Has the CIA Sponsored Some of the Pirates and Terror Groups in Somalia?

US foreign or imperial policies “spawn” their own “monsters” which they eventually end up fighting against.

They never seem to learn from their experience with Al Qaeda, or perhaps these have been part of the undercover scheme to promote foreign interventions and wars abroad in the interests of neoconservative politics and of the Wall Street backed military industrial complex.

From the Business Insider,

An attempt by CIA-connected trainers to create a sophisticated counter-piracy force in Somalia turned into hundreds of half-trained and well-armed Somali mercenaries being left to their own devices in the desert, Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times report.

The Puntland Maritime Police Force, trained by dozens of South African mercenaries from sometime in 2010 to June 2012, was run by a Dubai-based company called Sterling Corporate Services that seems to be connected to the CIA.

The Times reports that in July a United Nations investigative group uncovered that the force shared some facilities with the Puntland Intelligence Service, a spy organization that answers to the president of the semi-autonomous Somali region of Puntland and has been trained by the CIA for more than a decade.

Michael Shanklin, a former C.I.A. station chief in Mogadishu, was reportedly hired to work his contacts both in Washington and East Africa to build support for the force while Erik Prince, the founder of the private security firm Blackwater, made several trips to the Puntland camp to oversee the training of the counter-piracy force.

It is important to emphasize that the “private company” has not only been backed by the CIA, the UAE government had considerable involvement in them. According to the New York Times “millions of dollars in secret payments by the United Arab Emirates”. So the private sector contractor is in reality a crony or a politically connected firm operating on stealth political goals.

In addition, the unintended consequences of interventionism have not merely been that these abandoned highly trained and armed groups have been left to their devices, but rather, as the NYT points out they may have joined up with “the pirates or Qaeda-linked militants or to sell themselves to the highest bidder in Somalia’s clan wars — yet another dangerous element in the Somali mix”. So in essence, the CIA trained possible and or potential, if not current, members of future pirates and terror groups.

The above signifies as further evidence that the perpetual foreign interventions, which ironically fostered her pirate industry has, contrary to mainstream expectations, induced the vicious cycle of violence in “stateless” Somalia.

However, Somalia isn’t “stateless” anymore. Repeated foreign interventions has finally resulted to the installation of a new Western backed government for the first time in four decades. As for the longevity of this US sponsored government, this remains to be seen.

Quote of the Day: Failed and Failing States

Professor Michael S. Rozeff at the lewrockwell.com writes,

I like to use the ammunition provided by the statists themselves (or those who take states for granted) that discredits their own statism. For example, there is the "Failed States Index".

How many states are there in the world, and how many are failures or leaning toward failure, according to the people who devised this index? They assess 177 states. Of these, 124 are in the troubled categories (ALERT and WARNING). That's 70 percent! Here we have a great experiment at one point in time. We have 177 trials of the state as a way to organize, and we have 124 failed or failing or approaching failure. Among the Moderate and Sustainable categories (non-failed states) we have such wonderful states as Greece and Spain.

If instead we look at the performance of states across time, a century or two, we find huge and endemic failures almost everywhere we look in major countries: Russia, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, China, many eastern European countries, and even the United States (if we count, for example, the civil war as evidence of a gigantic failure). The U.S. has held together by force, not law. Is that what a non-failed state is supposed to mean? Many European states have failed time and again, as several world wars and hyperinflations demonstrate. Their current financial manipulations are new evidence of their failure, as are their high rates of unemployment.

70% of the world nations are considered as at the risk of becoming a ‘failed state’. That’s a great measure of political success.

Prof. Rozeff rightly points out that the today’s crisis affected EU nations have been categorized as moderate (non-failed states) which has not accurately reflect been on the failed state index (as this was based on 2011)

Yet, the increasingly dysfunctional political institutions of Greece would almost qualify her as a ‘failed state’.

As I recently wrote,

Instead, what a “failed state” means is that there is no standing government or that imposed government will mostly likely be ignored by society or what could be called “stateless society”.

I am not sure if Greece will technically become a failed state.

What is certain is that we are witnessing the accelerating collapse of a parasitical relationship anchored upon the spendthrift welfare and bureaucratic state.

Nonetheless this should be good news as Greece’s political economy would be compelled by nature to face economic realities; regardless of the outcome of today’s elections.

Oh by the way, despite all the cheering, drum beating and exaltation by media over the supposed political progress in the Philippines, the nation remains a candidate of becoming a failed state.

The Philippines has been ranked 51^st and classified as in “warning” conditions.

I’d say that the Philippines has more characteristics of a failed state: 40+% of the domestic economy are considered as informal. OFWs, whom has been labeled as heroes, are in reality symptoms government failure due to the lack of economic opportunities and depressed standards of living. Yet these combined forces which operates outside of government spectrum, has been delivering the real progress, but whose credit has been usurped by politicians and by mainstream media and institutions.

Yes, there have marginal improvements from 2010, but this could be seen on a relative perspective—perhaps more states have been performing far worst than the Philippines than the Philippines doing better.

Is Greece Falling into a Failed State?

According to the mainstream media and establishment experts, Greeks supposedly loathed austerity. They wanted “growth”, which is a euphemism for continued unsustainable government spending. If true, then this means that Greeks wanted free lunch.

But many Greeks may have come to realize that there is NO such thing as a free lunch. They needed to pay taxes in return for political entitlements.

Yet Greeks have been balking at doing so.

