War Is A Crime .org

Location-Obama Campaign Headquarters, 130 E. Randolph, Prudential 1 Plaza, moving to the Canadian Consulate (Prudential Plaza 2 ), United Kingdom Consulate (400 N. Michigan Suite 1300), and German Consulate (676 N. Michigan, Suite 3200 )

Noon, Thursday, March 17, 2012 

Chicago, IL— On Thursday at noon, CODEPINK: Women for Peace, The World Can’t Wait, Veterans for Peace and other groups associated with the NATO protests will attempt to present letters expressing our outrage about NATO operations and our demand an end to military operations, particularly drone operations, to four NATO countries:  the United States, Canada, Germany and the UK. They will also bring visual representations of the civilians killed by NATO forces. "We are outraged by the numbers of innocents killed in NATO/US wars, and will we focus on their stories," says Debra Sweet of The World Can't Wait.  

"As NATO meets in Chicago, it is important to remind member states of NATO of the extraordinary violence of NATO and their responsibility for these civilian deaths," says retired Colonel Ann Wright.  Of the 28 NATO countries, 18 have consulates in Chicago (Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece Germany, Italy, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom). The peace activists have chosen to visit the Consulates of Canada, the UK and Germany since all three nations still have troops in Afghanistan and have been key US allies in initiating and continuing the Afghan war.

In the past ten years, NATO and US military operations have caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Both the British and US militaries have caused numerous civilian deaths by drone attack, and under President Obama, the CIA has killed over 3000 persons in the undeclared war on Pakistan, 65 persons in the undeclared war on Yemen, including the targeted assassinations of four American citizens.   Additionally, a NATO helicopter attack on a Pakistani Army border unit killed Pakistani 24 soldiers in September, 2011. 

US PRESSES AHEAD WITH ARMS SALE DESPITE ONGOING VIOLATIONS

No Investigation into Past Misuse of US-origin Helicopters, Armored Vehicles, and Rifles

Cindy Sheehan discusses the new Venezuelan Constitution as a model for reforming the U.S. Constitution in the direction of greater democratic and economic rights, as well as the politics of Hugo Chavez, and her new book, Revolution: A Love Story.  Cindy Sheehan is a leading U.S. peace actvist, a gold star mother, an author, blogger, and radio host.

Total run time: 29:00

Host: David Swanson.

Producer: David Swanson.

Engineer: Christiane Brown.

Music by Duke Ellington.

Download or get embed code from Archive.org or AudioPort or LetsTryDemocracy.

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  The Nakba: Before and After

by Stephen Lendman

May 15 marks Israel's 64th independence day. This year's Jewish calendar commemorated it on April 25. 

For Palestinians, May 15 represents 64 years of Nakba suffering. Survivor testimonies bare witness. No words adequately explain their catastrophe. An unnamed Jew said:

  Hunger Strike Aftermath

by Stephen Lendman

As they say, it's not over 'till it's over. Palestinian prisoners have been mass hunger striking since April 17. Others began earlier. Some hadn't eaten for two months or longer.

ULUDERE, Turkey—After winding along a narrow mountain ridge, a caravan of 38 men and mules paused on the Turkish-Iraqi border. Then they heard the propellers overhead. Minutes later, Turkish military aircraft dropped bombs that killed all but four of the men.

The strike in late December was meant to knock out Kurdish separatist fighters. Instead it killed civilians smuggling gasoline, a tragic blunder in Turkey's nearly three-decade campaign against the guerrillas. The killings ignited protests across the country and prompted wide-ranging official inquiries.

The civilian toll also set off alarms at the Pentagon: It was a U.S. Predator drone that ...

READ THE REST.

Watch 4 minute video.

Center for Constitutional Rights:

Washington, D.C.– Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Members of Congress from both political parties will hold a press conference in support of expedited withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan on Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at 10:00 a.m. EST.  As President Obama prepares to address the NATO summit, Members will address the growing opposition among Americans and announce the opening of a letter to be delivered to the President urging expedited withdrawal.  Seventy nine Members of the House have signed the letter, including 4 Republicans. 

