Billmon:
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April 23, 2006
WB: Threat Projection
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A really nice one Billmon!
Also Kaplan:
These categories are loose and overlapping. What [such states] have in common is that the rulers can exploit the whole panoply of state power, without regard for the will of the people.
Who paid him to write that fiction piece?
Never before have we needed a more unified military-diplomatic approach to foreign policy. For the future is a multidimensional game of containment.
Same WaPo: New Plans Foresee Fighting Terrorism Beyond War Zones
For example, SOCOM has dispatched small teams of Army Green Berets and other Special Operations troops to U.S. embassies in about 20 countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America, where they do operational planning and intelligence gathering to enhance the ability to conduct military operations where the United States is not at war.
And in a subtle but important shift contained in a classified order last year, the Pentagon gained the leeway to inform — rather than gain the approval of — the U.S. ambassador before conducting military operations in a foreign country, according to several administration officials. “We do not need ambassador-level approval,” said one defense official familiar with the order.
Sure, a unified approach under Rumsfeld
“The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government.” — Rev. Martin Luther King, April 4, 1967.
And there’s nothing worth watching on TV either! Go figure.
Posted by: Malooga | Apr 23 2006 18:12 utc | 2
speaking of threat projection…
Does bin Laden heart Baby Bandar Bush?
Why is it that bin Laden is able to conveniently appear whenever BushCo is in deep shit? BBC asks boost for Bush?
they mention the issues of spying on private citizens, but that’s a straw man for the big issue of justifying an attack on Iran. The fourth amendment has been on life support for years.
…and maybe this latest is to cover for the calls for Rummy’s resignation by all those Generals. Richard Clarke talks as if he thinks bin Laden is still alive. I don’t know. I do know that he appears exactly when Bush needs him to, tho.
what’s your opinion?
1. Bin Laden and GWB were both fabulously successful on the drag queen circuit and this posturing is just an extension of that bitch slap fight that started in the dressing room one night over false eyelashes. They’re both still alive and secretly love one another, but, dammit, “he” has to show some respect, too, each says…and no, he won’t just talk to him.
2. Bin Laden was given embalming fluid the last time he went for dialysis treatment. He was then flown to a secret animatronic base located at Euro Disney where he was given a life-like mouth hinge that moves on command. Cheney keeps suggesting that George visit Paris, but George said he’s the decider and he’ll decide when he goes to Euro Disney, but wonders if they have any timber for him to cut there. Cheney secretly worries about shorting out the control pod on Bush’s back with all the flop sweat coming from Fox’s announcement of approval ratings below 35%.
3, bin Laden is in heaven with a whole lotta virgins and finds out *THAT’S* not quite what he expected…they all look like Sharon…as in Ariel…and want him to cut his beard cause it’s too long and he’d really look good in khakis and a white shirt, with his coloring and all. being a martyr just isn’t the dog and pony show he expected. it was so much more fun when he could kill people in the name of god.
Bush tunes into the godhead and says, “I hear yah.”
4. other
Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 23 2006 19:35 utc | 3
Bin Laden tape
NYT titles: On Tape, Bin Laden Urges Militants to Fight in Sudan
Finally Mr. Kristoff, NYT columnist, running an “Occupy Sudan” campaign for years now (who knows for whom?), gets the headline he wants.
Why didn´t Binni urge the Iranians to build a nuke? That would also fit the script.
@fauxreal et al…
Well, according to a Former German Minister: “9/11 [was] run by Bush Administration” and this towelhead whacko (snark) who says, Flight 93 cockpit recording is a hoax. It took the authorities a long time to come up with evidence from the flight recorders which they had earlier stated were not recoverable. It seems to me they still did a rather sloppy job when replacing the real recordings with this dramatic production. Here is why:
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 23 2006 20:49 utc | 6
Addendum:
Let us not forget the rabbit hole, otherwise known as the memory hole…(of the first reported real(?)tape)
Air Traffic Control Recording of 9/11 Flight 93
or
Los Alamos National Laboratory “morphing” technology
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 23 2006 21:19 utc | 8
Followed uncle scams link to prison planet.
b, who is Andreas Von Bülow who talks in the article? Was he a minister and of what and when? Is this getting any press in Germany?
Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Apr 23 2006 22:41 utc | 9
OCTOBER, 2000 – Blackstone Real Estate Advisors, the global real estate investment and management arm of The Blackstone Group, L.P., announced today that it has purchased the participating mortgage secured by 7 World Trade Center, a commercial office complex controlled by real estate developer Larry Silverstein.
