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Deserting Libya: The Rhetoric of British Foreign Policy

Tuesday September 29, 2015

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If you care to read the British Government’s official advice to potential or actual visitors to Libya, which as at 26th September, 2015 is “Still Current”; you will find the following bleak message:
Latest update: Summary – intense fighting continues in Benghazi, Sirte, Darnah and parts of southern Libya; the situation remains dangerous throughout the country.
More specifically the grim picture painted by the Foreign Office continues as follows:
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) advise against all travel to Libya due to the ongoing fighting, threat of terrorist attacks and kidnap against foreigners (including from ISIL-affiliated extremists), and a dangerous security situation throughout the country.

British nationals still in Libya are strongly urged to leave immediately by commercial means. The British Embassy in Tripoli has temporarily closed, and is unable to provide consular assistance.

There is a high threat from terrorism. There have been a number of attacks and threats against westerners, western interests and symbolic targets throughout Libya. ISIL-affiliated groups have stated an intention to target foreigners. There is clear evidence that groups within Libya have both the intent and capability to carry out kidnappings and are specifically targeting foreign nationals.
The advice goes on with similar warnings regarding the high risk of kidnapping, of car bombs and heavy fighting in residential areas of Benghazi and elsewhere.
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‘Minority Report’ Is 40 Years Ahead of Schedule: The Fictional World Has Become Reality

Monday September 28, 2015

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We are a scant 40 years away from the futuristic world that science fiction author Philip K. Dick envisioned for Minority Report in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.

Unfortunately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we may have already arrived at the year 2054.

Increasingly, the world around us resembles Dick’s dystopian police state in which the police combine widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining and precognitive technology to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage. In other words, the government’s goal is to prevent crimes before they happen: precrime.

For John Anderton (played by Tom Cruise), Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in Washington, DC, the technology that he relies on for his predictive policing proves to be fallible, identifying him as the next would-be criminal and targeting him for preemptive measures. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.
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Intel Analysts: US Fixing Facts Around Policy

Monday September 28, 2015

More than 50 intelligence officers from the Defense Intelligence Agency have formally complained that their work is being altered before it is sent to senior Obama Administration officials -- and even to the president himself. Concerns over the effectiveness of the year-long new US war in Iraq and Syria are being covered up and a more rosy picture is being painted. The media has largely ignored this replay of the kind of lies fed the run-up to the 2002 Iraq war and, as could be expected, Congress is totally uninterested. Today's Liberty Report is not uninterested, however....
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Congress and the Fed Refuse to Learn From Their Mistakes

Sunday September 27, 2015

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This month marks the seventh anniversary of the bursting of the housing bubble and the subsequent economic meltdown. The mood in Congress following the meltdown resembled the panicked atmosphere that followed the September 11th attacks. As was the case after September 11th, Congress rushed to pass hastily written legislation that, instead of dealing with the real causes of the crisis, simply gave the government more power.

Just as few understood the role our interventionist foreign policy played in the September 11th attacks, few in Congress understood that the 2008 meltdown was caused by the Federal Reserve and Congress, not by unregulated capitalism. Not surprising to anyone familiar with economic history, the story of the 2008 meltdown starts with the bursting of the Fed-created tech bubble.
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Catalonia Vote - Will They Secede?

Saturday September 26, 2015

Voters in Spain's Catalonia region will go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new parliament. Parties favoring secession from the Spanish state appear poised to make significant gains or even end up in majority. EU officialdom is furious at the move, and both German and British leaders have openly condemned any secessionist impulse among Catalans. Why so much fear over self-determination, which is after all a basic human right? What does it mean if an individual or even a group cannot determine for itself with whom or what it prefers to associate? Today's special edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report takes a look at tomorrow's vote with an eye on real human rights...
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The Harsh Lessons of History: Faux Reports of Progress Against IS

Friday September 25, 2015

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Allegations that American military analysts may have “cooked the books” to skew intelligence assessments about the campaign against Islamic State (IS), providing a more optimistic account of progress, are a sign of bad things to come.

