Political Correctness Causing US Generals to Ignore Islam as Cause of Increased Afghan Casualties?

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The U.S. Army command recently announced that only 25% of the lethal “green on blue” Afghan military insider attacks against U.S. and N.A.T.O. troops were attributable to the Taliban. Mere “personal grievances,” we are told, account for the other 75% of attacks committed by our Afghan allies.

How could it be that so many Muslims in the Afghan National Army (A.N.A.) have become murderously enraged over personal disagreements and accidental insults? What has caused this upsurge in murders that has killed at least 40 U.S. troops since January 2012?

The answer is buried deep in a May 12, 2011 unclassified report by a U.S. Army “Red Team.” This report, titled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility,” contains a litany of bureaucratic puffery that tries to explain away these acts of murder committed against the U.S. and N.A.T.O. troops by their A.N.A. “allies.”

During a recent press conference, General John R. Allen, Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan, claimed that Ramadan fasting, combined with operational tempo during the summer heat, were causing the current spate of killings of his own troops by Muslim A.N.A. soldiers.

That doesn’t seem right. The U.S. Army has been in Afghanistan for 11 years, and the number of attacks has climbed enormously in the last year.

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Israel hit Syrian nuke plant in 2007 after Bush refused to do so

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Former prime minister Ehud Olmert ordered the 2007 strike on a Syrian nuclear reactor immediately after former US president George W. Bush informed him that the Americans would not attack the facility, according to a Channel 10 report aired on Sunday evening.

Bush’s deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams was present when the president called Olmert on September 6, 2007 and made clear that the US would not take action, and that then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would fly to Israel to hold a joint press conference with Olmert to alert the international community of the secret reactor. The US had decided to handle the Syrian threat via diplomacy.

Olmert responded to Bush that the secretary’s visit would not be necessary and that Israel would deal with the nuclear facility on its own.

“If you’re not going to act against the reactor then we are,” Abrams quoted Olmert as saying during the teleconference. “You don’t want to know where or when,” the former prime minister reportedly added.

The Israelis were convinced that time was fairly short, and that they had to strike the reactor — built by the Syrians with extensive input from the North Koreans — before it went live, the TV report said.

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New Chinese nuclear missile will be able to penetrate US defenses

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It might be time to sweep the cobwebs out of that old nuclear bunker at the bottom of the garden after reports in state-run Chinese media confirmed that the People’s Liberation Army is actively developing an intercontinental missile capable of penetrating US defences.

News first emerged of the planned ‘super missile’ from defence industry bible Jane’s Defence Weekly last week, according to South China Morning Post.

It apparently claimed that a Dongfeng-41 (DF-41) intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), had been fired in testing last month by the PLA’s Second Artillery Corps.

This third-generation missile, US military sources told Jane’s, contain multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) – effectively multiple warheads – meaning they would be almost impossible for current US defences to take down.

A report in Global Times, the populist sister title of Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, apparently confirmed such a rocket was in development, quoting local military expert Wei Guoan.

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European far right flirts with Norwegian mass murderer Breivik’s ideas

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Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik may have failed to ignite a race war with Muslims, but he succeeded in stoking anxieties about the stability of Europe’s increasingly diverse societies.

Though his talk of an international underground of killers – latter-day Crusaders he called the Knights Templar – seemed to be mere fantasy, and while his methods place him far beyond the pale of mainstream politics, many of his beliefs are to be found within the fold of anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant populists.

“His ideological `manifesto’ is a distilled representation of a cultural crisis that pervades the European continent and finds expression in an increasingly xenophobic populism,” Kirsten Simonsen, a professor at Denmark’s Roskilde University, wrote in “Bloodlands”, a 2012 series of essays about Breivik.

Some notions – that Europe and its indigenous cultures are being weakened by immigration and multiculturalism – have been helping reshape the continent’s right-wing politics for years.

These beliefs occasionally find an echo on the margins of centre-right parties, among politicians seeking support from communities plagued by rising unemployment.

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Germany cooperated with Black September after Munich Massacre

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German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed Sunday that German authorities cooperated with Black September, a Palestinian terror group, after it had carried out an attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Germany, it was reported, did so for fear of additional attacks on its soil.

According to the report, the German government held secret contacts with the planners of the Munich Massacre. Several months after the attack, Germany’s then foreign minister, Walter Scheel, met secretly with several Black September members to “rebuild trust.”

Berlin demanded that the terror group not carry out any more terrorist attacks on German soil. The Palestinians, on their part, demanded Berlin’s support of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

According to Der Spiegel, Germany suspended its criminal investigation against the massacre’s perpetrators as the talks progressed. Several weeks later, the deputy foreign minister announced that the investigation had been concluded.

In 1977, French police asked Germany whether it wanted it to extradite Abu Daoud, one of the planners of the attack, but Germany decided not to answer the question.

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Massive Cyberattack: Act 1 of Israeli Strike on Iran?

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Talk in Israel of a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities has reached a fever pitch. Last week brought the news of an alleged “war plan” leaked to a blogger. This week, a well-informed military correspondent in Jerusalem reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “determined” to attack Iran before the U.S. election. Two weeks ago, an outgoing government minister told Israelis to prepare for a war that would last 30 days.

