewithal to navigate his way back to New York on the New Jersey Turnpike. On the issue of North Korea, a Trump White House official was anonymously quoted as saying, "The clock has now run out [on North Korea], and all options are on the table." That is not incredibly original or insightful.

NSA formulating American foreign policy in secret By The Wayne Madsen Report

NSA formulating American foreign policy in secret

By The Wayne Madsen Report

The recent disclosures of classified National Security Agency documents liberated from NSA databases by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal that the signals intelligence agency has been heavily involved in formulating American foreign policy. Information contained in a series of internal NSA newsletters called "SID Today," SID meaning the Signals Intelligence Directorate, describe a foreign policy bureaucracy, rivaling that of the State Department and Pentagon, existing within the intelligence agency. The degree to which NSA now influences U.S. foreign policy represents a sea change in the role of an agency originally charged with eavesdropping on foreign diplomatic and military traffic and protecting U.S. government communications from surveillance.

Many of the detailed foreign policy decisions by NSA are carried out by SINIOS, or SIGINT National Intelligence Officers, assigned particular areas of responsibility. For example, there are SINIOs for Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, East Asia, Strategic Programs and Arms Control, Science and Technology issues, and Global and Multilateral Issues, the latter including the operations of the United Nations. The SINIOs meet at regular and ad hoc SINIO Council meetings that assess and prioritize the most critical foreign policy issues facing the United States. The SINIOs operate under the aegis of the NSA's SID Customer Relationships Directorate. This top secret foreign policy apparatus operates with little oversight from the Congress and little, if any, input from the State Department. The proceedings of the SINIO Council and even its very existence would have never been known to the public or the press had it not been for Snowden's disclosures.

A July 17, 2003, SID Today item dealt with ways to eliminate Liberian President Charles Taylor's government in Liberia. The SINIO for Sub-Saharan Africa prepared a top secret report on Taylor and elimination options, titled "Charles Taylor -- West African Pariah;    Down But Is He Out?" 

In October 2003, the SINIO for Global and Multilateral Issues proposed ways to deal with a recalcitrant Germany and France, which opposed a UN Security Council imprimatur on an Iraq reconstruction donors' conference in Madrid. Other disclosed NSA classified documents described how NSA authorized "surge" surveillance of the UN missions of members of the Security Council, including those of Germany and France. The SINIO Council called such opponents of U.S. policy in Iraq, the "Coalition of the Unwilling" in an August 6, 2003 SID Today. The SINIO Council also aped the Bush administration's "Axis of Evil" terminology to describe Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

Other SINIO Council meetings held in 2003 dealt with deterring Vladimir Putin's Russia, dealing with "political Islam" in the Middle East and South Asia, and how the United States, Japan, and South Korea could best deal with a "rising China."

On July 22, 2003, the SINIO Council was briefed by an outside entity called the Eurasia Group. The SID Today announcement stated: "Ian Bremmer, head of Eurasia Group, and severa colleagues will be coming to speak at NSA. Eurasia Group is a research and    consulting firm that focuses on global political-risk analysis, as well as country-specific    and industry research for emerging markets. The name is a bit deceiving, as their    country research coverage includes more than 65 countries in Africa, East and Southeast Europe, Former Soviet Union, Latin America, Middle East, and Southeast and East Asia." The focus on the briefing was on oil and natural gas, terrorism, and Iraqi reconstruction. Bremmer is an advocate of the "weaponization of finance," the use of sanctions, trade embargoes, and asset freezes to supplement America's military power. It is easy to see why NSA was enthused about Bremmer's ideas about waging economic warfare since that eventually became a main focus of NSA's and its US Cyber Command's offensive information warfare strategy.

Bremmer was not the only dalliance by NSA, then headed by General Michael Hayden, with war-hungry neoconservatives. A November 2013 seminar at NSA on "China Rising: Implications of Military Modernization" had, as one of its speakers, a representative from Frank Gaffney's extreme neoconservative Center for Security Policy.

NSA's role in formulating U.S. foreign policy can be traced back to 1971, when the agency created its own International Affairs Institute (IAI), a top secret version of the Council on Foreign Relations. The IAI became its own bureaucracy, inviting hundreds of intelligence community and outside speakers to address NSA audiences and publishing a number of foreign policy papers. In August 2003, NSA and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) conducted a joint classified seminar on the instability of the south Caucasus region at the secure FANX facility near the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters. FANX is an acronym for the "Friendship Annex," a reference to Friendship Airport, the old name for Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The seminar discussed ways to pursue America's interests in the region.


Under Michael Hayden, now a major opponent of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, NSA received foreign policy briefings from the ultra-neocon Center for Security Policy.

A December 2003, NSA three-day foreign policy seminar dealt with ways for the U.S. to deal with "populist and left-of-center leaders in Latin America over the past five years." This seminar undoubtedly dealt with the ill-fated April 2002 coup attempt by the U.S. to overthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The coup had the support of the CIA and NSA.

The initial goal of the IAI was to promote an interest among NSA employees in international events and affairs. NSA's foreign affairs "interest" has now grown to include foreign policy formulation.

Through NSA's Foreign Affairs Directorate (FAD), the agency even decides on major foreign policy initiatives with its FIVE EYES signals intelligence partners in Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand outside of the civilian foreign policy infrastructures of the five nations. These initiatives included the decision in 2003 to jointly target communications in Burma, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia by NSA, the Australian Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), and New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

A June 12, 2003, SINIO Council meeting dealt with Turkey. It is clear that NSA had suspicions, along with the Turkish military's General Staff with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of then-Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is also highly probable that the recent abortive coup attempt against Erdogan was carried out by U.S.-aligned members of the Turkish General Staff, aided and abetted by certain elements within the U.S. military-intelligence complex, including defense and intelligence contractor companies. WMR has a string reason to believe that these elements hatched the coup plot in February of this year but without a Presidential Finding from Barack Obama or a green light from CIA director John Brennan, both of whom have close ties to fellow travelers of Erdogan's Islamist leanings. The 2003 NSA briefing discussed how the "pro-Islam Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Turkish General Staff (TGS), guardian of Turkey's    secular democracy, view each other with mutual suspicion. The strategic relationship with the U.S. is seriously weakened, so the U.S. is unlikely to champion Turkey's cause in Europe or with the IMF/World Bank as fervently."

