Re: Trump to win?
Here in the UK we have been up late to watch the latest BBC Four Storyville
Moazzam Begg: Living the War on Terror
Gripping first-hand account by a former Guantanamo detainee that chronicles the rise of modern jihad, its descent into terror and the reaction of the west. Moazzam Begg, a Birmingham-raised British Pakistani, has experienced a generation of conflict. He has been a witness to the escalation of global radicalisation for the past two decades, from the Bosnian conflict to wars in Afghanistan and Syria.
The documentary captures his perspective on the escalation in tensions between the west and Islam - from his forced confession and testimony as a free man to his experience as a British Muslim and living the 'War on Terror'. Begg's story, intercut with news archive, raises important questions about how democracies respond to terrorism and how that response has impacted communities and individuals.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0803hst
His final remarks, based upon his being right at the centre of the whole program for so many years, make for a profound sense of accuracy; that all of our present troubles all point back to the unlawful antics of the CIA, MI5 et al.
I will try and find a way to get hold of the transcript.
-
Re: Trump to win?
details of which i was unaware but nothing unexpected. i have long assumed that there were saudi elements supporting al-qaeda and other sunni jihadists/terrorists around the world, going back officially at least as far as their support for the mujahideen in afghanistan, and less officially since then. i thought of it as parallel to the role of pakistan's isi in supporting the taliban. the demarcation between the isi's policies and those of the pakistani gov't itself has always been hazy, i assume intentionally so. so it is no shock to learn that saudi officials supported the 9/11 terrorists. i doubt we will ever know how high that support went.Originally posted by Woodsman View Post
the link to the actual documents, btw, doesn't work. nor do similar links in a few of the articles you listed.Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
The latest is the "28 pages" of the 9/11 commission's report.Originally posted by jk View Post
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-...ty-eight-pages
http://intelligence.house.gov/sites/...classpart4.pdf
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016...ded-by-men-wi/
http://www.commondreams.org/views/20...audi-911-trail
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/04...aeda.html?_r=0
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ify-court.html
http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2...-911-pentagon/
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2015/...es-to-911.html
http://www.newsweek.com/saudi-arabia-911-cia-344693
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandar...h_presidencies
http://www.floridabulldog.org/2011/0...-kept-in-dark/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-us...0GX1ZA20140902
http://www.heraldtribune.com/opinion...sotas-911-ties
http://nypost.com/2013/12/15/inside-...i-911-coverup/Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
maybe i haven't been paying attention. could you elucidate this statement, perhaps provide some links? thanksOriginally posted by Woodsman View Post
fwiw, i too thought of tonkin when i heard of the tomahawks hitting the radar sites after the anti-ship missiles "perhaps fell short."Originally posted by woodsman
i think at some point johnson became more concerned about how any withdrawal would play in the arena of domestic politics. after all, it wasn't so long before that u.s. politicians were using "who lost china?" as a bludgeon against one another. especially as a liberal who passed medicare and the civil rights act, johnson felt vulnerable to charges of "appeasement."Originally posted by woodsman
although for johnson i think it was domestic politics, i agree that pulling back from the saudi's would in fact play well domestically. the choice of continuing support for the saudi's does indeed appear to be part of the global geo-political "great game." the 2 major middle eastern powers vying for regional dominance are the saudi's and the iranians. the iranians are being supported by the russians and the chinese.Originally posted by woodsman
the iranian conservatives, who hold power in spite of a wider population which [i read] is more favorably predisposed to the u.s., are not available for alliance with the u.s. so leaning more towards the houthis does not appear to be worthwhile as an effort to get the iranians to distance themselves more from russia and china. if we're going to play the game, that leaves us in our longstanding alliance with the saudis. i suppose that the iranian [conservative government's] deep hostility towards israel, along with the saudis tacit acceptance of israel, may well play a role in this as well.
it's hard to believe that there's anyone who thinks at all about global politics who hasn't noticed the role of wahhabism in fomenting sunni jihadist terrorism. apparently the calculation has been made in washington, perhaps first in langley, that that's a price the u.s. is willing to pay, at least for now, in its global schemes.Originally posted by woodsmanLeave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
Lake, it would be so nice if you could resist changing the thesis and putting words in my mouth each time we interact, but it seems you can't or won't help yourself. As endlessly fascinating as the Houthi order or battle might be, it's war porn, and is beside the point. Despite the impressive word and syllable counts in your post, none of it discounts anything I've written.
