Obama targets US citizen for ‘kill or capture’

From TimesOnline.co.uk:

The Obama Administration has authorised the targeted killing of an American citizen in what is believed to be an unprecedented move in the War against Terror.

According to US media reports, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has been linked to last November’s attack on Fort Hood, Texas, and the failed Christmas day airline bomb plot, has been approved for capture or killing.

Mr Awlaki, who is in hiding in Yemen, is understood to have moved from encouraging attacks on the United States to participating in them directly, The New York Times reports.

He has been directly linked to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the US army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, and to Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a Detroit bound plane with a bomb in his underwear on Christmas Day.

American counter-terrorism officials told the newspaper that Mr Awlaki was an operative of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. He is also believed to actively recruit new members for the terror network.

Experts said that targeting him was was extremely rare, if not unprecedented. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush told The New York Times he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president.

But the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, told a House of Representatives hearing in February that such a step was possible, without naming Mr Awlaki as a possible target. “We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said. “If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

Ret. intel officer: US troops violated Rules of Engagement in Reuters shooting

I wonder if Obama is going to do anything about this, or will he follow in the Bush tradition like he has been where the illegal wars are concerned.

From Raw Story (with video):

During a Monday appearance on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show, a retired intelligence officer claimed that U.S. forces violated the military’s Rules of Engagement in events depicted by a video released by whistleblower site WikiLeaks, which allegedly shows the murder of civilians and journalists in New Baghdad, Iraq.

The Pentagon maintains that no crime was committed and no investigation will be carried out.

In the video, U.S. military personnel apparently mistook the cameras slung over the backs of two Reuters journalists for weapons when they opened fire on them and a group of people on July 12, 2007.

The video purportedly shows the deaths of Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22 and Saeed Chmagh, 40, along with six other people on a street corner. It also shows US forces firing on a minivan in which two injured children were found.

“The military did not reveal how the Reuters staff were killed, and stated that they did not know how the children were injured,” Wikileaks states.

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What War with Iran Means

From CNSNews:

“Diplomacy has failed,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told AIPAC, “Iran is on the verge of becoming nuclear and we cannot afford that.”

“We have to contemplate the final option,” said Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., “the use of force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

War is a “terrible thing,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., but “sometimes it is better to go to war than to allow the Holocaust to develop a second time.”

Graham then describes the war we Americans should fight: “If military force is ever employed, it should be done in a decisive fashion. The Iran government’s ability to wage conventional war against its neighbors and our troops in the region should not exist. They should not have one plane that can fly or one ship that can float.”

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, Neocon Central, writes, “The only questions remaining, one Washington politico tells me, are who starts it, and how it ends.”

As to who starts it, we know the answer. Teheran has not started a war in memory and is not going to launch a suicide attack on a superpower with thousands of nuclear weapons. As with Iraq in 2003, the war will be launched by the United States against a nation that did not attack us—to strip it of weapons it does not have.

Blackwater used South Park character as alias to procure US weapons

From Raw Story:

The US Army’s lax supervision was cited in a Senate investigation of controversial private security firm Blackwater, which allowed employees to use weapons without authorization in Afghanistan.

At the outset of a months-long probe, the Senate Armed Service Committee found several cases of “reckless” use of weapons by personnel from Paravant, a subsidiary of Blackwater, itself now renamed Xe Services. What’s more, it documents that the firm was so desperate to procure weapons that it even used a South Park character as an alias. Notes the Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman:

Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police. According to the committee, at the behest of the company’s Afghanistan country manager, Ricky Chambers, Blackwater on at least two occasions acquired hundreds of rifles and pistols from a U.S. military facility near Kabul called 22 Bunkers by the military and Pol-e Charki by the Afghans. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, wrote to the committee to explain that “there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers.”

On one of those occasions, in September 2008, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who worked at 22 Bunkers and is a friend of a Blackwater officer working in Afghanistan, signed over more than 200 AK-47s to an individual identified as “Eric Cartman” or possibly “Carjman” from Blackwater’s Counter Narcotics Training Unit. A Blackwater lawyer told committee staff that no one by those names has ever been employed by the company. Eric Cartman is the name of a character from Comedy Central’s popular “South Park” cartoon.

Scahill: Blackwater used shell company to defraud US government

From Raw Story:

Blackwater set up a shell company to “defraud the government” by leading it to believe it wasn’t contracting with the notorious security contractor, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill says.

“In Afghanistan, they set up this shell company, Paravant, in collaboration with mammoth war giant Raytheon, which held the prime contract” for training Afghan security forces, Scahill told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.

