'Car Bomb' As Panetta Lands In Afghanistan

A suspected car bomb attack has taken place at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, Sky Sources have revealed.

The explosion came as US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta flew into Camp Bastion. It is believed that Mr Panetta was still landing or had landed at the time of the alleged attack, but it is not clear if he was a target.

Sky's Stuart Ramsay said the explosion was caused when a vehicle drove on to the runway either during or after the landing.

Sky Sources have been told the explosion was caused by the driver of the vehicle. An investigation has now been launched into the driver's identity.

The driver, who appears to have survived the attack, has been taken into custody and is being treated for burns.It was not clear whether Mr Panetta was a specific target or not. Sky Sources said the explosion did appear to be an "attack of some description".

The base was put on immediate lockdown after the explosion this morning - but Mr Panetta is understood to be in Kabul this afternoon and in talks with the government. Read More

Syrian army using 30 types of torture says Amnesty ... As Assad's troops plant landmines along border to stop refugees fleeing

Syrian forces are carrying out more than 30 types of torture on prisoners, a report claims.

Amnesty International said civilians held by security forces in the crackdown on anti-government protests were being horrifically abused.

The torture methods include crucifixion-type beatings, electric shocks and rape, according to a report based on accounts from Syrians who had fled to Jordan.

It said the testimonies were ‘further evidence that torture and other ill-treatment in Syria form part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population’.

At least 276 people had died in custody, Amnesty International said.

Yesterday troops killed dozens near the city of Idlib, activists claimed.

Troops have planted landmines along routes used by people trying to flee President Bashar Assad's regime, it has been claimed. Read More

US’ Balochistan Enterprise

Maverick US Congressmen Rep Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) and Rep Lousie Gohmert (R-Texas) may have laid the foundation of what may eventually turn out to be yet another disastrous US foreign policy faux pas.

They want to redraw the borders in South West Asia (SWA) in cahoots with the Afghan Northern Alliance (NA) and a group of angry Pakistan Baloch Sardars (PBS).

This proposed radical paradigm shift in the US approach to SWA is intended to change its entire political structure by creating an independent Balochistan comprising Pakistani, Iranian and Afghan Baloch areas. These US Congressmen intend to synthesize future US interests in SWA with those of the NA and these disenchanted PBS to craft one unified and consolidated US foreign policy approach to the region. This diabolical maneuver, if successful, will allow the US to continue to control the region from a central position long after she withdraws from Afghanistan. That this is intended to secure only US’ own long term interests is a subtle point lost on the angry PBS and the NA! Read More

Pakistan: Teetering On The Brink – Analysis

Pakistan’s continuing engagement with the production and export of Islamist extremism and terrorism continued to produce a bloody blowback at home, with a total of at least 6,142 persons, including of 2,797 militants, 2,580 civilians and 765 Security Forces (SFs) personnel killed in 2011.

However, even this worrying total constituted an improvement of 17.75 per cent over the preceding year. 7,435 persons, including 5,170 militants, 1,796 civilians and 469 SF personnel, had been killed in 2010.

While civilian and SF fatalities increased by whopping 43.65 and 63.11 percent, respectively, the steep decline (45.89 percent) in fatalities among the militants, primarily due to Islamabad’s approach of going soft on terror, was the sole reason for the decrease in overall fatalities through 2011. Read More

Libya: The partition begins

When Nato murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in cold blood, observers predicted that his demise would not mark the end of the war but would in fact mark its escalation.

Libya has been in the eye of a storm but now the winds are blowing again. The re-taking of Ben Walid by Gaddafi loyalists and the recent declaration of autonomy by tribal and militia leaders in oil-rich eastern Libya, are just harbingers of the strife to come.

While the NATO-installed head of the Tripoli-based National Transitional Council has threatened the use of “force” to prevent the country’s partition along regional lines, his words are bound to fall on deaf ears for the simple reason that he does not have the authority to back his words. He is just a Western mannequin.

In fact many members of the NTC do not move freely around Libya, with many reported to be sleeping in Malta, across the Mediterranean for fear of reprisals.

Nearly five months after the lynch-mob murder of Libya’s former leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and Nato’s declaration of victory in its war for regime change, the confrontation between Tripoli and Benghazi, the eastern city where the autonomy decision was taken, raises the spectre of civil war.

In a televised address on Wednesday from the city of Misrata, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, the chairman of the NTC, categorically rejected the autonomy bid.

“We are not prepared to divide Libya,” he said. “They should know that there are infiltrators and remnants of the Gaddafi regime trying to exploit them now and we are ready to deter them, even with force.” Read More

Former CIA Officer Michael Scheuer on the Economics of War with Iran

China: Tehran’s Reprieve?

Summary

The latest chapter in the Iranian nuclear saga contains some signs that coordinated unilateral sanctions from the United States and the European Union are actually working. But, will China’s reluctance to jump on board provide the Iranian regime with the trapdoor that it needs to escape the noose and hang onto power?

Analysis

While the latest round of sanctions has still fallen short of its intended goal of forcing Iran to renounce its uranium enrichment activities, it has succeeded in applying tangible economic pressure on the beleaguered regime in Tehran. The rial has lost 60 percent of its value against the dollar since the US and EU implemented their extraordinary sanctions against Iran’s financial industry. Iran’s oil output has also fallen by around 500,000 barrels in the past few months. Yet, Iran can still find buyers for its unrefined petroleum products, and it will continue to do so thanks in large part to the actions of the Chinese government.

Beijing doesn’t support the turning of the economic screw on Iran, and this lack of support is the very reason why sanctions are of the creative unilateral sort and not those that are imposed by the UN Security Council; a body that carries the legitimizing weight of international consensus. Beijing’s rejection of Western-led international pressure on Iran stems from the simple fact that it needs Iranian energy exports. Indeed, China is Iran’s biggest customer. Read More

The Blowback of TINA

There is a terrible rule of war. Whatever new weapon that you introduce onto the battlefield, your adversary will eventually acquire it as well. Indeed, they will often use an industrial-strength version of that very same weapon against you.

Hiram Maxim invented the modern machine gun – automated and oil-cooled – but the British army dismissed the invention. Not so the Germans, who used it with deadly accuracy against the British in World War I. The French, meanwhile, were the first to use modern chemical warfare in 1915 by deploying tear gas against the Germans with little effect. The Germans quickly improved on the innovation by developing chlorine gas, and later mustard gas, with devastating effect. And, of course, Americans invented nuclear weapons and then spent the next half-century trying to forestall their use by others.

The perfect weapon, however, has no odor and makes no sound. It has no half-life. It doesn’t require huge factories and production lines. There are no truly effective defenses.

The perfect weapon, of course, is ideology. And the United States, in the nuclear age, believed that it had created just such a perfect weapon. Washington would export the American version of liberal democracy and refashion the world in its own image. In so doing, America would make the world safe not so much for democracy, but for Americans.

But a funny thing happened on the way to hegemony. The very ideology that the United States assumed would defeat all comers has in fact been turned against the United States. Liberal democracy contains within it the very seeds of the American empire’s destruction. Call it blowback, TINA-style. Read More

Chinese Spies Steal F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Data from BAE Systems

The Australian reports today that the rumors surrounding the potential theft of F-35 Joint Strike Fighter data from BAE Systems by Chinese spies in 2009 should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

This author suggest an old-school approach involving safes and paper instead of data servers. Major defense manufacturers must learn to protect their data better than this:

CHINESE spies hacked into computers belonging to BAE Systems, Britain’s biggest defence company, to steal details about the design, performance and electronic systems of the West’s latest fighter jet, senior security figures have disclosed.

The Chinese exploited vulnerabilities in BAE’s computer defences to steal vast amounts of data on the $300 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a multinational project to create a plane that will give the West air supremacy for years to come, according to the sources.

The hacking attack has prompted fears that the fighter jet’s advanced radar capabilities could have been compromised. Read More

Shanghai Cooperation Organization Trapped in Identity Searches

It is not surprising that these days – as tectonic shifts materialize within the system of international relations, formerly uncontested global authorities like the UN and the OSCE are sinking into serious crises, and the whole architecture of the international law is crumbling - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional group whose potential is seldom called into question, is passing through a phase of protracted identity searches that threatens to turn chronic.

While China and Russia, the two SCO heavyweights with their original foreign-policy programs, largely define the organization's integral agenda, the group continues to lack an overarching concept, and divisions persist among the SCO members over the objectives behind their alliance. The multilateral part of the SCO internal mechanics appears particularly fragile, plus the interactions between SCO and other global actors obviously await a series of bold adjustments.

It is clear at the moment that many of the unbridged gaps between SCO members are actually widening as the post-Soviet Central Asia is being ripped apart under conflicting external influences. Neither the political and military, nor the economic potentials of the cooperation in the SCO framework have been fully unlocked so far, and the assessment is fair that bilateral activities such as massive Chinese investments in Tajikistan's infrastructures or the energy cooperation between Russia and Kazakhstan actually constitute the prevalent form of transactions under the nominally multilateral SCO umbrella. Read More

World War III Has Begun – It`s the First Asymmetric War Long Awaited by Pentagon Think Tanks

The Pentagon has already declared World War III and President Barack Obama and the Congress never even carried out their constitutional duties to approve the use of American military power for war.

One might reasonably conclude that the United States has outsourced war. Presently, World War III is being conducted on two continents – Asia and Africa – with two others – Europe and South America – looming on the horizon. Today, wars are crafted by the upper one percent of wealthy elitists who, using non-governmental organizations, television networks, non — profit “think tanks,” and public relations firms, can declare war on nations without a whimper from elected public officials.

Symmetric warfare is no longer an option for the global elites. World Wars I and II severely affected the investments of many of the global elite families as a result of the destruction of cities, factories, railways, seaports, and other infrastructures. The Korean, Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli, and Iraq wars were messy affairs that also adversely affected markets and destroyed valuable infrastructures. The Cold War never developed into a hot nuclear war because of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), which ensured that a nuclear first strike by either the West or the East would result in total annihilation of both sides, along with the rest of the world.

Even a western military attack on China would have had disastrous results for the attackers, especially since China could retaliate with a nuclear counter-attack and wipe out the U.S. Seventh Fleet and its East Asian naval bases, including Okinawa and Guam. A new type of warfare was required by the elites: asymmetric warfare – the use of unconventional warfare tactics, including information warfare, by proxies, non-state actors, agents provocateur, and fifth columns. Read More

Why The US Needs a Major War

At the moment, we find ourselves in the middle of a turbulent phase of the global evolutionary cycle which commenced in the 1980ies and is projected to end by the middle of the XXI century. In the process, the US is clearly loosing its hyperpower status…

Estimates offered by experts from the Russian Academy of Science show that the current period of severe instabilities should end roughly in 2017-2019 with a crisis. The crisis will not be as deep as those of 2008-2009 or 2011-2012 and will mark the transition to an economy built on a novel technological basis. The economic revival will, in 2016-2020, likely entail serious shifts in the global power balance and serious military-political conflicts involving both the global heavyweights and the developing countries. The epicenters of the conflicts will supposedly be located in the Middle East and the post-Soviet Central Asia.

The century of the US global military-political dominance and economic primacy appears to be nearing completion. The US failed the unipolarity test and, bled by permanent Middle Eastern conflicts, currently lacks the resources retaining the global leadership would take.

Multipolarity implies a much fairer distribution of wealth across the world and a profound transformation of the international institutions such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, etc. At the moment the Washington consensus seems irreversibly dead and the global agenda should be topped by the task of building an economy with much lower uncertainty levels, tighter financial regulations, and greater justice in the allocation of revenues and economic benefits. Read More

America’s Death Pornography Culture: Celebrating brutal deaths of Qaddafi and Saddam

The United States government and military revels in death and pornographic intimidation. The videos and photographs of howling Iraqis celebrating the hanging of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein after his U.S.-administered kangaroo court trial in Iraq and the physical abuse, alleged sodomizing, and execution of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi by NATO-armed and directed rebels after his convoy in Sirte was reportedly struck by a U.S. drone-launched missile, exemplify America’s fixation with pornographic death scenes…

The George Walker Bush and Barack Hussein Obama administrations share a fascination for displaying the dead bodies of their vanquished enemies. For Bush, it was the gruesome stone-slabbed corpses of Qusay and Uday Hussein, Saddam’s sons, after they were killed in a firefight with U.S. troops in. That was followed by the body of Sadaam after his hanging in.

Of course, it did not suit President Obama to broadcast a photograph of Osama Bin Laden, allegedly killed while resisting arrest in Abbotabad, Pakistan. In the case of Bin Laden, there is a strong reason to believe that Osama’s body could not be shown because there was no body of Osama. Whether an Osama Bin Laden look-a-like was killed or not may never be known, but what is certain is that the Obama administration’s explanation for ”Osama’s” burial at sea from a U.S. aircraft carrier appears dubious. Read More

Missile Defenses Offering Israel Calm in Conflict (So why are they butchering Palestinians in completely unbalanced responses?)

BEERSHEBA, Israel—Facing the worst barrage of rockets from Palestinian militants since 2009, Israel is getting a boost from a new interceptor system that destroys missiles in midair before they fall on population centers.

The "Iron Dome" missile system has provided an added layer of security for Israel's homeland by downing dozens of rockets in the past four days, buying more time for the country's leaders to confront militants with less citizen pressure to stem hostilities.

The system underlines Israel's shifting doctrine of emphasizing defense capabilities in addition to its offensive firepower, and offers a preview of how Israel will handle any retaliatory missile threat posed by Iran in the event of a pre-emptive strike against its nuclear facilities.

