US Military Option on Iran Is Back on the Table

From a DEBKAfile exclusive report :

Cheney stopped over in Oman Wednesday, Wed. March 19, after two days in Iraq. He will travel next to Saudi Arabia, is due in Jerusalem next Saturday and will also visit Ramallah and Turkey.

Our sources report exclusively that his talks are focusing on two aspects of the Iranian nuclear threat:

1. The Bush administration's decision to distance itself from the National Intelligence Estimate released last December. Its conclusion that Iran's nuclear arms program was shelved in 2003, which rendered America's military option superfluous, is now deemed a mistake.

2. The administration now buys British, German, French and Israeli intelligence estimates that Iran is indeed pressing forward with programs for building nuclear weapons, warheads and ballistic missiles for their delivery.

The vice president will listen closely to his hosts' ideas about joint efforts for containing Iran's aggressive expansionist thrusts across the Persian Gulf and Middle East and halting its progress towards nuclear armaments.

The vice president's choice of capitals for his tour is a pointer to the fact that the military option, off since December, may be on again. American will need the cooperation of all four - Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey - to mount a military attack on Iran.

 

A Different Perspective on Kosovo

From Driven From Kosovo! :

 

For Mr. Prlinčević, granting this interview was an act of bravery. In March 1999, before NATO began bombing Serbia, Mr. Prlinčević, then 61, was chief archivist of Kosovo. Three months later he and his family were refugees in Belgrade. As he says, they didn't have time to pack a suitcase before they had to run for their lives.

The interview was conducted two months after Mr. Prlinčević arrived in Belgrade, when the shock was still fresh. He wanted the world to know what had happened, although this involved serious risk. For one thing, he had been president of the Jewish Community in Priština; it was his responsibility to avoid any act that would prevent Jews from returning to that city or endanger Jews elsewhere in Kosovo.

It was my impression that, torn between honesty and hope, Mr. Prlinčević held back, not saying all he knew lest he infuriate the new rulers of Kosovo. Even as he told a misinformed world about NATO's actions, which made it clear that the KLA terrorists were NATO proxies, he held onto the hope that the KLA and its NATO/UN supervisors might begin to act reasonable, that things might somehow normalize. Speaking of the residents of Milana, the neighborhood where he had lived, he told me, "Many of the people who lived there are of prominent status and social position in the city." Notice that he used the present tense: "are of prominent status." In fact, at the time, they were no longer.

In November 1999, two months after the interview, I saw Mr. Prlinčević in Amsterdam, where we both had been invited to address a meeting about the reign of terror in NATO/UN occupied Kosovo. He was still devastated and he was still hoping. At the meeting, when he tried to speak about his experiences, he broke down in tears. Talking to me the next day, he commented that the new 'authorities' would of course carefully maintain the archives in Priština. I said that, regrettably, I didn't think so. I believed the KLA would destroy those archives. He was shocked. How could they do that? Surely they would need records – everyone needed records of births and deaths and marriages and ownership, and so on. Didn't they?

I said: "Cedda, the KLA just drove perhaps 300,000 people into homelessness and stole all their property including homes, farms, businesses. The last thing they want is to preserve records of ownership."

In this first interview, I think it required an intense internal struggle between emotion (his hesitation about antagonizing the KLA and NATO) and principle (his desire to tell the truth) for Mr. Prlinčević to be able to say, in Part I, that the stories of Yugoslav army atrocities were lies and, in Part II, that the terrorists marched into Priština side by side with NATO. Because of his courage we have direct testimony from the Director of Archives of Kosovo. The legal records he worked on all his adult life are, I am afraid, no more. But this record remains.

In the second interview, a year later, Čedomir Prlinčević was like a different man, in part because his state of shock had receded and in part because of something he saw in Amsterdam.

Being Jewish, Mr. Prlinčević wanted to visit the Anne Frank Museum. He came out of the museum in a rage. Someone had set up an exhibit 'updating' the Holocaust, so to speak, depicting the Serbs as today's Nazis.

This outrageous act – at once trivializing the murder of the European Jews and smearing the Serbs – convinced Mr. Prlinčević that, for the forces that had attacked Yugoslavia, nothing was off limits, and that things were not going to return to normal in Kosovo. In the second interview [2] he opened up and told me much more about what had happened in Kosovo, answering the important question: Why did many Kosovo Albanians flee to Macedonia and Albania during the 1999 NATO bombing? Were they fleeing bombs, or were they fleeing Serbs? He told me they were fleeing neither.

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by Peter Dale Scott

Excerpt from 1998 Preface

 

" ... Deep political analysis focuses on the usually ignored mechanics of accommodation. From the viewpoint of conventional political science, law enforcement and the underworld are opposed to each other, the former struggling to gain control of the latter. A deep political analysis notes that in practice these efforts at control lead to the use of criminal informants; and this practice, continued over a long period of time, turns informants into double agents with status within the police as well as the mob. The protection of informants and their crimes encourages favors, payoffs, and eventually systemic corruption. The phenomenon of "organized crime" arises: entire criminal structures that come to be tolerated by the police because of their usefulness in informing on lesser criminals. In time one may arrive at the kind of police-crime symbiosis familiar from Chicago, where the controlling hand may be more with the mob than with the police it has now corrupted.