The presence of a super-classified U.S. foreign policy apparatus buried deep within the bowels of the NSA is yet another indication that American democracy died a slow death when intelligence bureaucracies like the NSA were given a wide berth to operate. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the last two and current NSA directors are hard core neoconservatives who believe in American global supremacy.    

Syria crisis has Pentagon's sock puppet software working overtime by Wayne Madsen

Syria crisis has Pentagon's sock puppet software working overtime

by Wayne Madsen

The U.S. Defense Department's and the U.S. Cyber Command's offensive information warfare operations to program "sock puppet" software to post U.S. propaganda messages on social media and web page comment sites has been working overtime since Turkey's downing of a Russian war plane in contested Syrian-Turkish airspace.

In 2013, the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is based in Tampa, issued a contract to California-based Ntrepid Corporation for an "online persona management program" that would permit a single military member to operate 10 separate online identities in cyberspace. The operation is code named "Operation Earnest Voice"  and its area of coverage includes the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq. Through a procedure known as "traffic mixing," military personnel would blend their Internet personae with users in other U.S. military commands and government agencies, including U.S. Cyber Command and the Central Intelligence Agency, to maintain "powerful deniability." Other classified U.S. contracts support sock puppets acting as Wikipedia editors to alter the online encyclopedia's entries to keep in line with U.S. propaganda and disinformation aims.

online persona management service" that will allow one U.S. serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world. - See more at: http://www.occupy.com/article/revealed-sock-puppet-software-allows-us-military-creat-fake-online-identities#sthash.Wwu1p52L.dpuf

An example of an anti-Russian sock puppet program in action was recently discovered on the George Soros- and Democratic Third Way-influenced social media website, Democratic Underground (DU), which is often quoted by Soros acolyte Thom Hartmann. Interestingly, Hartmann also continues to broadcast from the studios of RT in Washington, which makes the following use of a sock puppet program all the more interesting.

On November 25, a DU user with the handle of "dantana21" posted a video of RT's CrossTalk program, which featured three guests agreeing that Turkey's shootdown of a Russian Sukhoi-24 fighter bomber was a senseless provocation. A sock puppet program using the handle "uhnope," and which has been wall papering the DU site with non-stop anti-Russia propaganda for well over a year, experienced a glitch and, after launching into a predictable attack on RT, went into a happy Thanksgiving mode.

The "uhnope" sock puppet came back and posted the same message using the handle "uppityperson." Both sock puppets also asked the RT video poster how his girls were doing. "Dantana21," aware that these posts were sock puppets, replied that he had no girls.

Rather than delete the "uhnope" and "uppityperson" sock puppet personae, DU, which is primarily used by gay and lesbian single-issue activists and Israel supporters to push their agendas, deleted the user dantana 21 and the RT video. RT has been informed on numerous occasions that its host Hartmann has close ties to Soros web operations like DU and DailyKos, however, the Moscow-based management of the network has chosen to ignore these repeated warnings to its own detriment.

Hartmann's past employment includes a stint at Radio Free Europe in Berlin at a time when the network was funded totally by the CIA. His expertise is in neuro-linguistics.



It is noteworthy that DU has banned any excerpts from or links to WMR articles.

In the coming EW war between the U.S. and Russia, the Americans will lose and lose badly. by Wayne Madsen

In the coming EW war between the U.S. and Russia, the Americans will lose and lose badly.

by Wayne Madsen

The latest neocon war proposal oozing forth from the right-wing think tanks in Washington is that there are serious discussions within the Pentagon, talks that include Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, to stymie Russia's Middle East military operations by waging an electronic warfare (EW) campaign against Russian air, naval, and ground forces in Syria. If Moscow approves Iraq's request for intervention in that country, the neocons want the U.S. EW campaign, which would include cyber-attacks, extended to Iraq, as well.

The neocons may want to engage Russia on the electronic battlefield but, according to National Security Agency insiders, the U.S. ability to wage an effective EW campaign is severely handicapped by former NSA director General Michael Hayden's decision to distribute NSA functions to various regional NSA facilities around the United States. This move was originally undertaken by Hayden's TRAILBLAZER project, a program that was eventually canceled after $1.2 was wasted on it.

NSA's main electronic warfare emitter signature databases, one code named KILTING and the other known as the Emitter Parameter List (EPL), were, as part of the NSA distribution of functions, split up between NSA Washington in Fort Meade, Maryland, and NSA Colorado in Aurora and NSA Texas in San Antonio. This distribution of NSA's operations has, according to the insiders, resulted in incorrect and outdated emitter data from databases maintained on Russian radar systems, avionics, telemetry, and other signal sources. Much of the KILTING data involves emitter data from Soviet military systems no longer used by the Russian military.

The Russians, on the other hand, have deployed to Syria advanced EW systems capable of jamming U.S. radar and electronic warfare, electronic surveillance, and electronic countermeasure systems. These systems are deployed on platforms like the IL-20 surveillance aircraft; the mobile Krashuka-4 land-based electronic warfare system that, among other things, can disrupt low-Earth orbit satellites and jam signals in a 250-square mile area; drones outfitted with EW pods, and Navy ships capable of waging technologically-advanced EW and signals intelligence collection. These systems would be devastating against NATO air units, including "stealth" aircraft, that are ordered to come to the assistance of the Saudi- and Qatari-funded jihadist rebels by enforcing a NATO "no-fly zone" over Syria.

The fact that the Russians, who spend only one-tenth of what the United States spends on defense, are able to outmaneuver the United States on the electronic battlefield, is a testament to the graft and corruption in the U.S. military-industrial complex, with companies like Lockheed Martin and SAIC enriching themselves with little or nothing in the Pentagon's quiver of electronic weapons to show for it.


NATO forces will be no match against Russian EW systems like the Krasukha-4 [above]. NATO EW systems rely on outdated emitter data from the NSA that is over 30 years old.

