Jewish publisher is an idiot – but his hatred is shared by many

Wow!

1) Starting tonight, Ron Paul will begin winning caucuses. This will be followed by either an assassination, or, in the long term, prosperity. Remember, they killed Bobby Kennedy after he began winning primaries. The chances of this are probably small. I do think there are powerful people and institution who would consider it.

If Ron Paul is assassinated, it’ll be followed by isolated instances of violence against federal institutions. These will be used to discredit anything libertarian. Government will declare new powers for itself, and the gigantic anti-terrorism apparatus will turn its full attention to Americans. An assassination would also be followed by large scale tax protests which would cripple the state. They will resort to printing money and slander tax protesters as domestic terrorists.

If, on the other hand, Ron Paul wins the primary, he will defeat Obama. Democrats will defect en masse to support him. The media mud slingers will realize their impotence. The markets will celebrate, perhaps with the exception of large commercial banks. They will threaten to blow-up the economy as revenge upon a public that elected Ron Paul. We will call their bluff.

2) At least one country will leave the Euro Zone. The EU will remain intact, but calls to end it will grow louder and more insistent. The turmoil in Europe will continue to create the illusion of economic stability in the U.S. and capital will flow away from the headlines, but once things have stabilized there, expect the much bigger and much more destructive problems of the U.S. to resume their unfolding. The prices of precious metals will resume their climb. Let’s hope Ron Paul is in power so the crisis isn’t used to lead us further down the road to serfdom.

3) SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, a thinly veiled attempt to censor the internet will fail. However, it’s proponents will very quickly put another piece of legislation on the table. They will not stop until it is passed.

4) A massive troop reduction will occur in Afghanistan. It will be done for political reasons. The media will spend weeks praising Obama.

5) A galvanizing incident will be provoked or staged in Iran. There will be an outbreak of hostility, but the United States, despite the propaganda from neo-con politicians and the media will not fully commit to a war.

See also, predictions for:
2011
2010
2009
2008

Enraged by a NATO cross-border air attack that killed 24 soldiers, Pakistan is considering withdrawing its support for the U.S.-led war on terror if its sovereignty is violated again, the foreign minister suggested in comments published on Thursday. (Read more)

Militants armed with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons attacked and destroyed at least 22 oil tankers parked in Pakistan, carrying fuel for NATO troops in Afghanistan, a senior Pakistani police official told CNN.

. . . .

Roughly 40% of supplies for NATO forces in Afghanistan travel through Pakistan. (Read more)

My comments below.

(DoJ) – WASHINGTON – September 23, 2011 – A former captain in the U.S. Army Reserve stationed in Afghanistan was sentenced today to 120 months in prison for soliciting $1.3 million in bribes from contractors involved in U.S.-funded reconstruction efforts and participating in a conspiracy to traffic heroin from Southeast Asia.

The sentence was announced by Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Sidharth Handa, 32, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Anthony J. Trenga in the Eastern District of Virginia. Handa was also ordered to pay $315,000 in restitution. Handa, of Charlotte, N.C., pleaded guilty on June 21, 2011, to soliciting and accepting bribes while serving as a public official and to conspiring to distribute a kilogram of heroin.

“Mr. Handa used his official position assisting the United States’ reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan to line his pockets,” said Assistant Attorney General Breuer. “He promised multi-million dollar contracts to Afghan businessmen in exchange for cash. He was so meticulous about collecting his bribes that he kept track of them on a spreadsheet. We will not tolerate this kind of fraud and abuse. Today’s sentence reflects the disgracefulness of Mr. Handa’s conduct.”

“This case is the largest bribery prosecution to date from our mission in Afghanistan,” said U.S. Attorney MacBride. “From the day he stepped foot in Afghanistan, Mr. Handa negotiated a staggering amount of bribes from contractors in a blatant breach of the trust our military put in him. His actions brought shame to our mission, harmed our reconstruction efforts, and defrauded American taxpayers who funded the contracts he looted.”

According to court records, Handa was stationed in Afghanistan from March through November 2008 and served as the liaison to the local governor and engineers on the Kunar Province Reconstruction Team (PRT). In that position, Handa assisted in awarding reconstruction project contracts funded by the U.S. government to local contractors through a competitive bidding process. Handa admitted that almost immediately upon his arrival in Afghanistan, he became engaged in a scheme to secure bribes from contractors who sought to secure large PRT construction projects. With the help of an Afghan interpreter, Handa typically solicited bribes equal to 10 percent of the overall contract value, though the actual bribe payment was negotiated based on the contractor’s ability to pay. The total value of bribes contractors agreed to pay amounted to $1,323,000, and Handa and the interpreter collected $315,000, which they split evenly.

