Tag: terrorism

The economic crisis can be summed up in three words TRUST, CREDIT and TERRORISM.  

Banks do not Trust each other so they are not willing to provide Credit to each other. During this economic panic, Paulson used terrorist tactics of threats and fear of economic collapse to coerce Congress to give him Czar like powers over our tax dollars.

Why don’t financial institutions trust each other?  Because for years they have been cooking the books, claiming they have more value than they really do.  So now that things have gotten tight no one is willing to issue Credit to anyone else because no believes what anyone claims they are worth (and rightly so).

Yesterday, two American helicopters were fired on and turned back by Pakistani troops after trying to enter a Pakistani village without the government’s permission. This only 12 days after the first known US ground incursion into Pakistan killed 20 civilians in the same village. The Pakistani people and their leaders are demanding  that Pakistan defend its land and people against foreign attacks.

President Zardari of Pakistan, is now on a diplomatic jaunt in the UK presenting what his aides call a “new Marshall Plan” for Pakistan’s northwestern border with Afghanistan. Will an Obama administration transplant the Bush administration’s policies that failed in Iraq to the homeland of the Taliban? Or will they commit to serious, long-term solutions?  

I was working for a bar owner at 44th St. & 9th Ave.  He had the news on both TVs.  And people started streaming in as large buildings were closed all over town.  One guy I knew perished.  Another, made it out of the twin towers alive, and walked uptown.  Another woman was late for work: she got to the ground zero area in time to see the second plane fly into the second tower, turned around, and caught what was probably the last subway uptown out of that area.

Here’s what I remember about that day:

Shortly before 9 a.m. EDT, I went into the hardware store to buy some paper towels for the sister bar.  The store owner, who knew me from similar errands in the past, said, “Did you hear?  A plane just flew into the World Trade Center.”

I gaped at him; said something like, “You’re kidding.”  It didn’t register, at first: I mean, small planes do fly into big buildings on occasion but…

He said, “No, it’s on the radio,” and turned up the volume.

I had planned on putting up another post covering what’s good about people and the dedication of, but with the breaking news last night, 8-25-08, we probably are seeing a continuation of recent reports about the reality of the world we live in. A reality that’s been mostly under the surface of this countries citizens but has been rearing it’s ugly face these last few years, pushed on by what we as a society have been allowing to come across our airwaves in the name of ‘free speach’!

The story line broke, on some of the interactive boards, with an initial report from a local Denver Colo. News Channel CBS 4 Denver Colorado about the arrest of a couple of very suspicious characters and has grown from there into a possible assassination attempt on the Democratic Candidate for the Presidency at the Democratic National Convention.

The National Security Archive has just released a Load of Files Electronic Briefing Book No. 253 Posted – August 20, 2008 under the title: 1998 Missile Strikes on Bin Laden May Have Backfired with a subtitle: Extensive 1999 Report on Al-Qaeda Threat Released by U.S. Dept of Energy,

Taliban Told U.S. They Wanted to Bomb Washington

With backlinks to the PDF’s and more links in the sidebar on the left.

Rand Corporation has recently published a report which concludes that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. To me it is mind-boggling that it took Rand, or anyone else, 8 years to come to this conclusion. Now the damage has been done. Hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, over a million lives lost, millions of people displaced, destruction of property and in the end we’ve only created more “terrorists” which in turn could be used as a pretext to continue the GWOT.

By analyzing a comprehensive roster of terrorist groups that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006, the authors found that most groups ended because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they negotiated a settlement with their governments. Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended, and few groups within this time frame achieved victory.

These findings suggest that the U.S. approach to countering al Qa’ida has focused far too much on the use of military force. Instead, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts.

Found this interesting blurb over at the Progressive, the article is a few weeks old so my apologies if somebody has done a diary on the topic.

It concerns the drafting/appointment of certain personnel to assist in the

detection of terrorists in our midst. It makes me wonder if we are all facing a future of being dragged in from of a special house committee to deny that we are terrorists and to give lists of names.

According to the article….

And the latest one to come to my attention is the dispatching of police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and utility workers as so-called “terrorism liaison officers,” according to a report by Bruce Finley in the Denver Post.

Their mission is as follows…..

They are entrusted with hunting for “suspicious activity,” and then they report their findings, which end up in secret government databases.

What constitutes “suspicious activity,” of course, is in the eye of the beholder. But a draft Justice Department memo on the subject says that such things as “taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value” or “making notes” could constitute suspicious activity, Finley wrote.

The states where this is going on include: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C.

So. I am about to do y’all a favor. As it happens, I undercovercalico, live in Tennessee and one of my hobbies is taking pictures. I wouldn’t say that I am a photographer because that would imply a level of skill.

And you’re going to need evidence of my activities so I might as well just give it up now…

US soldiers assigned to guard a crucial part of Iraq’s oil infrastructure became ill after exposure to a highly toxic chemical at the plant

They were bleeding from the nose, spitting blood.

There apparently were hundreds of American soldiers at this site that were contaminated.

And who do they and others accuse