A Predecessor To The Resorts World Manila Attack: Mexico August 2011

"Kung ISIS siya, namaril na siya doon (If he was from ISIS, he would have shot the people there)," Dela Rosa also said, explaining that a terrorist would have carried out a suicide bombing to inflict maximum casualties.”-Rappler.com,  June 2, 2017

Because of the lack of evidence of the use of firearms to shoot people down and also because the assailant “stuffed his backpack with P113 million in stolen casino chips” (Inquirer June 3, 2017), the administration declared that the attack at the Resorts World Manila was a work of a “crazy man” who “did not want to kill” (Inquirer June 4). 

And because terrorism was ruled out in the Resorts World Manila attack which unfortunately and sadly claimed 38 lives, the administration allayed concerns that martial law would be imposed nationwide (GMAJune 3). 

Martial law (Proclamation 216) was imposed over Mindanao last May 23 supposedly in response to the outbreak of violence by a rogue ragtag group of ‘terrorists’ in Marawi City. The Marawi siege and mopping up operations reportedly continues (GMA June 3)

Earlier, the administration floated the idea of a nationwide martial law “if the threat of ISIS persists” and spread elsewhere outside Mindanao (Rappler, May 24)

So in spite of the claim by ISIS that the Resorts World Manila incident was their handiwork (Rappler June 2), it’s probably better to just accept the administration’s interpretation of the current events.

Today, the Inquirer posted RWM's in-house video of the assailant’s “methodological” actions which implied premeditation or a planned set of actions.

But let me share a little secret.

What happened to Resorts World Manila would hardly seem unparalleled.

Flashback in August 2011, a group of armed men barged into a casino in Mexico.  Similar to the Manila, instead of shooting people, the group set ablaze a segment of the casino. The unfortunate incident trapped and claimed 52 lives. But in contrast to Manila, the Mexican president declared that the killing was “perpetrated by "terrorists" motivated by greed” (CNN August 26, 2011)

And unlike current events where the risks of violent actions have been targeted at religion based terrorism, the Mexican episode was blamed on drug cartels in reaction to the war on drugs implemented by the administration (CBS August 26, 2011)

Thanks to the gambling chips the scenario changed for Philippine politics - where events are all subject to the 'desired' official interpretation.

The reason why this should be kept a secret is that the alternative likely political option - nationwide martial law - would be harsh and drastic if this would be labeled as a 'terror event'. 

Ignorance is, thus, a bliss.

Ron Paul: Lessons from Paris

Former US congressman and libertarian Ron Paul explains that the latest terror events in Paris partly represented a blowback from foreign policies.

From the Ron Paul Institute  (bold mine)

After the tragic shooting at a provocative magazine in Paris last week, I pointed out that given the foreign policy positions of France we must consider blowback as a factor. Those who do not understand blowback made the ridiculous claim that I was excusing the attack or even blaming the victims. Not at all, as I abhor the initiation of force. The police blaming victims when they search for the motive of a criminal.

The mainstream media immediately decided that the shooting was an attack on free speech. Many in the US preferred this version of “they hate us because we are free,” which is the claim that President Bush made after 9/11. They expressed solidarity with the French and vowed to fight for free speech. But have these people not noticed that the First Amendment is routinely violated by the US government? President Obama has used the Espionage Act more than all previous administrations combined to silence and imprison whistleblowers. Where are the protests? Where are protesters demanding the release of John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA use of waterboarding and other torture? The whistleblower went to prison while the torturers will not be prosecuted. No protests.

If Islamic extremism is on the rise, the US and French governments are at least partly to blame. The two Paris shooters had reportedly spent the summer in Syria fighting with the rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Assad. They were also said to have recruited young French Muslims to go to Syria and fight Assad. But France and the United States have spent nearly four years training and equipping foreign fighters to infiltrate Syria and overthrow Assad! In other words, when it comes to Syria, the two Paris killers were on “our” side. They may have even used French or US weapons while fighting in Syria.