Handa admitted that after leaving Afghanistan, he tried to collect over $1 million in bribe money that contractors had pledged to pay. A cooperating witness (CW) offered to help Handa collect the money, and through 2010 and early 2011 Handa provided the CW with details of outstanding bribes and other relevant facts to help secure the promised bribes. During the course of these conversations with the CW, Handa indicated that he knew people in the drug business and he and the CW developed plans to sell kilogram quantities of Southeast Asian heroin to Handa’s drug contacts.

According to court documents, on April 7, 2011, Handa met with the CW and an undercover officer in a northern Virginia hotel, where Handa received what he believed was $500,000 in collected bribe payments and acknowledged that he knew the right people to receive the kilogram of heroin the undercover officer showed him. Law enforcement arrested Handa as he was leaving the hotel with the bribe money, a loaded handgun and a spreadsheet detailing specific bribe amounts paid and outstanding.

This case was investigated jointly by member agencies of the International Contract Corruption Task Force, including the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, the FBI’s Washington Field Office and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, and also by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The case is being prosecuted by Senor Trial Attorney David Bybee of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section and Assistant U.S. Attorneys Kosta Stojilkovic and Dennis Fitzpatrick of the Eastern District of Virginia. (Read more from mssparky.com)

Close to home for me. Here’s my take on the whole mission:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/10/e-mail-from-afghanistan/7103/

I think the whole thing is a crime and a fraud. Handa’s mistake was participating in the illegal variety of crime and fraud.

But even limiting my observation to that, my sense is that he’s just the one who got caught.

Also reported here: http://blogs.wsj.com/corruption-currents/2011/09/23/former-army-reserve-captain-sentenced-to-10-years-for-bribery/

Edit: Ha! Look at the comments on mssparky.com.

Fixa says:
September 25th 2011 at 5:42 pm
I was stationed to and I think its fucked up he couldn’t hook me up with any money I think SH3 Simmons snitched on him. Karma is a bitch shouldve shared the wealth sucka.

bryan says:
September 25th 2011 at 6:59 pm

Simmon’s problably did snitch, but he Honda was always a moron. Endangering our lives, his paycheck was more than enough income to make an easy life. Sadly our society has gotten greedy and always wants more. Thank you Fixa for sharing the link, and to think Camp you lost your clearance so this ass could scrap thousands from our tax dollars.

Roman says:
September 25th 2011 at 10:19 pm

@ bryan — yeah. It sounds like they didn’t need a snitch. He might have gotten busted trying to traffic heroine, and the spreadsheet of bribes led to the PRT corruption.

t’s a conspiracy plot straight out of a spy novel: on Monday, the Guardian reported that as part of the Osama Bin Laden capture effort, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) set up a fake vaccination clinic in Abbottabad, Pakistan, to collect DNA from Bin Laden’s children. The idea was to look for a match with DNA from Bin Laden’s sister, who died in early 2010 in Boston, to verify that the Bin Laden family was in the compound before attacking. It’s not clear whether the ploy worked; the CIA isn’t talking. (Read more from news.sciencemag.org)

(From takimag.com)

Not a single Afghan police or army unit is capable of maintaining law and order in the war-torn country without the support of coalition forces, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Almost a decade after international troops were sent in to overthrow the Taliban and help to establish a functioning democracy in Afghanistan, a combination of poor training, lack of numbers, corruption and illiteracy has left the country unable to protect its own people. (Read more from independent.co.uk)

(duh)

The hugely expensive U.S. attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan has had only limited success and may not survive an American withdrawal, according to the findings of a two-year congressional investigation to be released Wednesday.

The report calls on the administration to rethink urgently its assistance programs as President Obama prepares to begin drawing down the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan this summer.

The report, prepared by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic majority staff, comes as Congress and the American public have grown increasingly restive about the human and economic cost of the decade-long war and reflects growing concerns about Obama’s war strategy even among supporters within his party.