From Reuters.com/GreeceReporter.com

With anxiety mounting that Greece might vote for anti-austerity parties in the June 17 elections and be forced to leave the Eurozone of 17 countries using the euro as a currency, more Greeks – already legendary tax evaders – have stopped paying taxes. A senior Finance Ministry official on May 23 said that tax revenues have fallen 10 percent while two tax officials who declined to be named told Reuters that May revenues fell by 15-30 percent in tax offices away from the major cities and relative wealth centers of Athens and Thessaloniki.

So Greeks have been refusing to pay taxes. The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. That’s if the establishment’s assertion is true. Greeks cannot have it both ways.

Yet Greeks realize that if they cannot pay, then they would have to default on their debts.

But the establishment says that the only way to salvation is through devaluation that can only be actualized from an exit. So their prescription: Default by devaluation.

So this ‘exit’ prospect gives further jitters not just to the average Greeks, but to foreign businesses based on Greece, as well. Foreign businesses have been apprehensive about having inadequate laws to cover or protect them once Greece decides to exit.

From the New York Times,

What can companies do when the legally impossible becomes reasonably probable?

Under European Union law, Greece cannot leave the euro. That is the theory. But in practice, any protection the law offers investors could be difficult to enforce, according to lawyers trying to protect their corporate clients against the upheaval sure to follow if Greece were to default on its debts and adopt a new currency.

So their advice is blunt: Remove cash and other liquid assets from Greece and prepare to take a short-term hit on any other investments…

But, apart from trying to ensure that debts are paid promptly and therefore in euros, legal options for companies are limited. Contracts covered by Greek law, particularly for services delivered in Greece, provide little protection against the currency’s being redenominated and devalued — a development regarded as unlikely until recently.

“Greece would, through its laws, be able to amend contracts governed by Greek law or to be performed within the territory of Greece,” Mr. Clark said. “It is the governing law and the place of performance of the contract that is most important.”

International contracts, which might be covered by British, German or Swiss law, would be more likely to be honored in the designated currency, though in some cases the wording of the legal document may be vague.

And even if the law is on their side, companies would find that to extract payment from a Greek company, they would need a judge in Greece to enforce a ruling from a foreign court.

When the average Greeks doesn’t want to pay taxes, and when foreign businesses are either closing shop or transferring elsewhere, then this means that there will be insufficient tax revenues for the current government to finance her survival.

This also means that parasites have severely impaired the hosts, which may mean the prospective extinction of the parasitical relationship.

From FT/IBNLive.in

Greece's public finances could collapse as early as next month, leaving salaries and pensions unpaid unless a stable government emerges from the June 17 election, according to Lucas Papademos, the technocrat prime minister who left office after this month's inconclusive vote.

Mr Papademos warned that conditions were deteriorating faster than expected with cash flow likely to turn negative in early June amid a sharp fall in tax revenues and a loosening of spending controls during two back-to-back election campaigns.

Mounting anxiety that Greece is headed for further political instability and a possible exit from the euro has prompted many Greeks to postpone making tax payments, and has also accelerated outflows of deposits from local banks.

Athens bankers estimate that more than €3bn of cash withdrawn since the May 6 election has been stashed in safe-deposit boxes and under mattresses in case the country is forced to readopt the drachma.

Austerity becomes a NATURAL process as economic reality has been reasserting itself. This exposes the promises of a "state based elixir" as monumental delusion.

The prescription of devaluation has been provoking a bank runs and has been blowing up right ON the faces of establishment experts calling for devaluation.

This brings us to where the Greece might be headed for.

The new Deutsche bank boss calls Greece as a "failed state".

From Irish Times,

The incoming co-chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank today described Greece as a "corrupt" and "failed" state.

"Greece is the only country, I feel, where we can say 'it's a failed state,' it is a corrupt state, corrupt as far as its political leadership is concerned, and obviously other people had to be willing to support this," Juergen Fitschen, who takes up his post next week, said in a speech at a conference in Berlin.

Failed states, are characterized according to Wikipedia.org by

• loss of control of its territory, or of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force therein,
• erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions,
• an inability to provide public services, and
• an inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community.

Often a failed state is characterized by social, political, and/or economic failure.

In reality “failed states” are mainly products of unsustainable parasitical relationships, whether in Somalia, Chad or Sudan as rated by US think tank Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy.

But this does not necessarily mean social, political and economic failure as commercial operations exists. Otherwise logic says that these nations will have been uninhabited or deserted either through diaspora or death. But this has clearly not been the case.

Ironically, the US Central Intelligence Agency even admits that the number one “failed state” Somalia as having a “healthy informal economy”.

Thus the “inability to provide public services” does not represent reality. The difference is that mainstream cannot swallow or fathom such ideas. And the global political establishment has been repeatedly attempting for “failed states” to go mainstream through foreign interventions.

Instead, what a “failed state” means is that there is no standing government or that imposed government will mostly likely be ignored by society or what could be called “stateless society”.

I am not sure if Greece will technically become a failed state.

What is certain is that we are witnessing the accelerating collapse of a parasitical relationship anchored upon the spendthrift welfare and bureaucratic state.

This validates anew the great Ludwig von Mises who presciently warned more than half a century ago that

An essential point in the social philosophy of interventionism is the existence of an inexhaustible fund which can be squeezed forever. The whole system of interventionism collapses when this fountain is drained off: The Santa Claus principle liquidates itself.

And like Dr. Marc Faber, the collapse of the current Greece form of government should be bullish for Greeks over the long term (whether through exit or as part of the EU), as Greeks will be compelled to live within the laws of economics through greater economic freedom, and eschew feeding on political parasites.