In 2005, WMR detailed the weaknesses of U.S. EW capabilities. The situation, according to our sources, has not greatly improved in the last 10 years:

Operators in U.S. electronic warfare aircraft rely on NSA to provide accurate electronic intelligence (ELINT) data in order to program their radar warning receivers and jamming pods. However, NSA data, provided from two databases known as EPL (Emitter Parameter List) and "Kilting." 70 percent of NSA's ELINT data is 30 years old. NSA management has forced field operators to use raw ELINT intercept data, culled from a database called "Wrangler," to program their ELINT systems. NSA operations and software engineers believe this function should be handled by NSA and not the "warfighters."  Updated ELINT data is handled by ELINT Technical Reports or "ELTs." In 2003, the year the Iraq war started, there were 938 ELTs submitted on new emitter data. However, there were only 200 updates made to the ELINT databases.

The failure to update the ELINT databases may have had disastrous consequences in Iraq. For example, EPL and Kilting do not contain data on air traffic control radars and microwave communications links. Because current ELINT systems cannot differentiate between commercial signals and hostile target tracking emitters, U.S. forces in Iraq have launched attacks on non-threat targets in the belief they were hostile. NSA sources report that many of the cases of fratricide in Iraq has been due to faulty or old ELINT data. For example, the failure by NSA to update ELINT data and provide emitter parameter data to warfighting units led to the accidental shoot down by a Patriot missile of a British Royal Air Force Tornado fighter in March 2003 near the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border at the outset of the Iraq campaign. Two British crew members were killed. The ELINT data used by the Patriot misidentified the Tornado as an enemy missile and the U.S. Army blamed the British crew for the mistake, claiming they failed to switch on its Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) equipment. NSA insiders claim that allegation was false. They claim that "blue signals" (friendly) are not adequately included in the emitter data sent to field units by NSA and that claims by the Pentagon that the Tornado was shot down due to pilot error were false.

In other incidents, the radar warning receivers (RWRs) on U.S. F-16s flying over Iraq have either evaded or fired AMRAAM (Advanced Medium-Range, Air-to-Air) missiles on microwave communications towers because the microwave signals were identified as threat emitters from hostile aircraft. U.S. jammers are also adversely affected by the failure to update ELINT data.With aviation fire control systems so automated by the use of computers, incorrect or outdated emitter data may continue to have disastrous effects on the battlefield, including the recent unprovoked U.S. attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz.

The Pentagon recognizes that it is behind the eight ball when it comes to facing off against Russia on an electronic warfare battle. The Defense Department's planned
Multi-Function Electronic Warfare system (MFEW), the closest platform that matches Russia's Krasukha-4, is not expected to become fully operational until 2027.

Redacted Pentagon report on Israel's H-bomb released by Wayne Madsen

Redacted Pentagon report on Israel's H-bomb released

The federal government decided to release in a heavily-redacted form a 1987 Pentagon-commissioned report on Israel's and NATO nation's critical military technology. The move came after a litigation brought about by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy three years ago and a law suit filed for the release of the report in September 2014.

The 386-page report, prepared by the Pentagon think tank, Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), states that Israel's key nuclear weapons facilities were similar to those at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Specifically, the report states at the Soreq Nuclear Research Center, near Yavne, and the Dimona/Beer Sheva facilities are equivalent of Oak Ridge and Los Alamos and that Soreq had access to the same technologies developed at the American nuclear laboratories. This is a clear indication that U.S. nuclear technology was being provided by the U.S. to Israel either willingly or through espionage, or possibly, both. Soreq was also said to resemble the nuclear facilities at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

The report states: "The capability of SOREQ to support SDIO [Strategic Defense Initiative Operations] and nuclear technologies [emphasis added] is almost an exact parallel of the capability currently existing at our National Laboratories."

Furthermore, the report states: "They [the Israelis] use the same types of Lagrangian hydrodynamic codes using elastic-plastic deformation as are used by the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy. These, of course, find utility in studying the implosion of nuclear devices as well as studying spallation."

The report states that in 1987, Israel was at the same stage of fission nuclear weapons development where the United States was between 1955 and 1960 and that they were developing fusion or hydrogen bomb capabilities but still lacked the necessary codes and calculations to produce H-bombs.

It is noteworthy that while information on critical weapons technology of Italy, France, West Germany, and other NATO countries is redacted in the released report, Israeli technology did not receive as much blacked out paragraphs by military censors.

This editor, while working for the National Security Agency in 1987, discovered that Israel's Mossad targeted a number of sensitive NSA and other military operations, including the U.S. Navy's Trident submarine communications suite, for espionage. A number of American Jewish engineers at RCA, Raytheon, and various sub-contractors were discovered to have been sharing sensitive compartmented information (SCI) with Israeli "engineers" working on other signals intelligence projects outside of the NSA-DoD SCI framework. However, the FBI chose not to prosecute any of the Jewish engineers becase of the threat of being charged with "anti-Semitism." With the exception of Jonathan Pollard, no other Jewish spies for Israel were pursued by the FBI in the 1980s, including, as the 1987 IDA report indicates, those who were passing U.S. nuclear secrets to the Israelis from Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Livermore.

Read the IDA report here.

US Prepares to Sell Saudi Arabia Warships to Help Take Down Iran By Bruce K. Gagnon

US Prepares to Sell Saudi Arabia Warships to Help Take Down Iran By Bruce K. Gagnon (about the author)

Middle East
(image by Global Network)

The American revolution was supposed to have happened because of the revulsion our 'founding fathers' had with the institution of 'divine right of kings' or monarchy. Supposedly the new American nation went to war with England because a revolutionary 'democracy' was the preferred way of organizing our new nation. (Of course the truth was that the American 'founding fathers' had their own dreams of empire which is just what has sadly turned out for this country. But the mythology of America is all about our rejection of monarchy.)

Fast forward to today and we see the headlines on November 20 in the Portland Press Herald newspaper: Bath Iron Works may get Saudi ship contract worth billions.

The article reads in part:

Saudi Arabian officials say they are preparing to move forward with an upgrade to the country's navy that could include a multibillion-dollar contract for Bath Iron Works, the Reuters news service reported Wednesday.

BIW's DDG-51 destroyer is one of at least two ship designs being considered for the long-discussed Saudi Naval Expansion Program II, or SNEP, which has an estimated value of roughly $20 billion, Reuters said.