It now appears, due to the urgency to rebuild the ConEd substation, that 7 WTC will be rebuilt in the near future and that, in effect, the bondholders may take on the increased risks of construction lending. Silverstein, the building’s developer and leaseholder of the WTC twin towers, has said the claim for 7 World Trade Center will be US$861 million.
TENANTS:
Salomon Smith Barney
Internal Revenue Service Regional Council
U.S. Secret Service
American Express Bank International
Standard Chartered Bank
Provident Financial Management
ITT Hartford Insurance Group
First State Management Group, Inc
Federal Home Loan Bank
NAIC Securities
Securities & Exchange Commission
Mayor’s Office of Emergency Mgmt
JANUARY, 2001 – A recently inaugurated President George Bush meets with Fed Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill to assess the dot.bomb meltdown happening on Wall Street. Various SEC administrators, investment bank and securities firms chairmen and boards are consulted in teleconference by red phone.
“Give us the wrap-up, Paul. Tell it straight.”
“Sir, America’s citizens stand to lose $10T’s in sexed-up dot-com valuations on their pensions, there simply is no real floor to this selloff.”
“Alan, your view?”
“Cut Fed rates, cut Fed rates, cut Fed rates!”
“Thanks, I’ll give you my decision tomorrow.”
[SEC chairman on the speaker phone, “Sir, shouldn’t the SEC begin an investigation of securities and investment fraud and grand larceny before this sell-off unravels?”]
Bush stabs button on phone, laughing to himself.
APRIL, 2001 – Bush does nothing in the markets or the Fed funds rate. The Bush Administration is repeatedly warned by German intelligence of increased chatter, and plans to fly an airplane into New York high rise buildings. The WTC twin towers are the tallest buildings in New York.
Perhaps thinking of this, Bush does nothing:
http://history1900s.about.com/od/1940s/a/empirecrash.htm
SEPTEMBER, 2001 – You all know the sad events.
The SEC office in WTC7, which enforces stock and bond market regulations, lost files on about 300 pending investigations, including a major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom.
“A lot of cases had to be closed as a result of losing that building.” – David Curran
All the financial records in the WTC towers
are similarly destroyed, conveniently wiping out the entire dot.bomb trail of fraud and larceny.
“Let’s put some lipstick on this pig!” Zapata
JANUARY, 2002 – Larry Silverstein begins filing claims for lost income and damages, claiming double indemnity for each tower’s loss, which will ultimately come to $10B, plus interest on the clock, since September 11th. The original towers were constructed for some $2B in 1970.
Not bad return for a couple $100M lease option,
as the dot.bomb Wall Street gang gets away, scot-free. Small-time brokers lose everything in the following sell-off and job chop. Houses in the Hamptons briefly slow in their price runup.
MAY, 2003 – A day that will live in infamy, II.
JUNE, 2003 – Mission Accomplished. Crude oil and stock indexes reverse their catastrophic decline as a new era of fraud and grand larceny is born.
NOVEMBER, 2004 – Bush re-selected in a second national voting scandal. US media says nothing.
JANUARY, 2005 – US stock and bond markets go sideways. Commodities break through previously unimaginable ceilings, and deficits reach all time hemorrage as the Bushites realize they screwed the pooch with their catastrophically incompetent GWOT strategy.
Stay the course. Colin Powell bails out anyway.
AUGUST, 2005 – Hurricane Katrina rips away the veil, and reveals the wizard behind the curtain is merely a nincompoop with no clothes. The US account deficit and trade deficit go vertical.
NOVEMBER, 2005 – The Fed stops reporting M3, and transitions to new Chairman Ben Bernanke, whose first act is to start printing $2T in NotGeld.
APRIL, 2006 – Merrill Lynch, Nikko Salomon Smith Barney, Goldman Sacs announce record profits for Wall Street brokers. Crude oil is now at $75 a barrel, what was $15 a barrel in 2003, up 500%.
Same shit, different year. It smells like 1929.
WRAPUP:
Bush had no choice. A Dot.bomb financial panic threatened to destroy the civilized world. In times of real global emergency, you have to make tough choices. “It’s those G-d-damn Iranians!!”
SCORE BOARD: Osama -$10B and 3,000
George Bush -$ 7T and 502,247
Wall Street -$10T and ???,???
Osama was clearly playing way out of his league!
http://tinyurl.com/zxqyl http://tinyurl.com/ahmm2
That’s all!