WHO:              U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA)

                        U.S. Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC)

                        U.S. Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA)

U.S. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT)

U.S. Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA)

U.S. Rep. James McGovern (D-MA)

U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)

U.S. Rep. Janice Hahn (D-CA)

U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

U.S. Rep. Timothy V. Johnson (R-IL)

                        U.S. Rep. John Conyers (D-MI)

U.S. Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA)

                        U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)

                        U.S. Rep. Laura Richardson (D-CA)

WHAT:             Press Conference

WHEN:             Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at 10:00 a.m. EST

WHERE:           HVC-117, Studio B, U.S. Capitol, Washington, D.C.

###

Copy of the letter, signed by 79 Members of the House including 4 Republicans:

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC  20500

Dear President Obama:

Earlier this month you visited Afghanistan to sign a Strategic Partnership Agreement.  As you stated at Bagram Air Base, “this time of war began in Afghanistan, and this is where it will end.” The core of al Qaeda has been greatly reduced in size and ability to attack Americans. Our brave men and women in uniform have done everything that we have asked of them. With over 17,000 dead and wounded U.S. servicemen and women, and long term costs estimated at $4 trillion for the past decade of unfunded wars, the overwhelming majority of American people want to bring the war in Afghanistan to an expedited end.

While many of us would prefer an immediate full withdrawal from Afghanistan, there is broad, bipartisan consensus in Congress and across America that it is time to accelerate the transition from U.S. to full Afghan control.  We also remind you that any agreement committing U.S. troops to Afghanistan must have congressional approval to be binding.

Therefore, at the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago, we ask that you announce an accelerated transition of security responsibility to the Afghan government and security forces and the expedited withdrawal of our troops from Afghanistan as quickly as these can be safely and responsibly accomplished.

Sincerely,

Members of Congress

Tomorrow, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Europe's top human rights court based in Strasbourg, France, will hear arguments in El-Masri v. "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." Tomorrow's hearing marks the first case to come before the court against a European nation for complicity in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program.

The case was brought against Macedonia by the Open Society Justice Initiative on behalf of Khaled El-Masri. El-Masri, a German citizen, who was abducted by Macedonian authorities at a border crossing in December 2003 and held incommunicado for 23 days. He was then handed over to CIA operatives who drugged, hooded, and strip-searched him before putting him on a secret flight to Afghanistan where he was secretly held, tortured and abused for about four months, only for the U.S. government to realize that they had the wrong person. Instead of acknowledging their mistake and sending him back to Germany with an apology, CIA operatives put El-Masri on another secret flight and dumped him on a hill in Albania, leaving him to make his own way home to Germany.

READ THE REST.

By Oliver Pichardo
English 101, Research Paper

What is it about war that we like so much? Always on the news the war propaganda is heard. How is it possible that there is so much suffering in America and around the world? Who is to blame? It goes without saying that the media is supposed to tell the truth. Why are the American people so unwilling to listen to the truth? What is it about the truth that America fears?

New York, May 15, 2012 -- Stop Mass Incarceration Network --Occupy Wall Street/Stop Stop and Frisk activist Christina Gonzalez was arrested in court and sentenced to ten days in jail on Friday by Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge John H. Wilson, who charged her with "contempt of court."

The confrontation with Judge Wilson began when Ms. Gonzalez, charged with obstruction of government administration and disorderly conduct for her participation in a Brownsville Stop Stop-and-Frisk action last November, stood in the aisle to ask court clerks if a fax memo had been received indicating her attorney’s inability to be in court that day. The judge yelled at her to sit down, and then asked the court officers to remove her to the area outside the courtroom.