“And they set up this contract to try to hide the fact that the Pentagon was once again hiring Blackwater, this firm that’s been under investigation by practically every federal entity in the United States,” Scahill continued. “It’s a shell company that was used to essentially defraud the government by convincing the Army that Blackwater was not getting the contract, but this company Paravant.”

Scahill was discussing revelations at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing into Blackwater’s work in Afghanistan. Numerous allegations of wrongdoing were presented at those hearings, including a claim that employees of Blackwater’s Paravant subsidiary took more than 200 guns from a US military arsenal under a South Park character’s name — “Eric Cartman.”

Stunning Statistics About the War That Everyone Should Know

From Counterpunch.org:

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversightsubcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo[PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff,

“From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

US to ’simulate’ technically impossible attack by Iran

From Raw Story:

In order to test its missile defense technology, the United States intends to defend against a simulated attack that, according to reports on Iran’s military capabilities, is not technically possible.

Most prior tests of U.S. missile defense systems have been geared toward defending against a volley from North Korea.

Sometime in January a simulated missile will be launched from the Marshall Islands, aimed at California, but Vandenberg Air Force Base is expected to intercept it.

“Missile defense tests have been likened to hitting a bullet with a bullet,” CNN reported. “This test will be even more difficult: It will be like hitting a bullet head-on with another bullet, because any launch from Iran would have a trajectory that would require a U.S. interceptor missile hitting the target directly, [a defense official] said.”

Word of the test comes days after Iran tested its Sajjil-2 rocket, which can reportedly travel about 1,200 miles. As Iran’s most advanced ICBM, it could reach as far as Israel or southeastern Europe.

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It cannot reach the United States.

Were Iran to launch its imaginary missile at the United States, a CNN source said that a U.S. interceptor would likely be fired from Fort Greely, Alaska. It is the only site other than Vandenburg that houses the missile defense technology.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted Tuesday to allow President Obama the power to levy sanctions against Iran.

Obama Declares War On Pakistan

From Infowars.com:

Webster G. Tarpley
Infowars.com
December 14, 2009

	Obama declared all-out war on Pakistan during his December 1, 2009, West Point speech.

Obama’s West Point speech of December 1 represents far more than the obvious brutal escalation in Afghanistan — it is nothing less than a declaration of all-out war by the United States against Pakistan. This is a brand-new war, a much wider war now targeting Pakistan, a country of 160 million people armed with nuclear weapons. In the process, Afghanistan is scheduled to be broken up. This is no longer the Bush Cheney Afghan war we have known in the past. This is something immensely bigger: the attempt to destroy the Pakistani central government in Islamabad and to sink that country into a chaos of civil war, Balkanization, subdivision and general mayhem. The chosen strategy is to massively export the Afghan civil war into Pakistan and beyond, fracturing Pakistan along ethnic lines. It is an oblique war using fourth-generation or guerrilla warfare techniques to assail a country which the United States and its associates in aggression are far too weak to attack directly. In this war, the Taliban are employed as US proxies. This aggression against Pakistan is Obama’s attempt to wage the Great Game against the hub of Central Asia and Eurasia or more generally.

Scahill: Obama may be afraid of Blackwater

From Raw Story:

Despite news reports that the security contractor formerly known as Blackwater has seen its contracts dry up and its influence wane, the company continues to do brisk business in Iraq and Afghanistan — and the Obama administration may be too afraid of the firm to do anything about it, says investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill.

“You know who’s guarding Hillary Clinton in Afghanistan right now? Blackwater,” Scahill told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Tuesday night. “You know who guards members of Congress? Blackwater. They have half a billion dollars in contracts in Afghanistan right now. CIA, State Department, Defense Department. Why is President Obama keeping these guys on the payroll? There has never been a company in recent history that made the case that corporations are corrupt, evil organizations [better] than Blackwater.”

Scahill was on The Rachel Maddow Show discussing the New York Times’ revelation that senior Blackwater executives allegedly arranged for bribes of up to $1 million for Iraqi politicians in a bid to retain its contracts and silence criticism of the company in the wake of the Nissour Square massacre in 2007, in which 17 Iraqi civilians died after Blackwater guards opened fire.

Insurgents ‘have US ammo’

From News24.com:

Kabul – Television footage broadcast on Tuesday showed insurgents handling what appears to be US ammunition in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan that American forces left last month following a deadly firefight that killed eight troops.

The US military said the forces that left the area said they removed and accounted for their equipment.

Al-Jazeera broadcast video showing insurgents handling weapons, including anti-personnel mines with US markings on them. The television station reported that insurgents said they seized the weapons from two US remote outposts in Nuristan province. It was unclear when the video was filmed.