Posted by: Peristroika Shalom | Apr 24 2006 1:50 utc | 10
Great work, as usual Uncle,
WTC7 hadn’t made much sense to me at all until I read your link to German Minister. Also very intriguing commentary on Flight 93. The more sense can be fathomed out of the ashes of 911, the more amerika will be confronted with it’s own shadow. Eventually more of us will begin to peak around and take glimpses of the light again.
Posted by: Juannie | Apr 24 2006 3:06 utc | 11
I don’t know enough about engineering and physics and construction to know if the arguments put forth have merit or not. There is ample reason to think that the Bush junta could do such a thing, but that isn’t evidence.
I listened to Alex Jones interview Jeff Sharlet on his Harper’s article about “Jesus plus One” or whatever it was called. Jones was breathless with a desire to put words into Sharlet’s mouth, but Sharlet would not play along. He was reporting what he had seen and heard, but not extrapolating to some grand conspiracy. So Jones had to do that heavy lifting on his own.
I think there is enough verifiable evidence of international criminal action by this administration to hold them accountable for their deeds. For me, the other stuff is beyond my comprehension.
So what about this guy in Germany, b?
Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 24 2006 12:24 utc | 12
I did read an interesting comment that bin Laden may have appeared to undercut the 60 Minutes appearance of Tyler Durden…Durkheim —Drumheller… who put the case forward to voters that the Bush junta knew the reasons they gave for war were lies, and thus the invasion of Iraq was a violation of the Nuremberg Principles. (that thus is my conclusion, but one that flows naturally, imo, from a war based upon lies, dressed up as defense when it was, in fact, an act of aggression. Yo, Poland.)
Josh Marshall makes the interesting point that, given Drumheller’s statements, the legislators who investigated the Iraq war claims covered for those lies and also deceived the American people.
To me, this is all an extension of the Constitutional crisis that began with the 2000 elections. I knew no good would come from it, but I had no idea things could be this bad.
Digby has a post that talks about the calls to arrest people who are telling the truth. Criminalization of dissent. Digby links to Robert Parry, who notes calls for imprisoning journalists (Bill Bennett), charging generals with sedition (Moonie Times)…and as Parry notes:
The firing of CIA officer Mary McCarthy and the threats of criminal charges against various dissenters are just the latest skirmishes in the political war over who will decide what Americans get to see and hear.
The other signal to Bush’s critics, however, is this: If they ever thought he and his administration would accept accountability for their alleged abuses of power without a nasty fight, those critics are very mistaken.
From Harper’s, regarding the current power struggle:
This former senior officer said there “seems to be a quiet conspiracy by rational people” at the agency to avoid involvement in some of the particularly nasty tactics being employed by the administration, especially “renditions”—the practice whereby the CIA sends terrorist suspects abroad to be questioned in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, and other nations where the regimes are not squeamish about torturing detainees. My source, hardly a softie on the topic of terrorism, said of the split at the CIA: “There’s an SS group within the agency that’s willing to do anything and there’s a Wehrmacht group that is saying, ‘I’m not gonna touch this stuff’.”
The analogy is regular army against Hitler’s bodyguards. He used the SS to gain power, not just fight wars or run extermination camps. The Wehrmacht attempted an assassination, the July 20 (1944) plot.
The military evaded political meddling during most of the Third Reich’s history. Most of its leadership was politically conservative, nationalistic and hoped to reconquer territories that had broken away from Imperial Germany. Hitler had promised to rebuild Germany’s military strength and officers were mostly sympathetic towards the National Socialist movement. Political influence in the military command began to increase later in the war when Hitler’s flawed strategic decisions began showing up as serious defeats for the German army and tensions mounted between the military and the government. Not only did Hitler appoint unqualified personnel to lead his armies, but also gave to his commanders impossible orders, such as to shoot all officers and enlisted men who retreated from a front line. (From the Wehrmacht link at the July 20 entry.)
And, going back to the question of that German politician mentioned by Uncle $cam, Laura Rozen, at War and Piece, mentioned Drumheller on April 2, 2005…this is an article to go back to, considering the appearance of Drumheller. It concerns “Curveball” and intelligence sources who discredited him and those who shielded him. That article, and the link to Der Spiegel, question whether or not someone in German intelligence helped Bush fabricate evidence.
Several weeks later, Drumheller discovered that his warning had been ignored when his executive officer brought him an advance copy of Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N.
Drumheller said he then arranged a meeting in McLaughlin’s office and described what the German operative had told him over lunch several months earlier. After listening for 10 minutes, Drumheller said, McLaughlin responded by saying, “Oh my! I hope that’s not true.”