Beginning with Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US and its allies have deliberately radicalized Muslim fighters in the hopes they would strictly fight those they are told to fight. We learned on 9/11 that sometimes they come back to fight us. The French learned the same thing last week. Will they make better decisions knowing the blowback from such risky foreign policy? It is unlikely because they refuse to consider blowback. They prefer to believe the fantasy that they attack us because they hate our freedoms, or that they cannot stand our free speech.

Perhaps one way to make us all more safe is for the US and its allies to stop supporting these extremists.

Another lesson from the attack is that the surveillance state that has arisen since 9/11 is very good at following, listening to, and harassing the rest of us but is not very good at stopping terrorists. We have learned that the two suspected attackers had long been under the watch of US and French intelligence services. They had reportedly been placed on the US no-fly list and at least one of them had actually been convicted in 2008 of trying to travel to Iraq to fight against the US occupation. According to CNN, the two suspects traveled to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaeda. So they were individuals known to have direct terrorist associations. How many red flags is it necessary to set off before action is taken? How long did US and French intelligence know about them and do nothing, and why?

Foreign policy actions have consequences. The aggressive foreign policies of the United States and its allies in the Middle East have radicalized thousands and have made us less safe. Blowback is real whether some want to recognize it or not. There are no guarantees of security, but only a policy of non-intervention can reduce the risk of another attack.

Geopolitical Risk Theater Links: Thailand’s Hunger Games, ISIS Expansion, US 500th Drone Strike, Terror Not Excuse for Foreign Wars and more…

1 Hunger Games Thailand edition? : When Life Imitates 'The Hunger Games' in Thailand, the Atlantic November 21, 2014

2 Geopolitical blackmail continues: North Korea Conducts Ejection Test of Sub-Launched Missile Test indicates progress in submarine missile development Freebeacon.com November 21,2014

3 The nuclear race is ON: China's Nuclear Weapons Are Getting Bigger And More Destructive Business Insider November 20,2014

4 Hasn’t it been obvious? A Russia-China Military Alliance May Not Be As Far-Fetched As Many Think Business Insider November 21,2014 They are already part of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization which according to Wikipedia “is a Eurasian political, economic and military organization”

5 Like stocks, ISIS momentum keeps rollin’: ISIS Has An Important Iraqi City Surrounded Business Insider November 21, 2014

6 ISIS draws criticism from peer (ally?) Al Qaeda in Yemen rebukes ISIS CNN.com November 21, 2014 

7 If ISIS has international recruits, so does the Kurdish forces: Canadian veterans join Kurdish battle against ISIS RT.com November 22, 2014 

8 US government’s favorite assassin: America’s 500th Drone Strike Launched in Pakistan Six 'Suspects' Killed in Latest Attack Antiwar.com November 21, 2014 Question is who gets killed; militants or innocent bystanders labeled as militants? 

9 Oops, developing cracks on Western Sanctions against Russia? Serbia won’t join anti-Russian sanctions club despite EU pressure - Nikolic RT.com November 20, 2014 

Serbia is not planning to impose sanctions on Russia, said its President Tomislav Nikolic after meeting EU Commissioner Johannes Hahn. The latter said the EU expects Serbia to bring its policy in line with the European one if it seeks to enter the union.

Nikolic said that Serbia is not planning to introduce sanctions at the moment, though admitting the country is seeking EU membership which implies an obligation to pursue common policies, including foreign.

10 More beating of the war drums: Russia warns US against supplying ‘lethal defensive aid’ to Ukraine RT.com November 21, 2014

Moscow has warned Washington a potential policy shift from supplying Kiev with “non-lethal aid” to “defensive lethal weapons”, mulled as US Vice President visits Ukraine, would be a direct violation of all international agreements.

A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson said that reports of possible deliveries of American “defensive weapons” to Ukraine would be viewed by Russia as a “very serious signal.”