Bad intel leads to bad decisions. Bad intel created purposefully suggests a war that is being lost, with the people in charge that loathe to admit it even as they continue to stumble forward, ever-more blind. And if that sounds like America’s previous war in Iraq, or its earlier one in Vietnam, you are not wrong.

A Pentagon Inspector General’s investigation into allegations of overly optimistic intelligence reporting, first reported in the New York Times, began after at least one Defence Intelligence Agency analyst claimed officials overseeing the war against Islamic State were improperly reworking the assessments prepared for senior policy makers. The focus is on whether military officials changed the conclusions of draft intelligence assessments during a review process and then passed them on.
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Saving Syria

Friday September 25, 2015

Are the Russians coming to Syria to save the day? After more than a year of US bombing, ISIS seems to not have suffered much. Meanwhile the US maintains that it officially still demands regime change in Syria, even as US Secretary of State John Kerry hinted last week that it might accept Assad in power as part of a transitional government. In Washington's corridors of foreign policy power, the neocons and left-interventionist political appointees are in full battle with more seasoned diplomats. The Obama Administration seems at war with itself. RPI Director Daniel McAdams joins RT's Crosstalk to discuss latest developments in Syria...
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Good News: Gallup Finds Half of US Fears Government

Thursday September 24, 2015

What is the greatest threat to the American people? In a new poll taken by the Gallup organization we learn that half the country sees its own government as most threatening to life and liberty. Another poll taken last year showed strong libertarian leanings among the young people of this country. Might this signal a turning point for the warfare-welfare state? Today's Liberty Report takes a look at the trends...
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The Rape of Afghanistan

Wednesday September 23, 2015

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The rape of young boys in Afghanistan by our “allies” is getting a lot of press attention these days, provoked by the revelation that US military personnel who tried to stop it are being disciplined for interfering. Two US officers apparently beat up one of our pet warlords, who insisted on keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave: this kind of rough justice got one relieved of his command and the other is being forced to retire.

The US military denies ordering its personnel to look the other way, but this is a lie: why else would they be discharging one of the Special Forces soldiers who beat up that Afghan commander? If he didn’t disobey orders to ignore the practice then on what grounds are they forcing him out?

Writing in National Review, Mark Krikorian fulminates:
“While punishing our soldiers for roughing up pedophile rapists is outrageous, the general policy that “allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law” (in the words of an Army spokesman) is unavoidable given our policy of semi-colonization. If it were up to me, we’d wash our hands of Afghanistan, making clear that if the Taliban (or whichever armed gang manages to take power) makes the mistake of again serving as a safe haven and training ground for people planning to attack the United States, we’ll come back and kill a bunch of them again. But that until that day, and that day may never come, they’re on their own and are free to go on raping their children, if that’s what their primitive and barbarous culture calls for.”
Krikorian goes on to pose another alternative: go all out and “simply colonize the place.” While he acknowledges this isn’t going to happen – after all, “that’s never worked out well in Afghanistan” – “it would have the advantage of allowing us to impose our (objectively superior) standards on them.”
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Iran's Parchin Nuclear Myth Begins to Unravel

Wednesday September 23, 2015

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For well over three years, heavy doses of propaganda have created a myth about a purported steel cylinder for testing explosives located on a site at Iran’s Parchin military testing reservation. Iran was refusing to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect the site while it sought to hide its past nuclear weapons-related work, according to that storyline.

Now Iran has agreed to allow the IAEA to visit the site at Parchin and environmental samples have already been collected at the site. However, the politically charged tale of the bomb test chamber of Parchin is beginning to unravel. IAEA director general Yukiya Amano entered the building in which the explosives chamber had supposedly been located on Monday and announced afterward that he found “no equipment” in the building.

That is surely a major story, in light of how much has been made of the alleged presence of the chamber at that location. But you may have missed that news, unless you happened to read the story by Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg Business News, who was the only journalist for a significant news outlet who chose to lead with the story in his coverage of Amano’s Monday visit.

The rest of the news media buried that fact far down in their stories, focusing almost entirely on the fact that the Iranians have been allowed to physically gather environmental samples at the site under the gaze of IAEA technicians rather than IAEA inspectors carrying out that function.
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