Thoughts On The War Between The USA And Pakistan By Winter Patriot

May 9, 20091 Comment

8 May 2009 – Winter Patriot

Scrub towers in the distance,
Riders cross the blasted moor
Against the horizon.
Fickle promises of treaty,
Fatal harbingers of war;
Futile orizons…
— Van Der Graaf Generator: “Arrow”

Signs and omens, suddenly everywhere, tell us war between the USA and Pakistan is imminent.

Chris Floyd has been doing his usual fine job in covering the recent developments and reading the tea leaves. Particularly disappointing is the flow of war propaganda from McClatchy, in the person of Jonathan Landay. McClatchy and Landay were among the few voices of skeptical reason on the national media scene during Bush’s pre-Iraq propaganda campaign. But apparently they are now on board with Obama’s pre-Pakistan propaganda campaign. Success at last! This must be the change we were hoping for, just as Obama’s marketers promised!
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Spying on Individuals and Organizations: Anglo-American Defense Giants Entrusted with “Mastering the Internet” by Tom Burghardt

May 9, 2009Leave a comment

8 May, 2009 – Global Research – Antifascist Calling

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the National Security Agency’s ‘kissin’ cousin’ across the pond, has awarded a £200m ($300m U.S.) contract for an internet panopticon.

American defense and security giant Lockheed Martin and BAE subsidiary Detica (yet another firm specializing ‘in collecting, managing and exploiting information to reveal actionable intelligence’), snagged the contract The Register and The Sunday Times revealed May 3.

According to The Register the new system, called Mastering the Internet (MTI) ‘will include thousands of deep packet inspection probes inside communications providers’ networks, as well as massive computing power at the intelligence agency’s Cheltenham base, ‘the concrete doughnut’.’

Lockheed Martin and Detica aren’t talking and have referred all inquiries on the MTI contract to GCHQ. ComputerWeekly however, reported May 6 that Detica, a firm with close ties to MI5 and MI6, ‘has data mining software that can detect links between individuals based on their contacts with sometimes widely separated organisations.’
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NATO War Games In Georgia: Threat Of New Caucasus War by Rick Rozoff

May 9, 20091 Comment

8 May, 2009 – Stop NATO – Dandelion Salad

On May 6 the Cooperative Longbow 09/Cooperative Lancer 09 US-led NATO Partnership for Peace exercises began in Georgia.

More exactly, the first half of the paired exercises, Cooperative Longbow 09, which is a command post operation conducted at Georgian military headquarters in Tbilisi. The second, Cooperative Lancer 09, is a field exercise and was scheduled to include 1,300 servicemen from 19 countries (Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Georgia, Hungary, Greece, Kazakhstan, Moldavia, Serbia, Spain, Macedonia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, and the US), including 1,089 foreign troops and 214 Georgian servicemen in exercises at the Vaziani base of the Georgian Defence Ministry near the capital. The first started on May 6; the second will run from May 17-June 1.

This is the fourth in what have become annual Cooperative Longbow/Cooperative Lancer exercises, the first having been held in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova in 2006, the following year’s in Albania and last year’s in Armenia.

The exercises are referred to by NATO and the United States as routine and no cause for concern.
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The Prospects of a New Cold War? Towards the Consolidation of the Russian-led CSTO Military Alliance By José Miguel Alonso Trabanco

May 9, 2009Leave a comment

8 May, 2009 – Global Research

“We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War, but we don’t want one” – Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev

In his 1997 book entitled The Grand Chessboard American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that if Russia ever attempted to launch its own defense pact, it would include, “at most”, Belarus and Tajikistan[1]. Twelve years later, his list turned out to be incomplete. Moreover, the attempts being made in order to enhance the Russian-led CSTO’s actual power projection capabilities and the efforts undertaken to bring the organization’s members closer together is something Brzezinski failed to anticipate and it seems that the latest developments concerning CSTO demonstrate that his triumphalism was premature.

The Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), a.k.a. The Tashkent Pact, is an institutional framework created by countries from the post-Soviet space. Its charter was signed in 2002 by the Russian Federation, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. CSTO, along with the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC) and the Russia-Belarus Union State, is one of the organizations which sponsor integration efforts in the former Soviet Union. Its creation was clearly a response to NATO’s uninterrupted expansion eastward. CSTO articles include a mutual defense clause. Nevertheless, at the time, CSTO’s goal was more political than military because the organization was basically meant to prevent its members from being incorporated into NATO provided that this security pact stipulates that no member can join any other military alliance. For years, CSTO accomplished little more than conducting military exercises. This limited role was due to the fact that, back in 2002, the Russian Federation was still trying to recover from the chaos it had to deal with during the 90’s.
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