11 More testing of tolerance limits: NATO scrambles jets 400 times in 2014 as Russian air activity jumps Yahoo.com November 21, 2014

12 The slippery slope to totalitariansism: Terror Is Also Not a Reason or Argument for Foreign Wars Michael S. Rozeff Lew Rockwell Blog November 21,2014

Writes Michael Rozeff

But terror and terrorists cannot possibly justify such wars, and preventive wars at that. Terrorists are a problem that is unsettling, but it also has limited and sporadic sources, even if they can inflict great damage at times. The problem requires identification and location of terrorists. How can war, which is such a blunt instrument, an instrument of mass destruction, be justified against such a threat? How can the U.S. possibly use terrorist threats to justify the unseating and destroying of entire governments, the destroying of whole infrastructures, the throwing of countries and societies into massive turmoil, and the killing and wounding of innocent civilians in large numbers? How can the U.S. justify exacerbating religious and ethnic differences, ruining landmarks and turning countries into armed camps engaged in internecine warfare? There is absolutely no excuse for this. Terror, terrorism, terrorists and terror events provide absolutely no excuse for such huge human rights violations. 9/11 doesn’t justify this. Nothing can be brought forward that justifies it. There is zero moral justification for what America has done in the name of fighting terror.

Here at home, the federal government has militarized every force within all of its many agencies that do any kind of policing. Not only have local police forces become militarized, but so have every possible arm of the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security is but one umbrella for these many forces. By one count there are now more than 70 such militarized federal agencies. 

The government has used terror and terrorism as an excuse or pretext for militarizing itself and arming itself to the teeth. These forces stand ready to dominate Americans at every turn and create a nightmare police state in this country. Any excuse from a bomb threat to a hurricane can be used to mobilize one or more of these forces. One vindictive word or one phone call can unleash a number of SWAT teams against some innocent person or get them detained or get their names placed on a no-fly list or some other list.

The Myth of the Surveillance Cameras

Mainstream media continues to inculcate upon the public of the supposed public safety expediencies from surveillance cameras.

Steve Chapman at the Reason.org puts into perspective its efficacies.

One cherry picking of instances doesn’t imply effectiveness

There is no doubt that the cameras were a big help this time. But that doesn't mean they are generally a good idea -- much less a crucial tool in fighting terrorism and crime.

Surveillance cameras were originally touted as a strong deterrent, scaring away bad guys fearful of being caught on tape. But these devices have a disappointing record in action. In some places, they noticeably reduce crime. In others, they have the same effect as a potted plant.

In the Boston bombings, the cameras utterly failed in their preventive function. Not only did the bombings occur; they occurred in perhaps the most heavily photographed spot in America that day. Besides the permanent video cameras in operation, hundreds of spectators with cellphones were eagerly capturing the scene.

I’d say that mainstream media has been engaged in deceitful framing or applying selective influence or manipulation of the public through survivorship bias or through selective reporting. In other words, the positive effects from the use of surveillance cameras are being broadcasted, but its negative effects have not been shown. 

The implied goal seems designed to reduce people’s resistance from being monitored.

Security expert Bruce Schneier also shares this view stating that “Pervasive security cameras don't substantially reduce crime”

Next, since cameras are economic goods, they are subject to diminishing returns.

Again Mr. Chapman

Putting video gear in areas that are obvious potential terrorist targets is one thing. Putting them on every corner of an entire city is another. Some places are enviably safe without surveillance, which means any cameras installed there should be color-coordinated, since they will be primarily decorative.

They will fall victim to the law of diminishing returns. If you put out a couple of mousetraps, you may catch some mice. If you put out dozens, you may not catch many more. The second 10,000 cameras won't add nearly as much crime-fighting value as the first 10,000 -- or possibly even the first 1,000.

Of course, once aware, fugitives are likely to move activities away from where these cameras are located, or that they may use various forms of concealment. 

In short, surveillance cameras works from an element of surprise. Take the surprise away, the camera losses its effectiveness. Again human action.

The next is opportunity costs or tradeoff from use of scarce resources.

One drawback is that taxpayers are not composed of cash. Buying a camera costs money; so does maintaining it and monitoring the images it generates. A dollar spent on surveillance video is a dollar that can't be spent on foot patrols, police training, DNA tests or streetlights.

Then there is the issue of the invasion of privacy.