Patrick Dewar, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin, told the news service that Saudi officials were planning to release new information over the next several months about how the country plans to proceed with SNEP.

Dewar told Reuters that the Saudis are considering whether to buy up to a dozen of Lockheed's steel monohull Littoral Combat Ship or the larger DDG-51 destroyer built by BIW, a subsidiary of General Dynamics Corp.

"We are aware of the ongoing discussions between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia concerning modernization of the Saudi fleet," said BIW spokesman Jim DeMartini.

"We are in the business of building naval surface combatants and should the two governments reach an agreement on a program, we would be highly interested in pursuing that opportunity."

Looking at the map above we see the close proximity of Iran to Saudi Arabia. We know that the Saudi monarchy wants to take down Iran (as does Israel and the US). We know that the DDG-51 destroyer built by BIW is outfitted with so-called 'missile defense' systems that are key elements in US first-strike attack planning. We know that these warships are heavily reliant on US military satellites to direct the on-board weapons systems to their targets. Saudi Arabia does not have the military satellites nor the ground-based command and control systems to guide these weapons systems to their targets. Thus any Saudi high-tech ships and weapons would be run through the Pentagon's warfighting satellite system. In other words the Saudi monarchy would be paying for the ships that would essentially augment existing US military forces now surrounding Iran in places like Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and other locations in the region.

Most interesting of all is that US shipyard workers would be building warships for a brutal and unforgiving monarchy that is known for making ISIS look like amateurs. Saudi Arabia is one of the last places on earth where capital punishment is a public spectacle - carried out in what is called Chop Chop Square in Riyadh.

Capital and physical punishments imposed by Saudi courts, such as beheading, stoning (to death), amputation and lashing, as well as the sheer number of executions have been strongly criticized. The death penalty can be imposed for a wide range of offences including murder, rape, armed robbery, repeated drug use, apostasy, adultery, witchcraft and sorcery and can be carried out by beheading with a sword, stoning or firing squad, followed by crucifixion. The 345 reported executions between 2007 and 2010 were all carried out by public beheading. The last reported execution for sorcery took place in September 2014.

Interfaith Unity Against Terrorism reports:

Saudi Arabia has been the official sponsor of Wahabbism -- the extremist thought from which all jihadist militancy now pours forth. Saudi Arabia and its Wahabbism's militant Islamic doctrines constitute a clear and present danger to the Middle East and to the entire world. The house of Saud derives its legitimacy from religious credentials underwritten by Wahabbi clerics. Wahabbism is the creed that has fuelled all jihads --many with West's blessings- in world's recent memory.

You'd think that official circles in Washington would be up-in-arms about selling high-tech weapons of war to the brutal monarchy of Saudi Arabia. But this likely $20 billion weapons sale indicates just how corrupt and immoral the US 'experiment' in democracy has become. The #1 industrial export product of the US today is weapons. The US wants to take down Iran and has made a pact with the Saudi's to do just that.

There can be no doubt that the American dream of freedom, justice and democracy is now no more than a hollow phrase.

 

Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.

