Public Intelligence Blog

Joshua Kilbourn

Let’s see, 12,000 US troops going into Libya?  Undeclared war on Iran?  Absolute US guarantee of energy supply for Israel “no matter what?”  Whatever could we be borrowing money for?

Obama Sends Request To Congress For $1.2 Trillion Debt Ceiling Increase

Update:

• HOUSE TO VOTE JAN. 18 ON OBAMA’S DEBT-LIMIT INCREASE REQUEST

Two days ago we wondered how long it would take for Obama to restart the debt ceiling theater. Not that long it turns out.

• OBAMA SENDS CONGRESS REQUEST TO RAISE DEBT CEILING
• OBAMA NOTIFICATION STARTS 15-DAY CLOCK FOR CONGRESS TO VOTE

So with Congress in recess, will Obama succeed in passing another automatic vote using base trickery? The same Obama, who as recently as 3 hours ago warned Congress that any attempts to pass approval on the Keystone Pipeline without his involvement are “counterproductive”… In other news, America’ new debt ceiling of $16.3 trillion, or 107% of GDP is now just a formality, about to be interrupted by a little circus clowning.

Read full article with Bloomberg quote.

Who? Mini-Me?

Occupy 9/11 is emergent. This film, loaded on 1 February 2011, is now going viral. At 2:28:42, this is one of the best documentaries on the topic, and it is free online.

YouTube War by Deception 2011

Phi Beta Iota:  This is an extraordinary contribution.  It is highly recommended for students as well as adult learning clubs; it provides the best “overview” in one place.

See Also:

9-11 Truth Books & DVDs (33)

Chuck Spinney

Why the President Obama Should Study Sun Tzu

While Obama worries about appeasing Israel and Jewish vote at home, as well as being pressured to support threats of an Israeli attack on Iran, the government of Israel beavers away as usual, creating new facts on the ground.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

Without peace talks, Israel must leave East Jerusalem alone

Discussions on Jerusalem were postponed to a later stage of the final-status negotiations, but it was never agreed that this interlude be exploited to create facts on the ground.

Haaretz Editorial, 7 December 2011

As the diplomatic process has sunk deeper into hibernation, acts whose sole purpose is to tighten Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem have multiplied. Thus even as the Palestinians have given the Quartet a proposal on security arrangements and permanent borders in the West Bank, Israel is advancing proposals to change the master plans of neighborhoods over the Green Line.

Read full article.

Chuck Spinney

Patrick Seale is one of the finest and most experienced writers now reporting on the Middle East

Averting Civil War in Syria

by Patrick Seale

Agence Global, 22 Nov 2011

Syria is heading for a bloody sectarian civil war. The mutual kidnappings, torture, beheadings and displacement of populations taking place between the Sunni and Alawi communities in the central city of Homs — often described as “the capital of the revolution” — send a fearsome signal of what might be in store for the rest of the country.

To avert this descent into hell must surely be the immediate priority of Arab leaders and the international community.

The Iraqi example next door is there for all to see. The Anglo-American invasion destroyed a major Arab country. The country’s institutions and infrastructure were shattered; sectarian demons were released, triggering a civil war. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced from their homes or forced to flee abroad. The country was dismembered as the Kurds established their own semi-independent statelet.

Syria needs the intervention of a high-powered, neutral, contact group to stop the killing on both sides.

Read more.

Chuck Spinney

Who said Gaddafi had to go?

Hugh Roberts

London Review of Books, Vol. 33 No. 22 · 17 November 2011

So Gaddafi is dead and Nato has fought a war in North Africa for the first time since the FLN defeated France in 1962. The Arab world’s one and only State of the Masses, the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya, has ended badly. In contrast to the bloodless coup of 1 September 1969 that overthrew King Idris and brought Gaddafi and his colleagues to power, the combined rebellion/civil war/ Nato bombing campaign to protect civilians has occasioned several thousand (5000? 10,000? 25,000?) deaths, many thousands of injured and hundreds of thousands of displaced persons, as well as massive damage to infrastructure. What if anything has Libya got in exchange for all the death and destruction that have been visited on it over the past seven and a half months?

Read full analysis.

        The Small Wars Journal Blog has a post previewing a new book by Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham. Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict considers how the West’s Post Cold War conflicts have been fought amongst people rather than between armies. From publisher’s description:

“These people, amongst others, have been Mendes, Kissis and Konos (and the 13 other tribes of Sierra Leone), they have been Serbo-Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, Albanians, Unizzahs, al-Ribads, al-Zobaids, Kurds, al-Montifig (and the other tribal groups of the nearly 40 that make up Iraq), Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbecks (and the other 6 ethnic groupings that make up Afghanistan’s rich tapestry of population), they have been Sunni, Shia, Orthodox, Agnostic, Christian, Catholic; they have been farmers, politicians, police, administrators, businessmen, narco khans, war lords, men, women and children. In fact you can divide them in any one of a hundred or so different ways but the only certainty is that all of these groups and people will exhibit behaviour, that may appear utterly irrational but for better or worse will have profound effects upon the manner in which military missions are conducted.” 

The book is based on a paper written in 2009 for the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The tale of the lone Afghan farmer sowing seeds in a field near the Kajaki Dam should be a warning to those from the developed world who underestimate the intelligence of people just because they don’t speak English or have grown up without electricity and running water.

This book will have utility for anyone working in military, peacekeeping, policing or any other other cross cultural situation.

Cynthia McKinney

It’s really sad when journalists want to print the truth, but are prevented from doing so because of concerns about keeping their jobs.  It seems that is the situation today with the video that shows that all of the Libya destruction was built on a pack of lies.  The video done by Julien Teil called “The Humanitarian War” demonstrates, in the words of the author of the original lie, that there was no evidence at all to back up the allegation that thousands were killed by the Jamahirya government, but that instead, a small circle of friends “worked” that lie throughout the various organs of the United Nations and the result is genocide of a people and contamination of a land.

Now, here’s my request to you.  Can you become a journalist for a day and post the video link to just a few of the sites that you visit regularly?  If the real journalists won’t do it, then could you?  It is clear that we have to become the journalists that we seek.

Please post this video link to Daily Kos, Common Dreams, OpEd News, Democracy Now!, and the rest that we visit regularly.  But could you also please visit FOX, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBC, Russia Today, PRESS TV, etc. and post it there?

I’ll do my part, too, and make sure that it’s posted to my sites or sites that I’m supposed to have control over.  Only, I have to learn how to post!  (That’s another matter!)

Finally, if you haven’t taken the time to watch this video, please do.  It will take your breath away that all of this has been done by NATO to Libya and its foundation is a lie.  What kind of people would do that to their own country?

Click here to have a look at Julien (not Jonathan) Teil’s, “The Humanitarian War:” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gJz45K4Q50

(Those of you in Europe, Africa, and Asia might want to use this link instead:  http://www.laguerrehumanitaire.fr/english

Berto Jongman

Nine out of ten violent deaths occur outside conflicts.

The Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development strives to achieve measurable reductions in the global burden of armed violence by 2015.

Learn more.

Cynthia McKinney

Cynthia McKinney, 10 October 2011.

Third of Four Installments on Libya: Israel and Libya

Once again, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya peels away the veneer of legitimacy and deception enveloping the U.S./NATO genocide currently taking place in Libya. In his first article, Nazemroaya exposed the mechanism by which the world came to “know” of the need for a humanitarian intervention in the Libyan Arab Jamahirya and U.S./NATO admissions of targeted assassination attempts against the Leader of the 1969 Libyan Revolution, Muammar Qaddafi. In his first of these four installments since his return from Libya, Nazemraoya makes it clear that there never was any evidence given to the United Nations or the International Criminal Court to warrant or justify United Nations Resolutions 1970 and 1973 or current U.S./NATO operations inside Libya.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chuck Spinney

The Real Story of How Israel Was Created

CounterPunch, October 11, 2011

To better understand the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, it is important to understand the original 1947 U.N. action on Israel-Palestine.

The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the U.N. created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the U.S. governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.

In reality, while the U.N. General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.

Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.

Third, the U.S. administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.

The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.

It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 percent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 percent non-Jewish. And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds.

Let us look at the specifics.

Read full article with specifics.

Phi Beta Iota:  The specifics demonstrate with great clarity that at the time the U.S. Government had intelligence but lacked integrity.  Today the U.S. Government lacks both intelligence and integrity.  Electoral Reform is the sole possible demand that can resolve the crisis of US democracy and US capitalism run amok–inverted into velvet theatrical facism.