David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has his own contacts in the Israeli leadership. He says there’s more going on here than just war talk. “I think there’s a 50-50 chance before the U.S. election of an Israeli strike,” he says.

The alleged war plan that was recently leaked said an Israeli strike would begin with an unprecedented cyberattack designed to paralyze the Iranian regime and blind it to what was happening on its territory. The Internet, telephones, radio and television transmissions, the electrical grid would all be taken out.

That’s an attention grabber: The world has never seen a cyberattack remotely that dramatic.

John Bumgarner, chief technology officer at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, says the plan does make sense, at least in theory: “Israel has very good cybercapabilities. Some of the best computer scientists in the world come out of the Israeli military and intelligence branch,” he says. “Some of the best cybertools that are currently used in the world come out of Israel.”

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Jury Awards $1 Billion to Apple in Samsung Patent Case

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The nine jurors in the case, who faced the daunting task of answering more than 700 questions on sometimes highly technical matters, returned a verdict after just three days of deliberations at a federal courthouse in San Jose, Calif. They found that Samsung infringed on a series of Apple’s patents on mobile devices, awarding Apple more than $1 billion in damages.

That is not a big financial blow to Samsung, one of the world’s largest electronics companies. But the decision could essentially force it and other smartphone makers to redesign their products to be less Apple-like, or risk further legal defeats.

Consumers could end up with some welcome diversity in phone and tablet design — or they may be stuck with devices that manufacturers have clumsily revamped to avoid crossing Apple.

Samsung said it would ask the court to overturn the verdict and, if that is unsuccessful, appeal to a higher court.

The jury found that various Samsung products violated Apple patents covering things like the “bounce back” effect when a user scrolls to the end of a list on the iPhone and iPad, and the pinch-to-zoom gesture that users make when they want to magnify an image. Samsung was also found to have infringed Apple patents covering the physical design of the iPhone.

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North Korean jamming of GPS shows critical system’s weakness

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U.S. and South Korean military commanders will be on the lookout for North Korean efforts to jam GPS signals as they take part in exercises on the divided peninsula this week and next.

North Korea repeatedly has jammed GPS signals in South Korea, which has “very serious implications” because U.S. and South Korean military system rely on the navigation system, said Bruce Bennett, a North Korea scholar for the California think tank Rand Corp.

The jamming also underscores the vulnerability of a satellite-based tool on which civilian systems from car navigation to air traffic control rely upon.

North Koreans have used Russian-made, truck-mounted jamming gear near the border to disrupt low-power GPS signals in large swaths of South Korea. By broadcasting powerful radio signals on the same frequencies as the satellites, the jammers drown out the GPS signals.

Mr. Bennett said the jamming has occurred three times in the past two years and has coincided with joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises.The timing strongly suggests the jamming was “an experiment … a test … to let [the North Koreans] see what effect it would have and maybe disrupt the exercises,” he said.

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Obama plans military intervention in Syria to seize Assad’s chemical weapons

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The Pentagon has made contingency plans to send small teams of special operations troops into Syria if the White House decides it needs to secure chemical weapons depots now controlled by security forces loyal to President Bashar Assad, senior U.S. officials said.

President Obama warned this week that any effort by Assad to move or use his arsenal of chemical munitions in the country’s conflict would cross a “red line,” implying it could prompt swift U.S. intervention.

But Pentagon planners are more focused on protecting or destroying any Syrian stockpiles that are left unguarded and at risk falling into the hands of rebel fighters or militias aligned with Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or other militant groups.

Securing the sites would probably involve stealthy raids by special operations teams trained to handle such weapons, and precision airstrikes to incinerate the chemicals without dispersing them in the air, the officials said. U.S. satellites and drone aircraft already maintain partial surveillance of the sites.

U.S. intelligence agencies believe Syria has over the years produced or acquired hundreds of tons of sarin nerve agent and mustard gas, a blister agent, and has sought to develop VX, another powerful nerve gas. The toxicity of some chemical agents degrades significantly over time, so it is unclear how lethal the stockpiles are.

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Prime Minister Netanyahu “determined to attack Iran before the US elections”

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Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is determined to attack Iran before the US elections,” Israel’s Channel 10 News claimed last night, and Israel is now “closer than ever” to a strike designed to thwart Iran’s nuclear drive.

The TV station’s military reporter Alon Ben-David, who earlier this year was given extensive access to the Israel Air Force as it trained for a possible attack, reported that, since upgraded sanctions against Iran have failed to force a suspension of the Iranian nuclear program in the past two months, “from the prime minister’s point of view, the time for action is getting ever closer.”

Asked by the news anchor in the Hebrew-language TV report how close Israel now was to “a decision and perhaps an attack,” Ben-David said: “It appears that we are closer than ever.”

He said it seemed that Netanyahu was not waiting for a much-discussed possible meeting with US President Barack Obama, after the UN General Assembly gathering in New York late next month — indeed, “it’s not clear that there’ll be a meeting.” In any case, said Ben-David, “I doubt Obama could say anything that would convince Netanyahu to delay a possible attack.”

The report added that Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak believe Obama would have no choice but to give backing for an Israeli attack before the US presidential elections in November.

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