Another is that cameras contribute greatly to the steady erosion of personal privacy. Americans are generally oblivious to this phenomenon because they are oblivious to the multitude of unblinking eyes watching them in the course of a day. If each of us had a little alarm that went off every time we came into camera range, we might be less agreeable to the monitoring.

This is not really just an American thing, but also applies elsewhere as it does the Philippines.

 

Finally promoting surveillance cameras as furtive ploys to establish the Orwellian “big brother’ state that destroys civil liberties.

Cameras may also soften us up for even deeper intrusions. If video feeds are so great, why not add audio? If you can stand being watched whenever you leave home, surely you won't mind if every word is heard as well. And how about a tiny drone hovering over your front door, round the clock -- for the rest of your life?

Enthusiasts for electronic surveillance may say: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But there's a reason people don't live in glass houses.

There is really nothing wrong with the private sector’s use of surveillance cameras, what is wrong is having to politicize them and use these as tools to advance despotism in the name of public safety.

Video: Judge Andrew Napolitano on Fake FBI Terror Plots

Former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, Andrew P. Napolitano narrates of the US government's history of creating 'false flags' or fake terror plots at the Fox News Channel.(hat tip Lew Rockwell.com)

Graphic: How the US Government Identifies Terrorists

Sourced from Politifake.org (hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog)

Drone Warfare: Systematic Mass Killing of Innocents

It is sad and revolting to see how the recent gruesome shooting spree in Newtown Connecticut had claimed 27 innocent lives mostly children.

Yet what has been largely ignored by the public is how belligerent imperial US foreign policies continues to sow terror to unarmed civilians through drone warfare overseas.

This report from Daily Mail says that a US military personnel quit his job after learning of needless civilian deaths…many of them children.

A former U.S. drone operator has opened up about the toll of killing scores of innocent people by pressing a button from a control room in New Mexico.

Brandon Bryant, 27, from Missoula, Montana, spent six years in the Air Force operating Predator drones from inside a dark container.

But, after following orders to shoot and kill a child in Afghanistan, he knew he couldn't keep doing what he was doing and quit the military.

'I saw men, women and children die during that time,' he told Spiegel Online. 'I never thought I would kill that many people. In fact, I thought I couldn't kill anyone at all.'

Mass killings should be seen in a broader context and not just in the US.

As John Aziz at the lewrockwell.com/zero hedge observed: (bold original)

And if we value life and are opposed to violence against innocents, why do we demand action when 27 innocent Americans die, but not when larger numbers of innocent Pakistanis, or Afghanis or Yemenis die? One drone strike in Pakistan killed 69 children, dwarfing the impact of the Newtown Massacre. With predator drones now in American skies, how long until the “collateral damage” (remember – the NDAA declared the entirety of America as a battlefield) eclipses the Newtown massacre? Or how long until a foreign power or terrorist group hacks into a predator drone (technically feasible) over America and uses it as a flying bomb?  And how many more terrorist attacks against America will be fuelled by anger derived from the civilian casualties of the drone wars?

Obama might cry for Americans in Newtown, but where are his tears for the Pakistani and Yemeni children he has slaughtered? And what about for the many victims who died as a result of thousands guns shipped by the US government to the Mexican drug cartels via Fast and Furious?

The US government seem to promote the kind of policies it pretends to condemn. Drones as pointed out above (and in my previous post) is likely to become a commonplace security feature in the US which may entail the unintended consequences described above.

Yet it is hard to ignore of the possible influence of US foreign policies or the warfare state on her constituency or population. Or put differently, could the recent killing sprees signify as a policy blowback, where these assailants may have sublimely construed government's action as justifying their own? 

Quote of the Day: Manipulating Public Opinion to Foment War

Today, the most likely culprit are far right Christian fundamentalists, who hate Islam with religious passion, and a group of neconservative businessmen trying to promote war between the US and Muslim world – and namely, Iran. A network of Evangelical broadcasters, publishers and schools churns out a steady stream of anti-Islamic fulminations.