McLaughlin, who retired in January after 32 years at the CIA, said he did not recall the meeting and denied that Drumheller told him Curveball might be a fabricator.
“I have absolutely no recall of such a discussion. None,” McLaughlin said in a statement Friday. “Such a meeting does not appear on my calendar, nor was this view transmitted to me in writing.” He said he was “at a loss” to explain the conflicting accounts.
But another red flag appeared. On Jan. 27, 2003, the CIA’s Berlin station warned in a message to headquarters that Curveball’s information “cannot be verified.”
Drumheller, meanwhile, said he never heard from McLaughlin or anyone else to confirm that Curveball’s material had been deleted from Powell’s speech. So when Tenet called him at home on another matter the night before Powell was to speak in New York, Drumheller said he raised the Curveball case.
“I gave him the phone number for the guy he wanted,” Drumheller recalled. “Then it struck me, ‘I better say something.’ I said, ‘You know, boss, there’s problems with that case.’ He says, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m exhausted. Don’t worry about it.’ “
Posted by: fauxreal | Apr 24 2006 13:17 utc | 13
Apocalysts now
What if you not only believed that the world was going to end but had the power to make it happen? David S Katz explores the modern occult
Conservative American columnist Daniel Pipes concludes a recent article for the New York Sun on Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the following words: “The most dangerous leaders in modern history are those… equipped with… a mystical belief in their own mission. That, combined with his expected nuclear arsenal, makes him an adversary who must be stopped, and urgently.” As evidence of Ahmadinejad’s mysticism Pipes cites the fact that he believes in Mahdaviat, the ‘second coming’ of the ‘Mahdi’, an Islamic version of the Messiah. Such radical religious beliefs, held by the leader of a powerful nuclear state, Pipes argues, will have ominous consequences. No doubt he is right. But if Pipes is concerned about the rise of powerful nuclear-armed men who believe in the second coming, he might have looked a little closer to home. Forget Iran. The mainstay of religious radicalism and mainstream occultism, is the United States, and America already has the bomb. More than one. (…)
The Fundamentalist movement, a fusion of the occult tradition with popular Christianity, grew in strength throughout the twentieth century, and shows no sign of decline now. The sheer number of Fundamentalists has transformed religious extremism into part of American society’s mainstream. The convergence between religious and political agendas in the Bush administration is also unprecedented. Contrasting Bush with previous presidents, communications analyst David Domke writes “Presidents since Franklin Roosevelt have spoken as petitioners of God, seeking blessing and guidance; this president positions himself as a prophet, issuing declarations of divine desires for the nation and world.”
Facing off with other true believers in Iran just now might not be such a good idea, especially for the many millions of us who are unlikely to be raptured, and are less than eager to experience at close hand the seven years of tribulation….
(more)
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Apr 24 2006 14:10 utc | 14
@askod – Andreas von Bülow is a serious, no nonsense guy.
He served as state-secretary in the German Federal Ministry of Defence (1976-1980) and Minister for Research and Technology (1980-1982), both during the Chancellor Helmut Schmidt administration, and was regarded as a “rising star” of German politics at the time.[1] He served for 25 years as an SPD member of the German parliament (1969-1994). In the late eighties and early nineties, he served on the parliamentary committee on intelligence services (“Parlamentarischer Kontrollausschuss”). [1] This committee supervises German intelligence agencies and has access to classified information. In the early nineties, von Bülow also served as SPD ranking member of the Schalck-Golodkowski investigation committee, a task that first led him to inquire into white collar crime in connection with Eastern intelligence services, and later also into what he labels “criminal activities” of Western intelligence services. [2]His first major publication dealing with this realm, In the Name of the State (German:Im Namen des Staates) is a heavily referenced and extensive study focusing mostly on the CIA. Since leaving the Bundestag, he has largely left the SPD’s political loop.
Quite awhile ago I would read Billmon and it is great to have him back.
Again, no surprise at the little outrage expressed in the mainstream media concerning Bush’s threat in using nukes against Iran. I am outraged at this – media ignores that such threats are totally against the U.N. Charter. The U.S. is threatening ultimate terror – Does that make America now a terrorist state??
…see post at http://www.pamlico.org April 24, 2006
b,
von Bülow certainly has some good credentials. would you be willing to hazard a guess as to why he is making such an “outrageous” claim?
this is serious stuff and he is either a very brave or a very foolish man.
Of course corporate media will never touch this so maybe the PTB won’t feel obligated to destroy him.
Posted by: dan of steele | Apr 24 2006 18:46 utc | 17