THE ROVING EYE - A Caliph in a wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE A Caliph in a wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar I'm aiming at you, lover Cause killing you is killing myself  - Orson Welles (director), The Lady from Shanghai,1947 He's invincible. He beheads. He smuggles. He conquers. He's the ultimate jack-of-all-trades. No Tomahawk or Hellfire can touch him. He always gets what he wants; in Kobani; in Anbar province; with the House of Saud (which he wants to replace) trying to make Putin (who he wants to behead) suffer because of low oil prices. If this was a remake of Orson Welles's noir classic The Lady from Shanghai, in the mirror sequence the lawyer (American?) and the femme fatale (Shi'ite?) would also get killed; but The Caliph of Islamic State would survive as a larger than life Welles, free to roam, plunder and "give my love to the sunrise" - as in a Brave Caliphate World shining in "Syraq" over the ashes of the Sykes-Picot agreement. He's winning big in Iraq's Anbar province. The Caliph's goons are now closing in on - of all places - Abu Ghraib; Dubya, Dick and Rummy's former Torture Central. They are at a mere 12 kilometers away from Baghdad International. A shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile (or MANPAD) away from downing a passenger jet. Certainly not an Emirates flight - after all these are trusted sponsors. Hit, in Anbar province, is now Caliph territory. The police forces and the province's operational command have lost almost complete control of Ramadi. The Caliph now controls the crucial axis formed by Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah; Highway 1 between Baghdad and the Jordanian border; and Highway 12 between Baghdad and the Syrian border. The Caliph's goons are no less than taking over the whole, notorious Baghdad belt, the previous "triangle of death" in those hardcore days of American occupation circa 2004. Message to Donald Rumsfeld: remember your "remnants"? They're back. And they're in charge. Both Ramadi and Fallujah have been reduced to an accumulation of bombed-out schools, hospitals, homes, mosques and bridges. Residential streets are virtually deserted. According to the United Nations, there are a least 360,803 internally displaced persons in Anbar, as well as 115,000 others in areas under The Caliph's control. At least 63% of the 1.6 million people living in the province are classified as "in need" - with hair-raising minimal access to water, food and health care, and receiving little to absolutely zero humanitarian support from that fiction, the "international community." US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power is not screaming her lungs out for R2P ("responsibility to protect"). How could the Pentagon's spectacular Full Spectrum Dominance possibly not see any of this happening? Of course they see it. But they don't give a damn. The Pentagon occasionally uses AH-64 Apache helicopters to attack some of The Caliph's goons in Ramadi and Hit. But Apaches can be easily hit with MANPADS. They are stationed at Baghdad International and their only mission is to protect the airport. Who cares about local, civilian "collateral damage"? Married to the Mob In Kobani, the former third-biggest town in Syrian Kurdistan, in the far northeast, The Caliph also wins big. Another biblical exodus has reached 300,000 refugees - and counting, with over 180,000 headed to Turkey. The Caliph counts on indirect help from The Sultan (or alternate Caliph), aka Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Tehran is - rightfully - furious, as it sees the "West" - and Turkey - betraying the Kurds all over again. It's no secret Sultan Erdogan is doing nothing because he wants to screw the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD); let them die instead of repelling The Caliph and then be strong enough to threaten Turkish domination of those huge, essentially Kurdish patches of Anatolia. Thus the only thing Sultan Erdogan does support is aimless bombing by the Pentagon cum coalition of the clueless-cowards. Anybody who believes the US Central Command's spin that House of Saud and United Arab Emirates fighter jets conduct "bombing raids" on the outskirts of Kobani gets a one-way ticket to Oz. Imagine these clowns being able to deploy precision-guided bombs or trained laser spotters. To start with, the Pentagon has zero local intel - as in zero operatives able to paint lasers on targets. Thus the "coalition" can barely hit the odd tank (out of 25 around Kobani) or Humvee out of 2,000 crammed in a valley for almost two weeks now. But the "coalition" certainly is able - miraculously! - to hit Syrian state infrastructure, as in energy installations. In June, the official Pentagon excuse was, "We don't have any drone assets in Iraq." Now there's no excuse for drones which can read a "Smoking Kills!" warning in a packet of Marlboros not hitting The Caliph's assets in Kobani - or in Anbar province for that matter. So it's down to a mix of incompetence and neglect. It was so much easier to hit Pashtun wedding parties in the Waziristans. Especially because no one was paying attention. Erdogan's own goons, meanwhile, have instituted a curfew on all major towns and cities in southeast Anatolia, and are even gunning down peaceful Kurdish protesters. Fifteen million Kurds in Anatolia cannot be wrong; Erdogan wants Kobani to fall. Ankara remains for all practical purposes the top logistical hub for The Caliph's goons. The Sultan is using The Caliph as a proxy army to smash the Kurds. Terminal evidence has been offered by the leader of the Kurdish PYD, Salih Muslim, meeting Turkish military intel and asking for help. Conditions: abandon any hope of self-determination for Syrian Kurds; give up all your self-governing towns and regions; and watch as we install a Turkish "buffer"/no-fly zone inside Syrian territory. Don't expect the Obama "Don't Do Stupid Stuff/We Have No Strategy" administration to sentence, "Erdogan must go". Besides, the pathetic club of National Security Advisor Susan Rice and her deputy Ben Rhodes has no clue about what's goin' on. To the Green Zone! Tehran, for its part, has clearly identified Erdogan's nasty game. The Sultan knows monster B1-B bombers flying over Kobani are absolutely useless - while The Caliph's goons deploy massive car bombs and keep advancing. "Boots on the ground" will be needed. Enter NATO asset Turkey. But with one condition: regime change in Damascus, or at least a prelude, via that "buffer"/no-fly zone over Syria. The Big Picture remains the same. Sultan Erdogan and the House of Saud want regime change in Damascus (Erdogan dreams of a Sunni puppet as a vassal of Ankara; the Saudis want their own Wahhabi schemer). Israel merrily agrees. And if that comes with a bonus - attacking the new Iraqi government, still supported by Iran, in the American-made Green Zone - even better. The lowdown: "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" translates as the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey and Israel using Washington to advance their quite explicit agenda. Sultan Erdogan, as a Mob boss, does seem to heave learned a thing or two from watching Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. He's extracting the maximum pound of flesh from the bewildered "Don't do Stupid Stuff" team. The Sultan is boldly aiming at Turkish boots on the ground gloriously invading Syria in NATO "humanitarian intervention" mode. And all this sold as NATO offering "protection" to a member-nation. NATO's new secretary-general, former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, has just been to Ankara. Saudi Arabia has already "voted" out loud for the "buffer"/no-fly zone. Same for General Francois Hollande, that pitiful excuse for President of France. Once again, it's Tehran to the rescue. The Foreign Ministry has duly announced Iran is ready to liberate Kobani from The Caliph's goons (and they can do it) if Bashar Al-Assad says the word. Now that's how you work the chessboard; NATO is left with zero excuses to mount an invasion of Syria, whatever Mob Boss Erdogan comes up with. Operation Hands Off My Toyota The Caliph also wins big in the "bleeding the Pentagon" department. A single US "strike" against his goons - involving F-15s, F-16s or F-22s - costs up to US$500,000. The Pentagon has just revealed it has spent no less than $1.1 billion against The Caliph since June. What for? Virtually all the assets being destroyed by American bombing are made in the USA, deployed to the Iraqi army and then duly captured during The Caliph's offensive. So here we have the Empire of Chaos spending a fortune from the US Treasury to smash tanks, Humvees and other gear already paid for by American taxpayers. No wonder taxpayers are fuming. Thus Operation Hands off My Toyota. Additionally, the Pentagon does not have a clue on how to build its Obama-designed proxy "rebel" force to fight The Caliph (with no US soldiers or marines; only fanatic Wahhabis and assorted mercenaries). To start with, they have no clue who the hell qualifies as a "moderate rebel". The rabble must be "vetted" - and then sent to, of all places, Saudi Arabia for training. There the guy in charge will be - who else - a Special Ops honcho, Major General Michael Nagata. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the Pentagon won't have its proxy "moderate rebel" army on the ground in Syria before the summer of 2015. Hefty bottles of Chateau Margaux can be bet that all this prime US weaponized know how will ultimately end up captured by The Caliph's goons. Same applies to reliable "rebel" intel on the ground. But the real Dadaist masterpiece is that first these "rebels" will be politely asked by the Pentagon to forget about getting rid of Assad to fight The Caliph. At least for a while. Re-enter Stoltenberg, the new NATO head: "Next year, at the ministerial meeting, we will take decisions regarding the so-called spearhead but, even before it is established, NATO has a strong army after all. We can deploy it wherever we want to." OK, tough guy; why not "Syraq"? If this all sounds like a plot straight out of hit series Blacklist, that's because it is. Why not get Red (James Spader) to fight The Caliph? And then again, what if Red is The Caliph? He pretends to fight himself - and he wins, handsomely. Back to Welles' The Lady from Shanghai: "Killing you is killing myself". Yet nobody could possibly want The Caliph dead when he's such a smashing, undisputed box-office success. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE Operation Tomahawk The Caliph By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Operation Tomahawk The Caliph By Pepe Escobar The Tomahawks are finally flying again - propelled by newspeak. 42 Tomahawks fired from a Sixth Fleet destroyer parked in Mare Nostrum, plus F-22s raising hell and Hellfires spouted by drones, that's a neat mini-Shock and Awe to honor Caliph Ibrahim, aka Abu Bakr al -Baghdadi, self-declared leader of Islamic State. It's all so surgical. All targets - from "suspected" weapons depots to the mayor's mansion in Raqqah (the HQ of The Caliph's goons) and assorted checkpoints - were duly obliterated, along with "dozens of", perhaps 120, jihadis. And praise those "over 40" (Samantha Power) or "over 50" (John Kerry) international allies in the coalition of the unwilling; America is never alone, although in this case mightily escorted, de facto, only by the usual Gulf petrodollar dictatorships and the realm of King Playstation, Jordan, all none too keen to engage in "kinetic activities". Aseptic newspeak aside, no one has seen or heard a mighty Gulf Cooperation Council air force deployed to bomb Syria. After all the vassals are scared as hell to tell their own populations they are - once again - bombing a fellow Arab nation. As for Damascus, it meekly said it was "notified" by the Pentagon its own territory would be bombed. Nobody really knows what the Pentagon is exactly telling Damascus. The Pentagon calls it just the beginning of a "sustained campaign" - code for Long War, which is one of the original denominations of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) anyway. And yes, for all practical purposes this is a coalition of one. Let's call it Operation Tomahawk The Caliph. I am Khorasan Hold your F-22s. Not really. The tomahawking had barely begun when an Israeli, made in USA Patriot missile shot a Syrian Su-24 which had allegedly "violated" Israeli air space over the Golan Heights. How about that in terms of sending a graphic message in close coordination with the Pentagon? So this is not only about bombing The Caliph. It is a back-door preamble to bombing Bashar al-Assad and his forces. And also about bombing - with eight strikes west of Aleppo - a ghost; an al-Qaeda cell of the mysterious Khorasan group. No wonder global fans of the Marvel Comics school of geopolitics are puzzled. Two simultaneous villains? Yep. And the other bad guy is even more evil than The Caliph. Astonishing mediocrity Ben Rhodes, Obama's deputy national security adviser, has defined Khorasan as "a group of extremists that is comprised of a number of individuals who we've been tracking for a long time." The Obama administration's unison newspeak is that Khorasan includes former al-Qaeda assets not only from across the Middle East - including al-Qaeda in Iraq and Jabhat al-Nusra - but also Pakistan, as in an ultra-hardcore extension of the Pakistani Taliban. What a mess. Al-Qaeda in Iraq is the embryo of ISIS, which turned into IS. Jabhat al-Nusra is the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria, approved by CEO Ayman al-Zawahiri. Both despise each other, and yet Khorasan holds the merit of bundling Caliph's goons and al-Qaeda goons together. Additionally, for Washington Jabhat al-Nusra tend to qualify as "moderate" jihadis - almost like "our bastards". Too messy? No problem; when in doubt, bomb everybody. The Caliph, then, is old news. Those ghostly Khorasan goons are the real deal - so evil that the Pentagon is convinced their "plotting was imminent" leading to a new 9/11. The ghost in the GWOT machine Khorasan is the perfect ghost in the GWOT machine; the target of a war within a war. Because Obama in fact launched two wars - as he sent two different notifications to Congress under the War Powers Resolution to cover both The Caliph and Khorasan. And what's in a name? Well, a thinly disguised extra demonization of Iran, why not - as historic Khorasan, the previous Parthia, stretched from mainly Iran towards Afghanistan. Khorasan is theoretically led by The Joker, sorry, al-Qaeda honcho Muhsin al-Fadhli, born in Kuwait in 1981, a "senior facilitator and financier" to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, in the priceless assessment of the State Department. Although Ayman al-Zawahiri, ever PR-conscious, has not claimed the credit, the Pentagon is convinced he sent al-Fadhli to the Syrian part of the Caliphate to attract Western jihadis with EU passports capable of evading airport security and plant bombs on commercial jets. The Treasury Department is convinced al-Fadhli even led an al-Qaeda cell in Iran - demonization habits die hard -, "facilitating" jihadi travel to Afghanistan or Iraq. And what a neat contrast to the Society of the Spectacle-addicted Caliph. Khorasan is pure darkness. Nobody knows how many; how long they've existed; what do they really want. By contrast, there are about 190,000 live human beings left in bombed out Raqqa. Nobody is talking about collateral damage - although the body count is already on, and The Caliph's slick PR operation will be certainly advertising them on YouTube. As for The Caliph's goons, they will predictably use Mao tactics and dissolve like fish in the sea. The Pentagon will soon be bombing vast tracts of desert for nothing - if that's not the case already. There is no "Free Syrian Army" - that Qatari myth - anymore. There are no "moderate" jihadis left in Syria. They are all fighting for The Caliph or for al-Zawahiri. And still the Obama administration extracted a Congressional OK to train and weaponize "moderate rebels". US ambassador to the UN Samantha Power - Undisputed Queen of Batshit Craziness - at least got one thing right. Their "training" will "service these troops in the same struggle that they've been in since the beginning of this conflict against the Assad regime." So yes - this "sustained campaign" is the back door to "Assad must go" remixed. People who are really capable of defeating The Caliph's goons don't tomahawk. They are the Syrian Arab Army (roughly 35,000 dead so far killed in action against ISIS/ISIL/IS and/or al-Qaeda); Hezbollah; Iranian Revolutionary Guards advisers/operatives; and Kurdish militias. It won't happen. This season's blockbuster is the Empire of Chaos bombing The Caliph and the ghost in the GWOT machine. Two tickets for the price of one. Because we protect you even from "unknown unknown" evil. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - Vanishing point … By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE            Vanishing point … By Pepe Escobar  First, passenger airliner MH370 vanished from Planet Earth. Then MH370 vanished from the news cycle. First, MH17 was shot down by "Putin's missile" - as Planet Earth was told. Then MH17 vanished from the news cycle. Where's Baudrillard when we need him? Had he been alive, the dervish of simulacra would have already deconstructed these two Malaysian planes as mirror images; from absolute vanishing to maximum exposure, then vanished again. They might as well have been abducted - and shot - by aliens. Now you seem them, now you don't. Black boxes, data recorders - everything MH17 is now floating in a black void. The British are taking forever to analyze the data - and if they have already done so, they are not talking. It's as if they were singing, I see a black box / and I want it painted black … void. The Pentagon, with 20-20 vision over Ukraine, knows what happened. Russian intelligence not only knows what happened but offered a tantalizing glimpse of it in an official presentation, dismissed by the "West". The best technical analyses point not to "Putin's missile" - a BUK - but to a combination of R-60 air-to-air missile and the auto-cannon of an Su-25. A reader led me to this fair assessment by former USAF and Boeing engineer Raymond Blohm: "With proper vectoring, a Su-25 need not be quite as fast as a Boeing 777 in cruise. It just has to get to a missile-firing position. Since the 777 was not maneuvering, it would be simple to pre-calculate when to get in a certain spot in the sky below the 777. From there, it's the missile that has the speed and altitude capability to hit the 777. (The R-60 is a very capable missile.) After the missile takes out an engine, both the 777's max speed and its max altitude are well within the Su-25 fighter's speed & altitude capabilities. Then, the Su-25 can show off its cannon power." Follow the engine wreckage. Follow the cockpit wreckage. Follow the motive. One cannot even imagine the tectonic geopolitical plates clashing were the Kiev regime to be deemed responsible. It would be the vanishing point for the whole - warped - notion of the Empire of Chaos's "indispensable" exceptionalism. So as MH370 totally vanished, the MH17 story must also totally vanish. The Dutch and the British might eventually come out and hold a high-profile press conference telling the world what His Master's Voice finally redacted. Still, one may count on certified, residual outrage, if not puzzlement, by a large number of grieving Dutch families. And one may count on certified outrage by Malaysia as a nation. As in Why Us? And not once but twice? Moscow, after deconstructing the "logic" of the ongoing Russia/Putin hysterical demonization, knows that whatever they say will be invalidated by the Orwellian Thought Police. Yet as much as His Master's Voice controls what the Dutch and the British might eventually reveal, Russia can counterpunch by leaking the crucial scenario to Malaysia. And Malaysia will talk. MH370 vanished as in a video game. MH17 was hit as in a video game. Now their respective narratives are being vanished. It's as if we are living a tiny rehearsal of the black hypothesis of post-history. Postmodernist star Jean-Francois Lyotard and later Flemish thinker Lieven De Cauter were the rarified few who dabbled in studying the black hypothesis. The black hypothesis is the ultimate dystopia - playing out in the cosmological time of the death of the sun, something like 4.5 billion years away. Basically this is about techno-science surviving the death of the sun and the death of humanity itself. So MH370 may have vanished into an antechamber of the black hypothesis. But MH17 is much more prosaic; it could have been just a false flag gone wrong. Thus, under Empire of Chaos's rules, it must also vanish. The question is whether global civil society will accept it - or has already entered its own vanishing point. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - NATO's soft war on Russia By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE NATO's soft war on Russia By Pepe Escobar Poor NATO. Damned Soviets. The benign North Atlantic Treaty Organization has spent two decades "trying to build a partnership" with Russia. But now, "clearly the Russians have declared NATO as an adversary, so we have to begin to view Russia no longer as a partner but as more of an adversary", according to NATO deputy secretary-general Alexander Vershbow, a former US diplomat/ Pentagon employee. The hot lava irony of a Pentagon hack carping about "Russia clearly trying to re-impose hegemony" is enough to put the Vesuvius to shame. But that's only a minor plot twist in NATOThe Expandables (the movie). NATO - still in the process of being epically humiliated on a daily basis by a bunch of Pashtuns with Kalashnikovs in Afghanistan - is now considering "new defensive measures" to deter "evil" Russia from "aggression" against NATO members, mostly the Baltic states. And that will mean deployment of "more substantial numbers of allied combat forces to Eastern Europe" - mostly Poland. Permanently. Or, in Pentagonese, "semi-permanent unit training rotations". As if any doubt remained that Cold War 2.0 is here to stay. NATO will "debate" the issue - in its usual muddy waters fashion - over the summer, and the result will be announced at a meeting in Wales in September, presided by Emperor Barack Obama himself. Any analyst not embedded in the Pentagonese matrix knows that key European Union powers Germany and France - which have solid economic and business ties to Russia - will never buy this new spin for Cold War 2.0. As for other sizable NATO members, they are simply broke, and/or have better (economic) fish to fry at home. Informed opinion also knows that were Cold War 2.0 to progress, payback will be handsome - as in, just for starters, Russia simply killing the Northern Distribution Network, which allows NATO's escape route from its sterling performance in Afghanistan. Vlad the contemplator  Nonetheless, NATO spin remains relentless; there's "no sign of Russian troops withdrawing from the Ukraine border; the US is sending "non-lethal" military aid to Ukraine (as in what? Baseball bats?); US ground forces are being sent to Poland. And all this to fight "separatists" and "pro-Russian" militants in Eastern Ukraine. Rubbish. These people need to study geography, not to mention NATO's own charter. Ukraine is not even part of NATO, to start with. And the majority of Eastern Ukrainians don't want to annex themselves to the Russian Federation. What they want is strong autonomous provinces, free from Kiev meddling, in a cadre of a federal, Finlandized Ukraine. All one needs is to ask those Ukrainians who are now controlling 23 cities - and counting - in the Donbass, which accounts for over a third of Ukraine's GDP. Meanwhile, adults are talking, unlike the Obama administration's proponents of the juvenile delinquent school of diplomacy. Russian President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were on the phone on Workers Day. Putin once again stressed Kiev should halt its repeated "anti-terrorist" offensives, and launch an inclusive national dialogue. That does not seem likely. Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu also felt compelled to remind Pentagon head Chuck Hagel that Russia will not "invade" anything, unless Kiev uses their military against unarmed civilians - which is exactly what the latest Kiev provocation in Slavyansk is all about. US Think Tankland is frantically downgrading NATO hysteria about "aggressive Russia" as a "measured response". That fools only the hopelessly misinformed. After creating a failed state in Libya and the Afghanistan fiasco, global Robocop NATO, in its quest for "purpose" and meaning, cannot stop from fabricating an enemy. Some gloss is offered via what is described as shifting the "strategic focal point" - from Afghanistan? - to the Baltics plus Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. The Pentagon as well as Vice-President Joe Biden has promised to "increase training" with "eastern NATO partners". Putin, meanwhile, is just applying Sun Tzu. He might as well be calmly cross-legged contemplating the waters of the Volga. So far away from that nonsense about Moscow "aggressively" invading the Baltic states. By the way, it could be done in a heartbeat; and NATO would never see it coming. But Moscow does not want, or need, any such escalation. The bottom line: global Robocop NATO can only survive if it faces a mortal threat. So what better platform to "harmonize" NATO than a "hostile" Russia? Either that, or keep licking those Pashtun-inflicted wounds in the Hindu Kush. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - US 'pivots', China reaps dividends By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE US 'pivots', China reaps dividends By Pepe Escobar  Let's start with a flashback to February 1992 - only two months after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. First draft of the US government's Defense Planning Guidance. It was later toned down, but it still formed the basis for the exceptionalist dementia incarnated by the Project for the New American Century; and also reappeared in full glory in Dr Zbig "Let's Rule Eurasia" Brzezinski's 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard. It's all there, raw, rough and ready: Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed by the Soviet Union. This ... requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia. That's all one needs to know about the Obama administration's "pivoting to Asia", as well as the pivoting to Iran ("if we're not going to war", as US Secretary of State John Kerry let it slip) and the pivoting to Cold War 2.0, as in using Ukraine as a "new Vietnam" remix next door to Russia. And that's also the crucial context for Obama's Pax Americana Spring collection currently unrolling in selected Asian catwalks (Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and Philippines). Obama's Asia tour started this week in full regalia at the famed Jiro restaurant in Ginza, Tokyo, ingesting hopefully non-Fukushima radiated nigiri sushi (disclosure: I was there way back in 1998, when sushi master Jiro Ono was far from a celebrity and the sushi was far from atomic). Obama's host, hardcore nationalist/militarist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, obviously picked up the bill. But the real bill comes later, as in Japan bowing to strict US demands - on trade, investment, corporate law and intellectual property rights - embedded in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which is code for American Big Business finally cracking open the heavily protected Japanese market. Abe is a tough customer. His rhetoric is heavy on "escaping the post-war regime", as in re-weaponizing Japan and not playing second fiddle militarily to Washington in Asia anymore. The Pentagon obviously has other ideas. Post-sushi at Jiro, what matters for Obama is to force Tokyo to bend over not only on TPP but also on keeping the weaponizing subordinated to the larger US agenda. Beijing, predictably, sees all that for what it really is, as expressed in this Xinhua op-ed; the actions of an "anachronistic", "sclerotic" and "myopic" superpower that needs to "shake off its historical and philosophical shackles". The Southeast Asia leg of the Spring collection tour is all about making sure to Malaysia and Philippines, not as strong militarily as Vietnam, that the US Navy will never be replaced as the hegemon in the South China Sea - or even allow China to reach parity with it. It's at the heart of the "pivoting to Asia" as containment of China, whose aim is preventing China from becoming a naval power simultaneously in the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific. The Pentagon is predictably paranoid, accusing China of waging not only one but "three warfares" against the US. The fact is Beijing is developing a state-of-the-art underground base for 20 nuclear submarines in Hainan island just as Malaysia boosts its own submarine base in Borneo and the Philippines keeps imploring Washington for more planes, ships, airstrips and cyber capabilities as protection for what it regards as its absolute priority: explore for oil and gas in the West Philippine Sea to boost the economy. Radiate me with trade deals, baby The Spring collection is far from derailing other pivoting - whose latest offering is the current "anti-terrorist" campaign in eastern Ukraine by the Kiev regime changers, which follows a most curious calendar. CIA's John Brennan hits Kiev, and the regime changers launch their first war on terra. Dismal failure ensues. Vice President Joe Biden visits Kiev and the regime changers, right on cue, relaunch their war on terra. Thus the pivoting to Cold War 2.0 proceeds unabated, as in Washington working hard to build an iron curtain between Berlin and Moscow - preventing further trade integration across Eurasia - via instigation of a civil war in Ukraine. German Chancellor Angela Merkel remains on the spot: it's either Atlantic high-fidelity or her Ostpolitik - and that's exactly where Washington wants her. As for the batshit crazy factions fully deployed across the Beltway revolving door, everything goes, from "warning" China not to pull a Crimea to advocating war in Syria and even the North Atlantic Treaty Organization entering a nuclear war, as shownhere by the appropriately denominated Anne Marie Slaughter. This is what she's teaching her exceptionalist students at Princeton. How's Beijing reacting to all this hysteria? Simple: by reaping dividends. Beijing wins with the US offensive trying to alienate Moscow from Western markets by getting a better pricing deal on the supply of Eastern Siberian gas. Beijing wins from the European Union's fear of losing trade with Russia by negotiating a free-trade agreement with its largest trading partner, which happens to the be the EU. And then, the sterling example. Just compare Obama's Spring collection tour, as a pivoting appendix, to the current tour of Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi. It's a business bonanza, focused on bilateral financing and, what else, trade deals. It's all in the mix: Peruvian and Chilean copper; Brazilian iron and soybeans; support for Venezuelan social programs and energy development; support for Cuba in its interest for greater Chinese involvement in Venezuela, which supplies Cuba with subsidized energy. And all this against the background of a Beltway so excited that the Chinese economy is in deep trouble. It's not - it grew at 7.4% year-on-year for the first quarter of 2014. Demand for iron and copper won't significantly slow down - as the Beijing-driven urbanization drive has not even reached full speed. Same for soybeans - as millions of Chinese increasingly start eating meat on a regular basis (soybean products are a crucial feedstock). And, of course, Chinese companies will not losee their appetite for diversifying all across South America. For the large, upcoming Chinese middle class - on their way to becoming full-fledged members of the number one economic power in the world by 2018 - this Spring collection is a non-starter. He or she would rather hit Hong Kong and queue up in Canton Road to buy loads of Hermes and Prada - and then strategically celebrate with Jiro quality, non-Fukushima-radiated, sushi. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: A snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.