Obama has brought us into yet another war on behalf of the Saudis and we've been at it in Yemen since March 2015, providing intelligence and logistical support and even helping choose targets for airstrikes. Now there is a significant escalation but we're expected to believe it's in all "self-defense." Somehow it's expected to go without notice that the US has been deeply involved in making war against Yemen for a year and a half. The war has killed or wounded nearly 12,000 civilians and left over a million Yemenis in danger of starvation.
And for what? So the sclerotic Saudi Barbarian monarchy can sleep safe at night knowing their insouciant American allies will continue to do their bidding and install a government in Yemen amenable to their corrupt designs. What that has to do with the interests of the people of the United States, whose sons and daughters are yet again being put in harm's way for the benefit of oily Arab potentates, none can say.
Now that we are beginning to learn how deep the tentacles of Saudi intelligence go into the 9/11 attacks, I doubt very much you could find a dozen Americans who would shed a tear at Saudi Barbaria sinking into the ocean- barrings those whose livelihoods and fortunes (political and otherwise) depend dearly on their oily largess. Hillary Clinton is one such person, as is the regrettable George W. Bush, with little doubt the current president is banking on getting a bit of that greasy money himself once out of office. Add to that the reality that by supporting the Barbarian monarchy in its war against one of the poorest and most desolate countries in the world, we are giving aid and comfort (again) to Saudi Wahhabism and the terror is produces and finances.
The southern provinces of Yemen are bases for the radical al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Houthi Shiites hate al-Qaeda. But instead of seeking allies for the US against radical Islamic terrorists, we help create new terrorists abroad and at home. Instead of resisting the Wahhabi financiers of terrorism the Saudis are known to be, we let the Saudis defend AQAP and throw our weight against those whose enemies are also ours, leaving the US a party to Saudi war crimes and our homeland less secure again. The Saudis want to install a government in Sanaa that is in their back pocket, just as they tried to buy the Egyptian government and just as they are backing Salafist Jihadis in Syria. Saudi Barbaria is a small country of some 20 million citizens with a small army but a well-equipped air force stocked with the latest US and European warplanes and weapons, and we are trying our damnedest to help them punch above their weight as they seek to establish hegemony over the Middle East.
You think my Tonkin analogy is off, but it seems to me and many others that the historical rhyme sounds about right. Obama and his general staff would be wise to dissociate themselves from the Saudi war and to open its own lines of communication to the Houthis. But just as the Johnson Administration saw everything through the lens of paranoia of Soviet domination, the current bipartisan war party sees visions of Iranian domination as its manifestation of geopolitical paranoia. By failing to recognize that Wahhabi Islam and Saudi Barbaria is the proximate cause of the larger share of the problems we face, we make life worse for ourselves and for those in the region. I believe it rhymes quite consonantly with the shortsightedness we displayed in our self-inflicted struggle in Southeast Asia and I stand by the analogy.Last edited by Woodsman; October 16, 2016, 08:07 AM.Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
For someone with such a broad historical fetish in all things cloak and dagger you do yourself and your argument a considerable disservice with such shallow analysis that fails basic scrutiny.Originally posted by Woodsman View PostWhat's the emoticon for eye rolling. Yes, yes, we know. Everything Lake has is "fact." Woodsman, alls he's gots is his conspiracies. Yeah, for sure.
Anyway, weird how these Houthis are so good they can hit the Saudi and UAE shipping but their missiles "fall short" of ours, almost like they were never actually fired. Either they weren't fired because this is another false flag or because the Houthi commanders aren't stupid enough to try and sink an American vessel only to have the sun, moon and stars fall on their heads a few hours later, followed by a Marine amphibious division landing. Or for some other reason neither of us fathom.
Whatever the real story is, it seems we're now getting sucked in to fighting these Houthis directly, adding yet another war to the roster. Again, in a place where we are neither wanted nor have any interest beyond the garden variety freedom of navigation interests common to all.
Yet here we are again, seemingly at war with the entire Middle East, backing Saudi Barbaria in another proxy war, only now increasingly less proximate and more direct by the day. Here we go, imagining we can win a guerrilla war with high tech weapons. Once again driven reflexively and thoughtlessly by paranoiac fear of Sovi... Iranian influence, blindly walking in to another quagmire doomed to cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
And why was the Mason sailing where she was? As you imply, more or less the same reasons for the OPLAN 34Alpha strikes. More or less the same reason Maddox and Turner Joy were sailing where they were.