When her case was called about an hour later, Ms. Gonzalez attempted to reenter the courtroom, not knowing that the Judge had not intended for her to return at all.  Without warning, the Judge immediately ordered for her to be handcuffed.  She became indignant at what appeared to be an arbitrary abuse of power in the courtroom and asked another defendant to call her employer since she "was being arrested by a white racist pig."  With court still in session, Judge Wilson demanded that she apologize.  Ms. Gonzalez refused, stating that in good conscience she could not.  The Judge abruptly found her in contempt, and immediately had her taken into custody.  A bystander in the courthouse who filmed the incident was also arrested.  Ms. Gonzalez is currently serving her sentence on Rikers Island.

  US/Israeli Special Relationship

by Stephen Lendman

Strategic interests largely benefitting Israel, not shared values, are at issue. Washington doesn't provide the Jewish state more aid than all other nations combined because of historic binding ties.

  Hunger Strike Deal

by Stephen Lendman

Palestinian hunger strikers redefined courage. Mass willingness to die for justice is unprecedented. 

On May 13, they reiterated their dignity or death steadfastness. More on that below.

FromPlatoToNATO

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks - Isiah 2:4

If Monday, May 14 - the first day of anti-G8/NATO summit protests in Chicago - is any indication, a direct action street protest model of confrontational nonviolence that enhances both local campaigns and national social movements is emerging that could predict how the rest of the week will play out on the ground in the Windy City.
 

Imagine if, by next weekend, a hundred or more large affinity groups of 50-75 people each all started organizing their own pop-up demonstrations at big banks, payday loan shops, and the offices of elected officials. The city of Chicago could potentially be overwhelmed, while a disciplined commitment to confrontational nonviolence could increase the legitimacy of the protests and their message.

Monday morning, about 100 members of the national Catholic Worker movement occupied the Prudential building that houses President Obama's national campaign headquarters to protest the corporate G8/NATO agenda (for MSNBC, Chicago Tribune, and Reuters coverage, go here , here, and here. Eight people were arrested.

The demonstration was marked by prayer, song, and dance, more of a block party than a raucous rally (the only real chant heard besides antiwar blues and gospel tunes was "potato! tomato! no more NATO!"), but the christian anarchists still caught building security by surprise when they suddenly stopped their program outside the public sidewalk and quickly, efficiently, with discipline, rushed the front doors of the building, pushed past security, and resumed their "Ain't Gonna Study War No More" dance party - this time inside the lobby and second floors of the building before the private guards could react.

Demonstrators would have actually penetrated every floor of the skyscraper but the guards were forced to shut down the elevators, disrupting business inside the building for hundreds of people trying to get to work.

As bold as that action was, however, when dozens of Chicago police officers began mobilizing inside and outside, protesters maintained their nonviolent discipline, stalled for time by "mic checking" a prepared statement, and, eventually, dispersed in an orderly manner while the eight-member arrest team stayed and got busted for criminal trespass.

How the rest of the week of action plays out in large part depends on if street protests continue to grow and build momentum in advance of the nurses march on Friday, the coalition action on Sunday, and the Boeing shutdown on Monday.

But Monday showed that the G8/NATO summit protest mobilizations this week may also add power to local campaigns. Monday afternoon, more than 50 teachers and students at a southside high school were joined by more than 50 people from Occupy Chicago, the Coalition Against Corporate Higher Education, and assorted socialist groups like the Workers World Party and the International Socialist Organization.

Local immigration, climate, and housing organizations also have demonstrations planned this week, and spontaneous, or unannounced, anti-capitalist marches can take everyone by surprise.

By Yana Kunichoff, Truthout | Interview

The coming NATO summit and its protest counterpart in Chicago is full of symbolism: the stand-off between the 1 percent and the 99 percent in a city where that division is becoming ever more clear. But it's also been full of on-the-ground organizing to bring out communities of color, arguments around the role of the Democratic Party and (still ongoing) legal battles for permits to march within sight and sound of the summit.

Truthout sat down with Andy Thayer and Joe Iosbaker, two organizers who have been up to their elbows in press releases, meetings and messaging since it was announced that Chicago would be hosting the summit, to ask them why they will be protesting NATO.

Thayer was dubbed "the protest king" by NBC Chicago and his attempts to get protest permits over the years and acting as a gay rights and anti-war activist have taken him into court against the city about 18 times.

Meanwhile, Iosbaker has also dealt with legal issues related to his political action. In the fall of 2010, he was one of several anti-war activists in the Midwest whose homes were raided by the FBI on suspicion of working with groups in Colombia and the Middle East.

Together, they've placed themselves in the thick of organizing against the coming NATO summits in Chicago. Truthout sat down with them after one of their organizing meetings for CANG8, a coalition of groups and individuals against the summit. In this conversation, the organizers discuss how NATO has impacted organizing in Chicago, why the left is abandoning the Democrats and what Chicago's 1 percent just didn't see coming.

Yana Kunichoff: Why are you protesting the NATO summits?

Andy Thayer: NATO is, in the words of Dr. King, the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today and that to me is the first thing that you have to bear in mind with NATO. It's NATO's war in Afghanistan, the longest ever war in American history and it is NATO countries that are doing the done strikes in Yemen which have now reached the same awful level as in Pakistan. NATO is responsible for 70% of world military expenditure. Any number of other issues that we might be involved in, or other people might be involved in, are directly impacted by that. I mean, we live in a city that has had half of its mental health clinics closed. We live in a city that has had its public transit system reduced a couple of years ago. We live in a city where the student-teacher ratios are not what they should be, where there is a $700 million budget deficit looming for 2013 just in the Department of Education here. And so all of these issues that are seemingly disparate are very much connected with NATO.

I think this is why we have been very successful in getting people from other movements involved in this protests against NATO and its wars because, for example, when Occupy first started out it was dealing very narrowly with economic issues. But you can't have a situation when homes are foreclosed and expect to deal with it when you have 60% of the federal budget going to military.

The good thing about the protest about NATO is that it's finally bringing together "separate movements." Back in the 60's and early 70's, all these movements were considered part and parcel of one general struggle of the 99% against the 1%. And I'm really happy to see Palestinian activists working with environmentalist working with LGBTQ folks. If we're going to just talk about why to protest against NATO we could be here all day.

Joe Iosbaker: I agree with everything that Andy said. My general view of NATO is that NATO is an extension of U.S. foreign policy. You know, we live in the heart of an Empire. I remember when September 11 happened and there were so many people in this country who were shocked that there was anger at America from countries that had suffered either our direct rule or allies of ours, like you know, Israel's occupation of Palestine. The United States, without NATO originally although they now are involved in it, went into Iraq where over the course of a decade, over a million Iraqis lost their lives directly as a result of the war and occupation. The U.S. and NATO have attacked Libya, we are still threatening Syria, we have bombed Somalia in addition to Yemen and Pakistan, we have special forces inside of Syria ... We have, I've lost count, 40 or 50 or 60 [military] bases. We have troops in Africa for the time ever, in Uganda, and we are threatening several other countries in Central Africa. And that's just what we have done in the last decade.

If you go back to the 1960's and 50's or before the Unites States has had one intervention and bloody war or another against the people of the poor countries of the world for over a century. You ask why do we protest NATO, well those of us who've realized this, we have a responsibility to speak out. That NATO and the G8; who most people in Chicago have never even heard of, have now become topics of dinner table conversations means we have an opportunity and it's thrilling to be organizing the coalition that we have. That includes community groups, that includes, you know, anti-war groups, that includes Occupy, that includes the unions. It's a tremendous opportunity, it's a historic opportunity. It's going to be a historic protest.

READ THE REST AT TRUTHOUT.

1) How many US military personnel does the DOD estimate were raped or
assaulted in 2010?
1) 0
2) 5
3) 76
4) 113
5) 15,790

2) Democracy supposes who should rule?
1) Wall St.
2) Pentagon
3) Federal Reserve
4) White House
5) The People

3) What word does not appear in the US Constitution?
1) Justice
2) Tranquility
3) Welfare
4) Liberty
5) Democracy

4) Of the 68,379 US veterans who had at least one VA outpatient visit
related to military sexual trauma in 2010, what percent were men?
1) 3%
2) 7%
3) 18%
4) 26%
5) 40%

5) The US Conference of Catholic Bishops is investigating:
1) priests' relationships with women
2) bishops who hid pedophile priests
3) the pope's history as a Hitler Youth
4) papal infallibility
5) the girl scouts

6) What US military service was implicated in the Secret Service's
recent prostitute scandal?
1) Army
2) Navy
3) Air Force
4) Marines
5) All of the above

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein is a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. She voted for the Patriot Act and has voted for it again every time its reauthorization has come up. Likewise, she has consistently voted against requiring FISA court warrants before the government wiretaps Americans at home or abroad.

So it should come as no surprise that she favors TSA procedures.

By Dave Zirin

As many as 48,000 security forces. 13,500 troops. Surface to air missiles stationed on top of residential apartment buildings. A sonic weapon that disperses crowds by creating "head splitting pain." Unmanned drones peering down from the skies. A safe-zone, cordoned off by an 11 mile, electrified fence, ringed with trained agents and 55 teams of attack dogs.

Reviewed by David M. Kinchen

http://www.huntingtonnews.net/31693

Lawrence S. Wittner is the author of scholarly works on the peace movement and nuclear disarmament but, as he recounts in his memoir "Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual" (University of Tennessee Press, 288 pages, $29.95) he was denied tenure at Vassar University in the 1960s because of his activism. There could have been other reasons, including anti-Semitism toward a secular Jew from Brooklyn at a school that educated a goodly portion of the nation's WASP American princesses.

In a lively departure from his scholarly works, Wittner tells the story of a man who combined teaching and activism -- an often toxic combination in the eyes of university administrators. I first became aware of Wittner when my friend and fellow Midwesterner Tom Hastings of the PeaceVoice program at Portland State University, Portland, OR, sent me commentaries by Wittner. I was delighted to edit these op-eds and see them through publication in www.huntingtonnews.net. While I don't always agree with Wittner's views -- I don't think it's the job of an editor to always agree with contributors -- I sensed that his contributions enriched our news magazine site.

A middle class kid from Brooklyn and later Long Island, Wittner rejected his mother's advice to attend nearby Brooklyn College. Instead, he opted for the prestigious Ivy League Columbia College in Manhattan, the alma mater (when it was called Kings College) of Alexander Hamilton, where he switched his major from English to history. Despite a lifelong stammering problem, he blossomed at Columbia, making friends that lasted a lifetime and learning that he was destined for a life in academia.

You'd never know it from watching television, but there are many thousands of people in the United States who take peace, justice, environmental protection, and government of the people so seriously that they don't censor themselves whenever the president is a Democrat.

While many others are still debating whether it would be appropriate to criticize or protest President Obama after a mere three and a half years of disaster, the people I have in mind have been openly and honestly resisting the latest Wall Street war monger since before he was elected.

Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank have collected 56 essays from prior to, from early on in, and from quite recently during the Obama presidency.  The collection, just published as Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, has a consistent approach to its topic.  The authors, including Kevin Alexander Gray, Jeremy Scahill, Chris Floyd, Sibel Edmonds, Franklin Spinney, Kathy Kelly, Marjorie Cohn, Chase Madar, Michael Hudson, Medea Benjamin, Charles Davis, Ray McGovern, Dave Lindorff, Bill Quigley, Tariq Ali, Andy Worthington, Linn Washington, Jr., and many more, don't agree on everything.  A few try to urge serious progressive plans on Obama that they would never have proposed that Bush champion, not even rhetorically, not even for laughs.  The book is not organized by topic; it's a random, if chronological, ride through a catalog of catastrophes.  But it's united by the theme of horrendously bad government in the age of Obama.  It ignores the mythology and treats Obama based on his actual performance.

Reducing the charges against Obama developed in detail in this book to a Declaration of Independence-like list of grievances might look something like this:

Obama has taken massive funding from Wall Street, appointed Wall Streeters to top positions, and followed their lead, to the benefit of banksters and the detriment of the rest of us.  Obama, despite promises the contrary, has put lobbyists in positions of power in his administration.  Senator Obama's corporatist vote for the Class Action Fairness Act was in line with the rest of his performance as senator and later president. 

Obama has taken massive funding from war profiteers and worked in their interest, empowering a collection of war hawks from the George W. Bush and Bill Clinton eras, and including no opponent of militarism in any high office.

Obama abandoned the people of Gaza to their fate beneath Israeli bombs.

Obama bailed out AIG, but not you or me.

Obama delayed de-escalation in Iraq and tried every way he could to avoid complete withdrawal.

Obama has expanded secrecy, sought retribution against whistleblowers, expanded warrentless spying, protected confessed torturers, revived military commissions, and expanded the military.

Obama has made anti-environmentalist corporate tools the heads of the Departments of the Interior and Agriculture. 

Obama's administration facilitated and accepted a military coup in Honduras.

Obama has continued and expanded upon aggressively inhumane immigration policies.

Obama championed corporate health coverage over Medicare for All.

Obama tripled the size of the war on Afghanistan.

Obama has championed nuclear power.

Obama has backed murderers in Colombia and put U.S. troops into that country in the interests of big oil.

Obama has dramatically escalated drone killings, developing a new type of war.

Obama has continued pointless killing in Afghanistan on the basis of false pretenses.

Obama has appointed a deeply flawed candidate to the Supreme Court.

Obama has expanded the weaponization and the use of nuclear power in space.

Obama facilitated the kind of drilling that created the BP oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, and then sought to cover up the extent of the damage.

Obama has kept tax breaks for billionaires in place, persuading his followers to continue calling them "the Bush Tax Cuts." 

Obama has claimed the power to torture and to "rendition" prisoners and kidnap victims to other countries that torture.

Obama has promoted corporate culture and CEO heroes, while failing to promote nonprofit groups -- a fantasy that contributing author Ralph Nader proposes for Obama while never having proposed it for Bush.

Obama has pushed deregulation as a solution to the problems caused by deregulation.

Obama has served Israel at the expense of human rights, peace, and democracy.

Obama has gone around Congress and courts to approve of Monsanto's GMOs.

Obama has tortured Bradley Manning.

Obama has pushed U.S. weapons sales on foreign nations.

Obama has punished Iranians with sanctions while threatening war. 

Obama has expanded nuclear weapons spending.

Obama has worked largely against the interests of organized labor. 

Obama has sabotaged efforts to protect the earth's climate. 

Obama has thrown Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block.

Obama has extended the worst parts of the PATRIOT Act, plus secret parts we haven't seen yet but which are somehow nonetheless "law."

Obama has militarized police forces, expanded wiretaps, prosecuted Muslims for speech, raided activists' homes, preemptively detained journalists, and supported the prison industrial complex and the widespread use of solitary confinement.

Obama has launched a fraudulent war on Libya as a "humanitarian" effort, while aiding human rights abuses in Bahrain, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. 

Obama has abandoned his effort to close Guantanamo, which was only ever -- in reality -- an effort to move one of the United States' lawless concentration camps to Illinois from Cuba. 

Obama chose to pursue an insufficient economic stimulus bill, not to mention increasing economically damaging military spending each year thus far. 

Obama has continued the "war on drugs." 

And Obama has shut down activism in this country by appearing to be what he is not and by virtue of the malady that causes millions of people to believe that self-governance consists of cheering for one team in a sporting competition.

St. Clair and Frank describe Obama as "so innately conflict-averse that even when pummeled with racist slurs he wouldn't punch back."  But Obama does not appear to try to minimize conflict across the board.  He avoids conflict with those on the right -- and often there is little basis for, or value in, supposing that his mental state is one of surrender as opposed to agreement. 

There are two things that Obama is able to count on.  First, no matter how seriously he attacks the interests of ordinary people, major liberal groups will support him.  Second, no matter how much he supports the agenda of the right, major rightwing groups will attack him while demanding more.  These two states of affairs feed each other.  Attacks on Obama from the right are absolutely essential to generating his liberal support.  Obama is the Not-Romney candidate.  And that liberal support helps produce attacks from the right.  Hopeless could help some to break out of this cycle of guilt or innocence by association.

I'll leave you with a slightly modified verse from Paul Simon:

Hopeless, hopeless
Moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake
We are hopeless, we are hopeless
The moonlight sleeping on a midnight lake

Somebody say ih hih ih hih ih
Somebody sing hello, hello, hello
Somebody say ih hih ih hih ih
Somebody cry why, why, why?

By Yousaf Butt, The National Interest

A report by the Pentagon's own Defense Science Board (DSB) has poured cold water on U.S. missile-defense plans. It basically backs up what independent scientists and engineers have been saying for decades: a dedicated adversary easily could defeat the planned system by using simple decoy warheads and other countermeasures. So while missile defense will create incentives for U.S. adversaries and competitors to up their ballistic-missile stockpiles, it won't provide any combat capability to counteract these enlarged arsenals.

The simplest countermeasures to the planned missile defense are cheap inflatable balloons. Because the missile-defense interceptors try to strike ICBM warheads in the vacuum of space, any such balloons and the warhead would travel together, making it impossible to tell the decoys from the real thing. An enemy bent on delivering a nuclear payload to the United States could inflate many such balloons nearby the warhead and overwhelm the defense system by swamping it with fake signals.

The DSB report says that “the importance of achieving reliable . . . discrimination [between the warhead and decoys] cannot be overemphasized.” It underlined that missile defense is “predicated on the ability to discriminate” real warheads from other targets, “such as rocket bodies, miscellaneous hardware, and intentional countermeasures.” One way around this challenge is to attempt to intercept the missile before it releases the warhead and decoys. But intercepting missiles in their boost phase, while the rocket booster is still firing, is “currently not feasible,” according to the DSB.

There is a short interval between the time the missile stops burning and when the payload is released, assumed to be about one hundred seconds by the DSB. But, again, intercepting the missile in this window “requires Herculean effort and is not realistically achievable, even under the most optimistic set of deployment, sensor capability, and missile technology assumptions.” The main problem the DSB found is that missile-defense interceptors would not be able to reach the target quickly enough: “in most cases 100 seconds is too late” to prevent the release of decoys. And if “the defense should find itself in a situation where it is shooting at missile junk or decoys, the impact on the regional interceptor inventory would be dramatic and devastating.” In short, the interceptor inventory would be exhausted in chasing decoy warheads.

The latest tests of both the ground-based and sea-based missile-defense systems have failed—and these are rigged tests, where the intercept team knows the timing and trajectory of the incoming missile, and the missile has no decoys. There are no such luxuries in the real world, where adversaries launch surprise attacks and use countermeasures and decoys. And on the very few occasions that the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) has tested countermeasures, even these carefully rigged tests have never succeeded. The sea-based missile-defense system also has never been tested in really rough sea conditions and is known to be unreliable.

How did such an untested and unworkable technology make it so far in the DoD procurement process? Another recent government report, this one from the GAO, explains that instead of flying before buying, the MDA has been doing the exact opposite. Its cart-before-the-horse methodology has resulted in “unexpected cost increases, schedule delays, test problems, and performance shortfalls.”

All told, the missile-defense program has cost more than the entire Apollo program without providing any credible combat capability against enemy ballistic missiles hosting simple countermeasures.

  FBI Wants Greater Surveillance Powers

by Stephen Lendman

FBI Director Robert Mueller wants Congress to enact greater surveillance powers following the false flag underwear bomb plot blamed on Al Qaeda.