"It hasn't been easy to put into the public and military consciousness the need to learn defense and not only attack,'' Israeli Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor told Israel Army Radio on Sunday. "The Israeli character is aggressive." Read More

Afghanistan shootings: diplomats in Kabul are already discussing a doomsday scenario

There is never a good time for an American serviceman to go on a shooting spree in Kandahar, methodically murdering 16 Afghan men, women and children – some in their beds. But coming soon after a wave of anger engulfed Afghanistan at the burning of Korans, and as American officials negotiate the departure of troops in 2014, it is difficult to imagine a worse time.

So much for an exit strategy based on building trust between Afghan security forces and their mentors.

Hamid Karzai has condemned the attack. And the Taliban has promised revenge against “American savages”, showing rather more concern for the civilians killed by American weapons than by their own indiscriminate explosive devices.

For its part, the Afghan parliament has demanded that the unnamed soldier face local justice.

“We seriously demand and expect that the government of the United States punish the culprits and try them in a public trial before the people of Afghanistan,” the lower house of parliament said in statement. Read More

Stop Iran gas project: US tells Pakistan

Islamabad, March 10: The US has asked Pakistan to abandon the Iran gas pipeline project and counselled Islamabad to explore alternative energy.

Deputy US Ambassador to Pakistan Richard Hoagland said Pakistan should start looking for alternative energy sources like wind, sun, biogas and cowdung, instead of Iranian gas.

Pledging America's readiness to lend a helping hand, he said the US fully realizes the energy crisis in Pakistan and was trying to help it out of the present situation, Geo TV reported Friday. Source

US request to open consulate in Balochistan was rejected: Pakistan

Islamabad: Pakistan has said that the United States had sought permission to open its consulate in Balochistan but it was refused.

During a weekly briefing on Friday, foreign office spokesman Abdul Basit said that Pakistan missions were ensuring that the Balohistan issue could not be wrongly portrayed.

Basit said that the issue had also been raise before the United Kingdom and Switzerland and they assured Islamabad that anti-Pakistan activities would not be allowed on their soil.

Answering a question regarding Pakistan’s relations with India he said that confidence building measure were being taken but the Kashmir issue could not be put aside.

The spokesman said that the UN representative in Human Rights Council had asked India to end laws like Public Safety Act. Read More

Pakistan warns countries to discourage Baloch separatists

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan Foreign Office reminded those countries, who have given asylums to Baloch separatists, to discourage anti-Pakistan secessionist activities within their territories.

Foreign Office Spokesman Abdul Basit while giving weekly briefing to the media representatives said that Pakistan has been handling the situation politically in accordance with its own laws, priorities and constitution.

Replying to a question, about providing shelter to some of the elements who are involved in the disturbance of Balochistan, the spokesman said Pakistan has raised this question with the concerned countries adding that demarche was issued to ambassador of Switzerland in Islamabad.

Talking on the issue of activities of estranged Baloch leaders taking refuge in England and Switzerland, Basit said Islamabad has made demarches to the relevant countries and have been assured by them that their territories will not be allowed to be used against Pakistan.

“We are cognizant of the developments in Balochistan and necessary steps have also been taken,” he added. Read More

US senator urges naval blockade of Iran oil

The chairman of the US Senate Armed Services Committee has put forward a proposal to impose an international naval blockade of Iran’s oil exports prior to any military strike against the country.

In a Friday interview with Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, Democratic Senator Carl Levin said naval blockade of Iran is “one option that needs to be considered” in order to escalate pressure against the Islamic Republic.

He went on to say that alternative crude supplies should be ensured prior to any such naval siege, in an attempt to avert potential price hikes in the global crude market.

Iran is OPEC’s second oil producer and the world’s third major crude exporter.

Levin insisted that similar measures aimed at mounting pressure on Iran without engaging in a combat, including imposition of a “no-fly-zone,” could prove to be “very effective” and urged Tehran’s adversaries to explore such options. Read More

US gives up Afghan jail in deal to stay after 2014

AMERICA has agreed to hand over control of Afghanistan's biggest prison to the Kabul government, removing a key obstacle to a new strategic agreement that would result in US troops staying in the country after 2014.

The transfer means Afghan security forces will be responsible for about 3000 detainees at Bagram, including the most senior insurgent captives, including some likely to have been detained by Australian troops.

It amounts to a significant US concession to Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has made control of the prison a precondition for concluding a long-term deal on future relations with the US.
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One remaining obstacle is controversial night raids by coalition special forces. But General Abdul Rahim Wardak, the Afghan Defence Minister, predicted this was likely to be resolved within a month. ''By signing these agreements, the ground will be paved for signing a strategic agreement between the United States and Afghanistan,'' he said. Read More