But we're 21st century now, so instead a big combined operation of Nasty boats and SOG troopers raising Hell on the coasts and multiple ships running DESOTO patrols listening in, one boat does all the shooting and all the rooting around collecting the subsequent signals.
And that's was my point in making the analogy. Lyndon Baines Clintoon can do a Tonkin gulf, i mean Baab el Mandab resolution in January assuming she manages to steal the election.
1)You went and picked possibly the only precision attack on the Houthi by the Saudi/UAE/GCC that can be easily defended as a legitimate military target. The casualty list was a "Who's Who of Houthi senior military", not he usual and always tragic photos/videos of women and children blown to pieces as collateral damage.
2)The unarmed and non ECM/Decoy equipped UAE ship Swift was a sitting duck when hit with a Chinese C-801 copy of an obsolete 40 year old French Exocet compared to the USS Mason, a state of the art destroyer specifically equipped with at least 6 systems to kinetically or non kinetically deter or destroy the missile.
An Israeli frigate got caught with its pants down by this same missile type fired by Hezbollah a few years back.
3)Your binary choice of "Why didn't all the missiles hit? Conspiracy!" or "we can't comprehend it" is playing silly buggers.
Maybe read up on, or better yet, meet and talk to folks who have served in surface warfare command. I have.
What's far simpler and far more likely?
Staging a complex false flag attack?
or
Simply having a surface combatant commander aggressively manoeuvre within range of jury rigged Houthi ASM coastal batteries in hopes of initiating an engagement?
Everything isn't a conspiracy.
Maybe the skipper of the Mason was ordered or encouraged to patrol very aggressively.
Maybe the skipper had the command latitude to patrol so aggressively(although I would doubt that in the current risk averse climate where senior military heads roll at the slightest political embarrassment).
The jury rigged Houthi ASM coastal batteries are a poor man's anti-access/area denial effort against Saudi/UAE/GCC maritime assets. The Houthi don't have much in the way of coastal surveillance radar and C3I. Houthi "eyesight" monitoring its coastline/littoral would be nearsighted with cataracts and glaucoma. So just shooting at blips really.
Literally the entire Yemen Air Force, Presidential Guard, Special Forces Command, and Missile Command all defected to the Houthi, along with most of the army and navy.
Yemen has considerable experience with ballistic missiles(seperate specialisation from anti ship missiles) used in combat stretching back to intra Yemen conflict in the 1990's.
Here is a list of SOME missile attacks(and interceptions, the Sausus spent millions) in Yemen:
http://static.businessinsider.com/im...4dcc/image.jpg
It oddly fails to include the two additional successful SS-21 Tochka attacks that the 4 combined resulted in VERY high numbers and high ranked Saudi/UAE/GCC casualties and equipment losses. They are finally dispersing(as they should have from the start) out of considerable fear of the few remaining Houthi SS-21s.
Several days ago, an enhanced Houthi ballistic missile struck a Saudi Air Base over 500km deep into Saudi from Yemen, and reportedly only 50km from Mecca.
Yes this is an asymmetric war, but it is also being fought with anti-ship missiles and long range ballistic missiles.
The destination is still likely the same(Yemen's asymmetric war is to Saudi as the D-Day Normandy invasion was to the Nazis...a clear indicator leading to eventual House of Saud downfall) but it doesn't have to require pit stops in conspiracy crazy town along the way.
Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
Rant not cant. Leave the latter to Kunstler.
Even though Taibbi's rapping as he's tapping,
he's a journalist.
Meanwhile, Chesterton is rolling over in his Catholic grave.Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
What's the emoticon for eye rolling. Yes, yes, we know. Everything Lake has is "fact." Woodsman, alls he's gots is his conspiracies. Yeah, for sure.Originally posted by lakedaemonian View Post
Anyway, weird how these Houthis are so good they can hit the Saudi and UAE shipping but their missiles "fall short" of ours, almost like they were never actually fired. Either they weren't fired because this is another false flag or because the Houthi commanders aren't stupid enough to try and sink an American vessel only to have the sun, moon and stars fall on their heads a few hours later, followed by a Marine amphibious division landing. Or for some other reason neither of us fathom.
