Pakistani Taliban militants in South Waziristan, an ethnic Pashtun region on the Afghan border, have vowed to fight a tough, protracted guerrilla war. The Waziristan offensive is closely watched by the United States and other powers embroiled in Afghanistan.
In the latest attack, a suicide bomber in a car set off explosives in a square northeast of the city of Peshawar, killing up to 20 people and wounding at least 30.
“They thought they would capture Waziristan easily but the fight in Waziristan will be tougher than in Kashmir,” a militant said.
The reference to Kashmir is where security forces have been battling separatist guerrillas since 1989.
Reuters
Categorized in Afghanistan and Pakistan
Tags: Afghan, Afghanistan, american, guerrilla war, Kashmir, military, Pakistani, pashtun, Taliban, troops, U.S., United States, war, Waziristan
As President Barack Obama prepares to depart for his first Asia trip, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao is urging the U.S. to keep its deficit to an “appropriate size,” a clear message to the leader of the world’s largest debtor nation from its largest creditor.
China is the largest holder of U.S. government debt and has invested an estimated 70% of its more than $2 trillion stockpile of foreign-exchange reserves (the world’s largest) in dollar assets, Reuters reports.
Regardless of whether or not China chooses to unpeg its reminbi from the dollar, longer term the U.S. must come to terms with its deficit structure.
Categorized in U.S. Economy
Tags: economy, U.S., Obama, american, United States, china, deficit, debtor nation, U.S. government debt, dollar assets
The movie, Charlie Wilson’s War, is a good history lesson on how we got involved in Afghanistan. Congressman Charlie Wilson started the U.S. funding of the Afghan mujahedeen in their battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, then kept the U.S. Congress increasing the funding.

Charlie Wilson in Afghanistan years ago
Now the ex-congressmember from Texas has spoken out and said the worst mistake made was not helping to rebuild the war-torn country after the Russians left. “That was a terrible mistake.”
Wilson said during a speech in Scranton, Pennsylvania, “Had we spent that $20 million or $30 million for the entirety of the problem, we wouldn’t be spending $20 or $30 million an hour today.”
Wilson said in an interview with the Scranton Times Tribune that it is “best to make a calculated withdrawal” and said that if he were in Obama’s position, he would “probably shut it down, rather than lose a lot of soldiers and treasure.”
Using his extraordinary power as a member of the US House of Representatives Defense Appropriations subcommittee throughout the Carter, Reagan, and GHW Bush administrations, Wilson succeeded in quadrupling the $30 million requested by the CIA in 1984 for the Afghan resistance to $630 million in 1987, each increment matched by the Saudis.
In 1986, the formidable Wilson prevailed over the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department resistance to supplying the Afghan Mujahdeen with shoulder-fired surface-to-air Stinger missiles and launchers. When the last Russian soldier bid adieu to Afghanistan in February 1989, Wilson boasted that his guys had won.
Categorized in Afghanistan
Tags: U.S., war, Afghanistan, CIA, Pentagon, american, congress, Afghan, United States, Russia, State Department, Charlie Wilson, Charlie Wilson's war, congressman, Mujahdeen
Last week, Admiral Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that the Pentagon will seek additional war funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2010. While he did not give a firm dollar amount, the New York Times reported that defense budget analysts are kicking around the number of $50 billion.
The Obama Administration is now leading us down the path of the most expensive year in war funding since President Bush began the so-called “Global War on Terror” (now morphed into the “Overseas Contingency Operations” under President Obama).
War spending in 2010 will exceed $190 billion if indeed the Pentagon seeks-and Congress approves—$50 billion in “emergency” funding. That’s more than the $179 billion spent under President Bush in 2008, the previous high water mark for war spending.
War spending in 2010 will also far exceed spending in 2009 (which is about $145 billion). Funding levels in 2009 were: Personnel – $19.9 billion; Operation and Maintenance – $80.4 billion; and Procurement – $31.9 billion.
Which leads one to ask the question: In announcing that the Pentagon intends to seek additional war funding for 2010, did Admiral Mullen tip the hat that President Obama intends to dramatically increase the level of U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan—edging towards that 40,000 additional troops that General McChrystal seems to be requesting?
Full story
Categorized in Afghanistan, Iraq and U.S. Economy
Tags: Iraq, U.S., bush administration, war, Afghanistan, Obama, terrorism, Pentagon, McChrystal, troops, military, Afghan, cost of war, United States, George W. Bush, war on terror, Admiral Mullen, Joint Chiefs of Staff, defense budget, Global War on Terror, Overseas Contingency Operations
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”- Arthur Schopenhauer
“When faced with a choice between confronting an unpleasant reality and defending a set of comforting and socially accepted beliefs, most people choose the latter course.” -W. Lance Bennett
Categorized in Uncategorized
Tags: accepted, opposed, ridiculed, self-evident, truth
Ambassador Craig Murray, rector of the University of Dundee, was until 2004 the British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.
As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA that described the most horrible torture procedures. “People were raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their parents until they [the parents] signed a confession, people were boiled alive.”
Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to Uzbekistan’s torture prisons “were told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda, … they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan, … they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”
Murray also saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,” and the utter fools would believe the lie.
“You’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, it’s about energy, it’s not about democracy.”
And guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give Enron the rights to Uzbekistan’s and Turkmenistan’s natural gas deposits, and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline? It was Karzai, the US-imposed “president” of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.
“I was absolutely stunned,” says the British ambassador, who thought that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally, had moral integrity. Ambassador Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington.
[From an article by Paul Craig Roberts]
Categorized in Afghanistan and Uncategorized
Tags: torture, war, bush, CIA, troops, British, military, NATO, Afghan, Hamid Karzai, Karzai, United States, Turkmenistan, UK, pipeline, Uzbekistan, Ambassador Craig Murray, Craig Murray, MI5, prisons, energy, Enron, Unocal
Pipelinestan is a term used to define the “…istan” nations that the pipelines carrying gas and oil have to pass through.
Those who control the Mid-East-Central Asia oil and gas supplies control the world.
The U.S. went into Iraq for the Oil, with plans drawn up to go into Iraq well before 9/11 happened. In Iraq, we want a government to work with, so we can have our oil companies come in and control the production and distribution of the oil under the sands of Iraq.
Similarly, the purpose of the U.S. is in Afghanistan is not about raising Afghanistan from 188th place out of 189 of the lowest ranking nations of the world, or other reasons cited. We are there to keep a puppet government in place and things calm enough so a pipeline can be built through Afghanistan, across Baluchistan, to India and the Gulf of Oman from the rich oil fields of the Caspian Sea area.
Refer to the map below for a geography lesson on oil, the stars indicating the close-to-50 locations of U.S. military bases in the region.
Afghanistan is yet another war over oil.

Categorized in Afghanistan and Iraq
Tags: 9/11, Afghan, Afghanistan, bases, Big Oil, gas, Iraq, military, oil, pipeline, U.S., war
The Nation highlights the Muslim backlash that grew out of the killings at Fort Hood army base: A U.S. soldier — Major Malik Nidal Hasan — identified as the gunman had a name that led to the presumption that he was Muslim, inspired an all-too-predictable outbreak of Islamophobia. The point here is not to defend the soldier or his alleged actions. Rather, it is to question the rush to judgment regarding not just this one Muslim but all Muslims.
Fox News host Shepard Smith asked Senator Hutchison on air: “The name tells us a lot, does it not, senator?” Hutchinson’s response? “It does. It does, Shepard.”
Paul Sullivan, executive director of the group Veterans for Common Sense, noted that the incident might well be the latest in a series of stress-related homicides and suicides involving soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan or are being dispatched to those occupied lands.
Major Malik Nidal Hasan is a psychiatrist who had served in the Department of Psychology at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress at the Bethesda Naval Facility in Bethesda, Maryland, before his transfer to Fort Hood.
The New York Times has a profile of Hasan:
Born and reared in Virginia, the son of immigrant parents from a small Palestinian town near Jerusalem, he joined the Army right out of high school, against his parents’ wishes. The Army, in turn, put him through college and then medical school, where he trained to be a psychiatrist.
Having counseled scores of returning soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, first at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and more recently at Fort Hood, he knew all too well the terrifying realities of war, said a cousin, Nader Hasan.
“He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy,” Mr. Hasan said. “He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there.”
Categorized in Afghanistan, Iraq and Uncategorized
Tags: Fort Hood, gunman, Hutchison, Islamophobia, Malik Nidal Hasan, military, muslim, post-traumatic stress, psychiatrist, Shepard Smith, stress, troops, U.S., war
The extent of the massive waste and abuse surrounding the construction of the monstrous US embassy in Baghdad continues to expand. The State Department has just released another audit of the embassy’s construction and suggests that the Kuwaiti contractor hired by the Bush administration to do most of the construction work may have to repay more than $130 million to US taxpayers as a result of construction deficiencies, incomplete and undocumented design work, inadequate quality control and interest on unauthorized payments.
The Baghdad embassy—the largest of any nation on planet earth and ten times bigger than any other US embassy—is striking evidence indicating a continued US presence in the country for many years to come. The structure cost more than $700 million and is the size of 80 football fields. It is bigger than the Vatican, six times larger than the United Nations compound in New York and is about two thirds the size of the National Mall in Washington. It has space for 1,000 employees who are guarded by scores of paramilitary mercenary forces.
In other words it is the perfect structure for a nation that claims to be leaving Iraq very soon.
What makes this story all the more outrageous is that the Obama administration is moving forward with a plan to build a $736 million massive US embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan that is modeled after the Baghdad embassy.
[Excerpts of article by Jeremy Scahill]
Categorized in Iraq and Pakistan
Tags: american, Baghdad, bush administration, CIA, cost of war, Iraq, Islamabad, mercenaries, Pakistan, State Department, taxpayers, U.S., United States, US embassy
Nano-microchips invisible to the naked eye are a reality that are already being hosted in wide-range of applications. The question is, how long will it take governments and big pharma to immerse nano-microchips (100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair) inside of vaccines to tag and surveil global populations?
Scientists working at Queen Mary, University of London, have developed micrometer-sized capsules to safely deliver drugs inside living cells. The same microchip could be used to surveil the patient in conjunction with various tracking systems.
Doug Dorst, a microbiologist and vaccine critic in South Wales, says, “Depending on which side of the vaccine debate you’re on, whether pro or con, nanobots inside vaccine preparations could advance their effectiveness exponentially by either dramatically improving or destroying immunity depending on their design.” The worry for Dorst is that one day vaccines “will do what they’ve always been intended for … control of the global populace.”
In December 2000, Former Chief Medical Officer of Finland, Rauni-Leena Luukanen-Kilde, MD stated that it is technically possible for every newborn to be injected with a microchip, which could then function to identify the person for the rest of his or her life. Such plans are secretly being discussed in the U.S. without any public airing of the privacy issues involved. With the help of satellites, the implanted person can be tracked anywhere on the globe.
This secret technology has been used by military forces in certain NATO countries since the 1980s without civilian and academic populations having heard anything about it. Such a technique was among a number tested in the Iraq war. The 20-billion-bit/second supercomputers at the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) could now “see and hear” what soldiers experience in the battlefield with a remote monitoring system (RMS). With RMS, healthy persons can be induced to see hallucinations and to hear voices in their heads. Thought signals and subconscious thinking can be read, dreams affected and even induced, all without the knowledge or consent of the implanted person.
And the NSA’s electronic surveillance system can simultaneously follow and handle millions of people.
The timeline for integrating nano-microchips inside of vaccines is speculative. It could be just a few years, months or perhaps it is here and we already unaware of their integration within pharmaceuticals.
In 2005 the World Health Organization (WHO) developed international health regulations that would bind all 194 member countries to pandemic emergency guidelines which could enforce such a mandate. Public participation is an essential tool that will soon allow big pharma to inject the most effective surveillence tool ever designed into billions of people.
In 2009, the WHO and the Center of Disease Control (CDC) effectively hyped a false flu pandemic and convinced the world to submit to H1N1 vaccines. Additional doses of propaganda and possibly a biological event, may equally convince populations to knowingly accept microchips inside of vaccines under the guise of a “greater good” for humanity.
Related video clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIX7wCKDuZE&feature=player_embedded#
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVWNlvI-eB4&feature=player_embedded#
Categorized in Uncategorized
Tags: big pharma, biological, global, H1N1, immunity, microchips, military, Nano chips, Nano-microchips, National Security Agency, NSA, propaganda, remote monitoring system, RMS, satellite, special interest groups; u.s., supercomputers, surveil, U.S., vaccine, WHO, World Health Organization