A proposed $60 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, one of the largest-ever U.S. weapons sales, marks the consolidation of America as the kingdom’s main arms supplier after years of strain following 9/11.
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Islamophobia | Georgia | Iran
• READ: Fire and Gunshots at Tennessee Mosque Site Called ‘Terrorism’: On Sunday, one day after a fire at the site of a planned Islamic center and mosque in the Nashville suburb of Murfreesboro, Muslim community members reported hearing gunshots as they inspected the damage. Saleh Sbenaty, an engineering professor at Middle Tennessee State University who is on the the Islamic center’s planning committee, told The Daily News Journal of Murfreesboro that nine shots, in two volleys, were fired near the property while he and female family members looked at construction equipment burned in the fire. Mr. Sbenaty, who has lived in Tennessee for three decades, said, “It was nothing like a hunting rifle.” He added: “We hope for the best, obviously, but this isn’t hunting land. There’s plenty of houses around here…. To say we’re nervous is a huge understatement. It’s terrorism.”
• READ: Putin: America is Rearming Georgia: Tbilisi: Although Washington has an intention to improve relations with Moscow, the U.S. continues “rearming Georgia”, which is not in line with the reset policy, Russia’s PM Vladimir Putin said in an interview with Russian daily Kommersant. “I want to believe in reset [with the U.S.] very much. And I want it [reset] very much,” he said in the interview published on August 30. “I see that the intention of the current administration in the United States to improve relations with Russia is clearly traced. But there are other issues as well. For example, further rearmament of Georgia is underway. Why? That’s real; we see that. There would have been no aggression and blood if not for the rearmament of Georgia two years ago; we had been telling this to our partners, including to our European friends; and everyone kept silence; and how did it all end? It led up to the war. This rearmament continues today,” Putin said. He also said that a missile defense shield in Europe still remained a problem for the reset policy.
• READ: Iran bank assets withdrawn from Europe: central bank chief: Iran’s central bank chief said on Friday that Tehran has withdrawn the assets held by its banks in Europe to escape the latest round of international economic sanctions over its nuclear drive.
It has been of one of Europe’s worst nightmares: traffickers obtaining highly-radioactive materials on the loose in the former Soviet Union with the help of corrupt officials and passing them on to rogue groups looking to make a dirty bomb.
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Pratap Chatterjee, Tomdispatch.com
“Find, fix, finish, and follow-up” is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these “manhunting” operations and the units assigned to them “capture/kill” teams.
Whatever terminology you choose, the details of dozens of their specific operations — and how they regularly went badly wrong — have been revealed for the first time in the mass of secret U.S. military and intelligence documents published by the website Wikileaks in July to a storm of news coverage and official protest. Representing a form of U.S. covert warfare now on the rise, these teams regularly make more enemies than friends and undermine any goodwill created by U.S. reconstruction projects.
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F.D.Brightly
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Teabaggers | Canada: CSE | China | Iraq and Responsibility
• READ: Tea Party questionnaire reveals obsession with homosexuality: The Guardian blog adds, “There’s much to discuss with these questions, obviously. First, there’s the ordering of the questions in terms of their presumed priority. Second, there’s the, what would appear to be, obsession with homosexuality.”
• READ: We don’t peek into emails or eavesdrop on Canadians: Spy agency: A spokesman for this country’s ultrasecret electronic-spy agency, Communications Security Establishment, said Monday that the agency is not in the business of prying into Canadians’ private communications — and that if they do pick up emails or cellphone chats, it’s “unintentional.”…CSE spokesman Adrian Simpson said Monday that the agency only spies on the electronic communication of foreign targets — non-Canadians living outside of Canada. He said that the only way the agency would be able to pick up the communications of a Canadian is if that foreign entity corresponded with a Canadian. “We are prohibited by law from directing our activities at Canadians or any person in Canada,” Simpson said.
• READ: China’s Secret Satellite Rendezvous ‘Suggestive of a Military Program’: Earlier this month, two Chinese satellites met up in orbit. Depending on who you believe, it’s either a sign of China’s increasingly-sophisticated space program — or a sign of its increasingly-sophisticated space warfare program. A well-regarded Russian space watcher was the first to note that the two satellites, newly-launched SJ-12 and two-year-old SJ-06F, had performed maneuvers indicating a cutting edge procedure called non-cooperative robotic rendezvous. A loose network of amateur space spectators and astronomers soon congregated online, and confirmed that the sats had, indeed, converged. This kind of rendezvous can have extremely useful, and benign, applications: removing space debris, refueling satellites or repairing craft in orbit. But the military apps are massive, and include up-close inspection of foreign satellites, espionage — and the infliction of some serious damage to adversarial space infrastructure. In other words, orbital warfare that, given just how reliant we are on satellite technology, would have widespread consequences on the ground.
• READ: The “nobody-could-have-known” excuse and Iraq: The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures. The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the “nobody-could-have-known” excuse. Each time something awful occurs — the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration — one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they “could have known” what was to happen: “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile,” Condoleezza Rice infamously said on May 16, 2002, despite multiple FBI and intelligence documents warning of exactly that. One finds identical excuses for each contemporary American disaster. Robert Gibbs just invoked the same false excuse: that “nobody” knew the depth of the financial and unemployment crisis early last year.