It is of course no accident that such dirty realities are not usually talked about in classrooms. But the mechanics of accommodation are important, perhaps even more so in the area of political security, where security informants are first recruited, and eventually promoted to be double agents. The experience of the FBI and the Communist Party teaches us that such double agents tend to become increasingly important in the hierarchies of both the investigative agency and the party investigated. In the Vietnam anti-war movement, double agents were likely to become provocateurs, whether or not this was part of their official assignment. The greater the successful provocation, the more important the double agent to the agency to whom he reports. Truly successful double agents acquire their own agendas, distinguishable from those of their agency and possibly their party as well.

(This is a far from theoretical matter in this decade of high-tech terrorism. Time after time, from the fiascos of Oliver North's Middle Eastern ventures to the bombings of Pan Am 103 and the World Trade Center, we have seen how the tolerated crimes of double agents have proved disastrous to those who think they control them. I offer this as a timely argument against the proposed Anti-Terrorism Bill. By radically increasing the number of political informants and double agents in resentful and potentially violent groups, passage of this Bill would almost certainly aggravate the problem of double-agent terrorism.)

Speaking metaphorically, and a little over my head, I would suggest that deep political analysis enlarges traditional structuralist analysis to include indeterminacies analagous to those which are studied in chaos theory. A deep political system is one where the processes openly acknowledged are not always securely in control, precisely because of their accommodation to unsanctioned sources of violence, through arrangements not openly acknowledged and reviewed.

One cannot write of deep politics without discussing the resistance to it: resistance both to the general notion and to the topics where it is relevant, such as the Kennedy assassination. Just as in an earlier era people derived psychological comfort from the idea that the forces of our environment were controlled by benign or appeasible deities, so today we would like to think that the violence of the world we live in is subject to sovereign powers and laws.

In deep political analysis the nineteenth-century concept of centralized sovereignty is deconstructed to the point where in places it seems like little more than a comforting myth. A relevant example would be the city of Chicago. Years ago the late A.J. Liebling observed in the New Yorker how difficult it was to separate the power of the mob from the power of City Hall, and asked whether the powers of both were not a front for those private corporations who preferred endemic corruption to the enforcement of laws against themselves.2 Today, in an age of secret public powers dating back to World War II, the critical gaze of the New Yorker has been deflected from our society and its institutions, to heap scorn instead on the "fusion paranoia" of society's critics.

Deep Politics in the USA: the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate

And yet in this country there is now a JFK/ Deep Politics Quarterly , and even a Deep Politics Bookstore on the Internet. More than a million pages of new documents have been declassfied and released since Congress passed the JFK Records Act. We now have both the Lopez Report (see pp. 43-44 of my book) and even the document President Nixon was once denied, the CIA's IG Report of 1967 (see pp. 114, 116) on CIA-Mafia plots.3 Though I had some of the details wrong, the two reports confirm, and indeed enlarge, the picture I presented of CIA duplicities about Oswald in Mexico, and how CIA plots, if successful, would have guaranteed the mob a role in post-Castro Cuba. ... "

Brain Imaging Technology Adds to Interrogators' Arsenal

From High-tech interrogations may promote abuse :

" ... There is evidence that brain imaging technology is being used to interrogate suspected terrorists despite concerns that it may not be reliable, and that it might inadvertently promote abuse of detainees, according to a Penn State researcher. He says the risk that such technology could license further abuse of detainees remains ever present, given President Bush's March 8 veto of legislation that would have prohibited the CIA from conducting aggressive interrogations.

 

[ ... ]

 

The adoption of fMRI is not surprising given the limitations of other lie detection techniques such as a polygraph test, said Marks, whose analysis is published in a recent issue of the American Journal of Law and Medicine.

A polygraph relies on detecting accentuated signs of anxiety such as changes in skin conductance, heart rate, and respiration. But it is useless against sociopaths, and those trained to beat it. Counterintelligence experts also say the device is especially unreliable when questions and answers are translated with the help of an interpreter, as has been the case in Iraq.

Intelligence personnel believe fMRI could circumvent such limitations, and some commentators have argued that fMRI could render torture and interrogation obsolete. But Marks, who has critiqued the use of aggressive interrogation techniques in the war on terror, makes a case that "such claims are unfounded, and that the uncritical acceptance of fMRI as an interrogation tool could be potentially hazardous both to the health of the detainee and to the counterterrorism mission."


Unlike a polygraph, an fMRI uses powerful magnetic fields to detect tiny changes in blood oxygen levels in the brain. Since active neurons take up more oxygen than inactive ones, these tiny changes are believed to be signatures of cognitive processes.

Some intelligence experts believe that fMRI can be used to detect deception, or to flag when a suspect recognizes (but may not wish to admit that he recognizes) the photograph or name of a suspected terrorist. ... "

 

'12-Step Scenario' Forecasts Meltdown of U.S. Economy

Ultra-pessimist Roubini outlined his 12-step scenario for U.S. economic and financial meltdown in July 2006. In the first step to financial disaster, he cites the housing recession -- the worst in U.S. history.

According to his scenario, the U.S. economy will go from bad to worse following these steps: the spread of the subprime mortgage crisis to near prime and prime mortgages (step two), credit problems lead to a sharp increase in defaults on consumer debt such as credit-cards (step three), monoline insurers start to fail, casting doubt on their bond ratings (step four), and the commercial real estate loan market begins to meltdown (step five).

In the sixth step, a large regional or even a national bank fails, prompting the specter of bank runs and forcing the Federal Reserve to commit to bailouts. In the seventh step, banks take a hit from reckless leveraged buyouts during the credit bubble era.

In the eighth step, a huge wave of corporate defaults takes place and fear of counterparty risk looms large, deepening the credit freeze. In the ninth step, the "shadow banking system" collapses.

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