Whatever the real story is, it seems we're now getting sucked in to fighting these Houthis directly, adding yet another war to the roster. Again, in a place where we are neither wanted nor have any interest beyond the garden variety freedom of navigation interests common to all.
Yet here we are again, seemingly at war with the entire Middle East, backing Saudi Barbaria in another proxy war, only now increasingly less proximate and more direct by the day. Here we go, imagining we can win a guerrilla war with high tech weapons. Once again driven reflexively and thoughtlessly by paranoiac fear of Sovi... Iranian influence, blindly walking in to another quagmire doomed to cost billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
And why was the Mason sailing where she was? As you imply, more or less the same reasons for the OPLAN 34Alpha strikes. More or less the same reason Maddox and Turner Joy were sailing where they were.
But we're 21st century now, so instead a big combined operation of Nasty boats and SOG troopers raising Hell on the coasts and multiple ships running DESOTO patrols listening in, one boat does all the shooting and all the rooting around collecting the subsequent signals.
And that's was my point in making the analogy. Lyndon Baines Clintoon can do a Tonkin gulf, i mean Baab el Mandab resolution in January assuming she manages to steal the election.Last edited by Woodsman; October 15, 2016, 07:00 PM.Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
Woodsman, let's add some factual context:Originally posted by Woodsman View Post
Just a few days ago a precision strike (either by us or by our freedom loving Saudi allies on our behalf) took out a single bad guy in Yemen and only killed or maimed 640 noncombatants in the process. And the day before, we launched a missile attack on Yemen against radar installations in response to attacks by missiles against our ships that no can show actually ever happened, as the only ones who saw it were the same ones who reported it - the Navy.
I note the same pattern here as with the "Russian hack," but am more struck how it rhymes with the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. You might not be old enough to remember it, but I recall they had a similar degree of "confidence" and "belief" of those attacks too, only to have them revealed as lies once 50,000 Americans and upwards of 2 million Vietnamese were dead.
MAGA! GO TRUMP! JAIL HILLARY! GO TRUMP! MAGA!
MAGA! GO TRUMP! JAIL HILLARY! GO TRUMP! MAGA!
IMG_0816.JPG
That's the list of confirmed senior Houthi military leaders who attended and were killed in THAT specific attack. A reported 17 Houthi generals and 9 colonels in the casualty list.
The nearly ubiquitous and always tragic imagery of dead women and children oddly hasn't occurred in this particular case.
Ironically, the example you chose is one of the rare examples of what clearly appears to be legimitate and open source evidence based attack success.
A bit like the 4 frighteningly successful Houthi missile attacks on Saudi/UAE/GCC coalition HQ and force concentrations that killed over 500 personnel in the last 12 months and continue to scare the shit out of them.
-----
Here's the results of a Houthi land based anti ship missile attack on a UAE(former US Navy) ship days prior to the attack on the US Navy ship Mason:
http://www.maritime-executive.com/ar...ship-off-yemen
http://www.hisutton.com/HVS-2%20Swift%20hit.html#
-----
In your glee to find another "Gulf of Tonkin incident" the far simpler question you really should have asked is
WHY was the USS Mason even sailing within range of KNOWN Houthi anti ship missile range only days after a confirmed attack?
Aggressively navigating a surface combat ship to provoke an attack is far more likely than an overly complex Bondian villain conspiracy you have once again clearly implied.Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
Lek, the reply with the bad styling is like the "killing joke." It's so goldurned profound it might just knock you into the hereafter. So better it turned out that way.
Anyhoo, I invited the lads over for cards and cigars and some adult beverages and prolly had more than I should so sorry about that. I'm shitty card player but a pretty good drinker. Let me go handle these dudes.
MAGA!Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
well... something in your last/just now
cut n paste just broke the 'style' formatting woody....
("such wasted virtue")
so now CANT SEE ANYTHING???
when viewing in LINEAR MODE
maybe try remove (ctrl-A, then ctrl-X) that what you just pasted in,
then paste it (cntl-V) on notepad, and try to paste in again??
since this ones been getting really good lately!!Last edited by lektrode; October 15, 2016, 02:05 PM.Leave a comment:
-
Re: Trump to win?
Such an abundance of virtue, utterly misdirected and gone to waste. Feeling a bit of nausea myself after reading that self-serving cant.
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy” (1908)
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered…it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
? G.K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy” (1908)
Leave a comment:
Leave a comment: