Wednesday

The Daily WAR (08-19)

Reading between the lines, and thinking outside the box . . .
 
 
 
    "There's more fear here than wrath," a senior Vatican official told Time with regard to the Catholic hierarchy's attitude toward Obama.
    However, if Obama signs the Freedom of Choice Act in his first months in office, "it would be the equivalent of a war. It would be like saying, 'We've heard the Catholic Church and we have no interest in their concerns.'"
 
    An appeal for world peace was passed from religious leaders to children to government officials today in Cyprus.
    With the presentation of the appeal, the International Meeting of Prayer for Peace, traditionally sponsored by the Catholic lay Sant'Egidio Community, and this year cosponsored by the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, came to an end.
    This 22nd annual meeting was on "The Civilization of Peace: Faiths and Cultures in Dialogue."
    The text of the appeal acknowledges that the world is "at a difficult point in history."
    "Many certainties are shaken by the economic crisis that has seized our world. Many people are pessimistic about the future. Richer countries focus on protecting their own citizens. A very high price of the crisis will be paid for by the poorest of the world."
 
 
 
    A day after executives at ailing German automaker Opel met with Chancellor Merkel to discuss a multibillion-euro bailout, commentators in the German media are skeptical. Most think it would be better to let the carmaker collapse than to save it.
 
 
 
    President Sarkozy regularly denounced Russia's human rights record during his 2007 election campaign and promised to take a tough line with Moscow if he won power.
    But, once in office, he adopted a noticeably softer approach and has used France's presidency of the EU to promote himself as a good friend of Russia who can help ease its international angst.
 
    Russian Defence Minister on Tuesday warned Georgia that any efforts to strengthen its military would be punished more severely than during the countries' brief August war.
 
    The re-emergence of Russia on international arena and more importantly Putin's intellectual approach to developing a foreign policy, has presented an issue for the world to think about.
 
 
 
    France, which holds the presidency of the EU, said it wanted the Quartet of Middle East peace negotiators to meet again this year to continue efforts to keep Israeli-Palestinian peace talks alive.
 
    Barack Obama proclaimed himself "very impressed" with the Arab League's peace plan when he discussed it with President Peres during a brief visit to Israel 4 months ago, Peres said Tuesday.
 
    Barack Obama phoned Palestinian Authority President Abbas and pledged to work to establish a Palestinian state as soon as possible, a senior PA negotiator told WND.
 
    NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer appealed Tuesday for more troops from outside the US to be sent to Afghanistan to prevent it from again becoming a "safe haven" for terrorists.
 
    Obama would be foolish to imagine that Petraeus can work a miracle cure in Afghanistan. The cancer has spread too far and is affecting US troops as well.
 
    Alarm grows as governments and navies are rendered legally powerless to conduct security operations on the high seas.
 
    An Indian navy warship has sunk a Somali pirate "mother ship" in the Gulf of Aden, the world's most treacherous waterway, after the renegades threatened to attack the frigate.
    The Gulf of Aden controls access to the Suez Canal, which allows ships to go between Europe to Asia without having to take the longer and more expensive route around the southern tip of Africa.
    It is a crucially important route for oil tankers. The UN has said that piracy in the area is now out of control.
    The German navy said yesterday that one of its frigates had foiled attacks on two ships in the Gulf of Aden, using a helicopter to chase off pirates who fled in their speedboats.
 
    The American security company Blackwater is planning to cash in on the rising threat of piracy on the high seas by launching a flotilla of gunboats for hire by the shipping companies.
    [WAR: I made a comment to my father last night about this possibility.]
 
    The hijacking of the supertanker Sirius Star by Somalia pirates will contribute to driving up prices in Europe and worldwide amid soaring insurance and shipping costs, experts have warned.
    A surge in piracy in the Gulf of Aden, one of the world's major shipping routes, has seen dozens of ransom payments made, while the fate of 15 vessels and almost 300 crew members is still unresolved.
    But the seizure of a huge oil tanker, and the position where it was taken far south of the pirates' usual hunting ground, mean that the scale of the problem has suddenly worsened dramatically.
    "Somebody's going to have to pay for that and it's going to be consumers in Europe. It's come at a very unfortunate time for the world economy."
 
 
 
    "We are ready to do whatever is demanded of us" in order to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, IAF commander Maj-Gen. Nehushtan told German magazine Der Spiegel in an interview published Tuesday.
    He said that whether a military strike is eventually decided upon is a political question and not an issue of Israel's military capabilities.
    When asked by the paper whether the Israeli military was able to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities, which are spread around the country and partly located underground, he said, "Please understand that I do not want to get into details. I can only say this: It is not a technical or logistical question."
 
    Barack Obama must radically overhaul US policy on Iran by shunning confrontation and jettisoning attempts to isolate the Islamic republic through sanctions, a group of 20 former senior US diplomats and regional analysts urged yesterday.
    They warned that a military attack on Iran would "backfire" and called for unconditional, direct and comprehensive negotiations, insisting this was the only way to break a "cycle of threats and defiance".
    The statement also addressed "myths" it said had been used by US hawks to discourage engagement, among them the notion that the religious nature of Iran's regime rendered it undeterrable and that its leadership was implacably opposed to the US and determined to "wipe Israel off the map".
 
    Richard Perle, a former US assistant defense secretary and longtime proponent of regime change in Iraq, said in an interview there are several areas the administration of Barack Obama may explore to define his foreign policy legacy.
    On the Iranian front, he said Obama may be too ambitious regarding the effects of diplomacy when dealing with the Iranian nuclear dilemma.
    "I wouldn't take it at face value, but if Obama believes he can talk the Iranians out of their nuclear weapons program, and talk them out of their terrorist alliances, he's wrong."
 
 
 
    To troops downed in combat, few sights are sweeter than the approach of military rescuers. In a few weeks, Tucson will be at the center of efforts to speed up that lifesaving process.
    Personnel from around the globe will converge at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base from Dec. 1 to Dec. 12 for the largest rescue exercise of its kind.
    The effort, dubbed Angel Thunder, will involve the US Army and Air Force, troops from Germany, Chile, Colombia and observers from Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Pakistan.
    Several non-military US agencies such as the State and Justice departments, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, also will take part in the drills, which aim to smooth interaction between military branches, allied nations and civilian agencies.
    [WAR: Since I'm an hour SE of D-M, in Cochise County, I'll probably be seeing some of this activity.
    And this drill may explain my father and I finding a remote "pad" being built in the Dragoon Mountains. If there is some activity there, I'll be able to see it as I sit here typing.]
 
    Is Obi-Wan Kenobi a Whacko Conspiracy Theorist? This video summarizes the 'Star Wars' prequel trilogy's political storyline, which is that of false flag war and terror.
 
    It is Spring 2009. Just as many people have warned, a series of attacks using nuclear "dirty bombs" kills thousands of Americans.
    Before we launch world war 3, ask yourself: would you care if Iran, China and Russia were really behind the attacks?
 
    Next time you move to another state and need a new driver's license, try this:
    Refuse to produce the birth certificate or any other personal information required by the department of motor vehicles. Just explain that a facsimile of the required document is posted on your website and give the clerk the domain name.
    Tell them: "I'm following the example of President-elect Barack Obama. If he didn't need to produce a birth certificate to establish his eligibility to be president of the United States, why would you require me to produce one to get a lousy driver's license?"   
 
    The 2nd-in-command of Islamic militant network al-Qaeda has hit out at Barack Obama, calling Obama a "house negro" - a demeaning term implying he served white people.
    He also criticised Obama - whose father is Muslim - for abandoning his Islamic roots. "You were born to a Muslim father, but you chose to stand with the enemies of Muslims."
 
    Barack Obama is not an outsider. He has chosen the establishment over the people.
    But this is hard for Americans to understand because they have no concept of class -- which is to say the concept that class is a relation of power.
    How else to explain the enthusiasm over Obama, a man whose policies and advisors are indistinguishable from Clinton's, who was a dismantler of welfare, a neo-liberal free-trader, and an ardent warmonger? A man who put power and profits before the people?
    This is a tragedy in the making. Possibly the last disillusionment.
 
    The contradiction between the aspirations and hopes of millions of Americans who voted to repudiate the Bush administration's policies of war and social reaction and the class character of the incoming Obama administration has become increasingly clear over the two weeks since Election Day.
    The filling out of Obama's transition team with a cast of financiers, lobbyists and defense operatives gives tangible evidence of what is being prepared.
    These developments illuminate a fundamental political truth: Obama was the choice of a faction of the US political establishment that saw him as the ideal figurehead for the repackaging and recalibration of US imperialist policy.
 
    Our crazed foreign policy was a major reason why Americans gave Obama such a stunning victory.
    There's just one problem: our foreign policy is going to remain pretty much the same. Say whaaaat?!
    That's right: you heard me. No change in that department. Why is that, you ask?
    The reason is because the War Party has a strategy perfectly suited to solving their major problem, which is that they lack any kind of popular support, as the McCain campaign discovered to its horror.
    So instead of playing the game, they decided to rig it and greet the incoming Obama administration with a fait accompli.
 
    At a closed-door meeting Tuesday, Senate Democrats voted by a wide margin to forgo any serious measures against Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, an avid supporter of the Bush administration's war policies who campaigned intensively for the defeated Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
    The 42-13 vote to allow Lieberman to retain his chairmanship of the key Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee was entirely predictable, especially after Obama intervened directly to oppose any serious retribution.
    It provides one more indication of the bipartisan and right-wing course to be pursued by the incoming Obama administration.
 
    It's been a week and a half since Obama was elected. He won't take office for another 2 months. But he's already got one big group of Americans on their feet.
    What we're seeing in the gun stores is not a nation arming itself for revolt, but Americans in a thoroughly defensive mode, stocking up now to avoid the Democratic gun bans they believe are coming.
 
    Madam Speaker, for some, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. For others, it means dissent against a government's abuse of the people's rights.
    The true patriot is motivated by a sense of responsibility and out of self-interest for himself, his family, and the future of his country to resist government abuse of power.
    He rejects the notion that patriotism means obedience to the state.
 
    On December 23, 1913, after Congress went home for Christmas, private bankers through craft, intrigue and deceit. grasped control of the nation's currency, and thereby predestined the total collapse of America.
    Today, the Federal Reserve Board controlling our nation's "money" is 76% foreign owned by private interests. They have no allegiance whatsoever to America, as they think only in global profit$, nothing else!
    America is now controlled by a few very extremely wealthy globalists.
 
    From the top of the City of London financial oligarchy, a consensus emerged, according to US intelligence sources who closely monitor City factional developments, to turn Gordon Brown into a reincarnation of Ramsay MacDonald, the 1920s and 1930s Fabian prime minister of Great Britain, who established a outright corporatist fascist "unity government," at the very moment that Mussolini and Hitler were consolidating Fascist and Nazi dictatorships over Italy and Germany.
    It is this apparatus that has been mobilized to push a universal fascist agenda, beginning with the G-20 emergency summit. The City of London oligarchy is intent on saving its offshore financial havens at the center of Anglo-Dutch Liberal power.
 
 
 
    Intelligence agencies in China and Japan are focusing on the role of a successor entity of Salomon Brothers as being behind a fraud against Japanese banks by the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and Wall Street to bail out unscrupulous Wall Street bankers and mega-investors.
    Chinese and Japanese intelligence agencies that look closely at financial malfeasance are alarmed that the Salomon division of Citigroup has managed to take over all of Lehman Brothers' viable assets, leaving the US bankruptcy court holding the debt of the failed securities firm.
    Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. Lehman had borrowed billions from 2 Japanese banks to stay afloat.
    Our Asian intelligence sources report that the Salomon division of Citigroup engaged in a massive fraud scheme with the connivance of the Treasury Department of Henry Paulson and the Federal Reserve Bank of Ben Bernanke.
    WMR has also learned that a number of CIA officers are in Beijing to try to prevent a united Asian front against Washington's and Wall Street's attempts to call the shots on the global financial crisis.
    The CIA's top priority is to ensure that nothing interferes with China's continued backing of the US dollar.
 
    Russia begins to take revenge on the International Monetary Fund for its dictatorship on the post-Soviet space during the 1990s.
 
    France has unveiled plans for a post-French EU presidency financial summit, despite the Czech Republic's sensitivity over its upcoming chairmanship of the EU.
    The Elysee Palace on Tuesday formally announced an "international summit" to be held in Paris on 8 January, entitled "New World: Values, Development and Regulation," continuing France's ambition to create a "new model" for capitalism in the wake of the global financial crisis.
 
    Today there is a crisis on Wall Street. It involves enormous losses. It threatens the economy.
    One reason it is of such magnitude is that the institutions of Wall Street were allowed to become so huge. They are so big that their mistakes and their failures threaten all of us.
 
    Congressman Ron Paul confronted Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke about plans to replace the dollar with a new global currency during the House Financial Services Committee meeting on Capitol Hill.
 
    We are going through a financial crisis more severe and unpredictable than any in our lifetimes. And there is no playbook for responding to turmoil we have never faced.
 
    Every form of capitalism has contradictions that eventually bring about a structural crisis of that form of capitalism.
    The predominant form of capitalism changed to the "neoliberal" form, which means a type of capitalism in which the state plays a limited role in the economy, particularly withdrawing from activities that benefit ordinary people.
    It now appears that neoliberal capitalism can no longer overcome two key problems and is entering a structural crisis of its own.
    The developing financial and economic crises have exposed the high-flying financial operators for what they always were — thieves who got rich without doing anything productive.
    This has also exposed their fallacious free-market ideology.
 
    The G20-meeting held in Washington is in its essence a historical indicator that the Western - above all Anglo-Saxon - monopoly on global economic and financial governance, is coming to an end.
    Without a complete overhaul of the system, the failing of the current system and that of the US at the center, will lead the whole planet to an unprecedented economic, social, political and strategic instability, and more specifically to a breakdown of the global monetary system by summer 2009.
 
    World's only private ski and golf resort for billionaires, Yellowstone Club (Montana), has gone bankrupt.
 
    The heads of the Big 3 automakers of Detroit pleaded on Tuesday for emergency government aid to stave off potential collapse, but after four hours of testimony, it appeared they had not persuaded enough lawmakers to move quickly on a bailout.
 
    Banks in Europe, and their unfortunate would-be borrowers, face another blow as plunging oil prices tighten the spigot of petrodollar deposits.
    Billions of dollars' worth of funds from oil-exporting nations have made their way into banks from Zurich to London in recent years.
    These inflows helped banks withstand credit crisis losses and, given that much of the money was in dollars, were a source of dollar liquidity during recent money market difficulties.
 
    The world's national oil companies expect oil prices to fall further and will cancel most planned investment projects even at current levels.
    A recent meeting of the national oil companies in Beijing had predicted oil prices would fall to about $40 a barrel, the CEO of China National Offshore Oil Corporation told a conference in Barcelona.
 
 
 
WAR groups: GOOGLE / YAHOO!
WAR for military: YAHOO! WARriors
WAR fund: PayPal (payable to thedailywarrior@gmail.com)
 
 
 
 
Posted by at