The report describes the use of aid money to stabilize areas the military has cleared of Taliban fighters — a key component of the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy — as a short-term fix that provides politically pleasing results. But it says that the enormous cash flows can overwhelm and distort local culture and economies, and that there is little evidence the positive results are sustainable. (Read more from washingtonpost.com)

Not a single Afghan police or army unit is capable of maintaining law and order in the war-torn country without the support of coalition forces, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. Almost a decade after international troops were sent in to overthrow the Taliban and help to establish a functioning democracy in Afghanistan, a combination of poor training, lack of numbers, corruption and illiteracy has left the country unable to protect its own people.

The grim official assessment of the capabilities of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) is a major blow to the hopes of a troop withdrawal by 2014, a timescale that assumes the ANSF will be able to start taking the lead in fighting the Taliban from next month. The commander of Nato’s mission to train the ANSF has admitted the task will not be complete until at least 2016.

This comes after a decade in which tens of billions of dollars have been spent building up the Afghan army and police. Yet they remain too dependent on coalition forces, according to the latest progress report on Afghanistan from the US Department of Defense. It cites assessments made in February that show how, of more than 400 Afghan units, none is rated as independent – defined as capable “without assistance from coalition forces”. (Read more from independent.co.uk)

Send moar tax dollarz!!!1!

I consider myself fortunate to be in Ukraine on a Fulbright Scholarship. It shelters me from the sensationalism surrounding the announcement that “Osama bin Laden, the terror mastermind killed by Navy SEALs in an intense firefight, was hunted down based on information first gleaned years ago from detainees at secret CIA prison sites in Eastern Europe.”

The reaction has been impossible to avoid altogether, as Twitter, Facebook, and many of the blogs I read exploded with videos of euphoric celebrations beside the White House and in Times Square, affirmations of America’s greatness, wishes by otherwise nice young women to see the bullet riddled corpse, and praise given to all soldiers and veterans, including praise from President Obama.

I remain bewildered by the changing and contradictory justifications for our many wars: the well being of Iraqis and Afghans (and now, Libyans), preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction, establishing democracies, Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn Rule (We broke it, so we own it). Didn’t President Bush announce in 2006 that the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden was no longer a goal of our war efforts in Afghanistan?

Timing and political expedience seems to have swung our rationale back to the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden.

Should we pause to consider the return on our investment of money, blood and reputation? I am two and half years removed from my last day in the military, and life-times removed from the world view I had when I first commissioned as an infantry officer in March 2000.

My doubts centered on the realization that my membership in the military, though full of adventure and challenge, just like the television commercials promised, did not provide a valuable service. For this reason, I politely decline President Obama’s thanks.

The military, myself included, makes America less safe from terrorism, debt, and tyrrany. I began to consider the ancient and noble institution of the Army a gigantic toy for politicians who, with the thinnest pretenses, went adventuring all over the world.

I no longer consider myself at war with Afghanistan or Al Quaida, though I understand that many Americans do. I consider war to be very much the business of demagogue politicians who pretend to defend Americans from Muslims, and demagogue Islam-o-fascists who pretend to defend Muslims from Americans. I wish we could make them fight one another directly without the involvement of so many others, but this would never happen. They are cowards who work hard to convince better men to do the fighting.

I’d like to point out the difficult fact that Afghans killed by errant artillery strikes or nervous, undisciplined soldiers, or what a friend of mine calls “Nobel Peace drones,” are just as innocent and just as human as the New Yorkers who were killed when three skyscrapers collapsed on September 11, 2001.The tragedy is firstly that many innocent people get killed, and secondly, that so many good people are easily convinced to sacrifice blood and money. It is best to have as little to do with our wars as possible.

In contrast to the revelers on the National Mall, my pride and identity now have little to do with national pride and national identity. I am as sovereign an individual as the tax code allows me to be.

The only aspect of this announcement I find comforting is that now politicians will likely be confronted with meek requests to undo the TSA, warrant-less wiretaps, secret prisons, suspensions of habius corpus, the department of homeland security, and the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They will have to again justify these institutions, which they will do very easily. I will take minor comfort when the questions are asked.

I retain hope that America can regains the liberties it lost in the name of our many wars. However as I watched the exuberant masses intoxicated with national pride at the announcement of Osama Bin Laden’s death, I thought of not of the importance of restoring our lost liberties, but of running away; escaping and hiding from the collectivist madness — somewhere where neither my person nor my wealth nor my pride nor my identity can ever be dragged into such a barbaric enterprise again.

Stories told of Private Jessica Lynch, American footballer Pat Tillman and British aid worker Linda Norgrove were all incorrect. (Read more from guardian.co.uk)

Also, http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts304.html