The latest anti-US riots across the Mideast further convinced many Americans that all Muslims are violent extremists. The hate film reinforced the mistaken notion held by many Muslims that the United States is bent on eradicating their faith.

All this fits nicely with efforts by right wing ideologues to push the US into war against Iran. President Obama has so far stoutly refused to give in to war-mongering, no mean feat in an election year in which he is neck-a-neck with Romney.

This week, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, demanded Obama openly define the conditions under which the US would attack Iran. Netanyahu’s American supporters accuse Obama of "throwing Israel under a bus." At times, it appears there are three candidates for office in Washington: Obama, Romney and Netanyahu.

Netanyahu scolded and rebuked Obama for not sending American troops and spending American treasure to attack Iran because it is a potential rival or threat to Israel. Netanyahu is now openly backing Romney for president.

In Yiddish, such behavior is called "chutzpah," a mixture of brazen nerve and outrageous presumption.

Add all this up and we have evil memories of the hysteria and military posturing of August, 1914, the lead-up to World War I, a totally unnecessary conflict that ran out of control and wrecked Europe.

Opinion in the Muslim world, America and Canada is being manipulated by those seeking war. A few more killings, a clash in the congested Gulf, a bombing in the west, and a wider Mideast war could erupt.

This is from historian Eric Margolis talking about the wave of attacks on US embassies in the Middle East (source Lew Rockwell.com)

Quote of the Day: Wikileaks’ Tweet on US Embassy Attack at Libya

By the US accepting the UK siege on the Ecuadorian embassy in London it gave tacit approval for attacks on embassies around the world.

Source: Business Insider

For a short background, in fear of extradition to the US (through Sweden) out of political harassment for exposing many of the secrets of the US government, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sought refuge at the Ecuador Embassy in London which was recently besieged by UK officials.

Wikileaks thus attempts to associate the US embassy attack to the harassment being endured by its founder.

Is Al-Qaeda now a US ally in Syria?

The world of politics is a world of smoke and mirrors.

The supposed arch enemy of the US, the Al Qaeda, has reportedly become a US ally in Syria’s civil war.

Writes Joseph Wakim, founder of Australian Arabic Council, at the Canberratimes.au

In Syria, there is mounting evidence that Al Qaeda and its allies are actively deploying terror tactics and suicide bombers to overthrow the Assad regime.

Syrian citizens who prefer the secular and stable state to the prospect of an Iraqi-style sectarian state may well be turning this same question around to the US government: are you with us, or with the terrorists?

This week, head of the Salafi jihad and close ally of al Qaeda, Abu Sayyaf, pledged ''deadly attacks'' against Syria as ''our fighters are coming to get you'' because ''crimes'' by the regime ''prompts us to jihad''.

Bush referred to al Qaeda as the enemies of freedom: ''the terrorists' directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews''. But Sheikh Muhammad al Zughbey proclaimed that ''your jihad against this infidel criminal and his people is a religious duty … Alawites are more infidel than the Jews and Christians''. Because the new jihad targets Alawites rather than Jews and Christians, does this render them better bed fellows?

By his own admission, Bush stated that al Qaeda was ''linked to many other organisations in different countries … They are recruited from their own nations … where they are trained in the tactics of terror … They are sent back to their homes or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction''.

Yet this is precisely how the foreign jihadists in Syria have been described by reporters. They are funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar. And they collaborate with the Free Syrian Army which is aided and abetted by the US.

Read the rest here.

Timeline of Mass Shooting Incidents during the Last Two Decades

Following the Colorado Denver massacre at the midnight showing of ‘Dark Knight”, here is a compilation or a list of mass shooting incidents as reported by Chicago Tribune/Reuters.com

Here is a timeline of some of the worst shooting incidents carried out by one or two gunmen around the world in the last 25 years:

March 13, 1996 - BRITAIN - Gunman Thomas Hamilton burst into a primary school in the Scottish town of Dunblane and shot dead 16 children and their teacher before killing himself.

April 28, 1996 - AUSTRALIA - Martin Bryant unleashed modern Australia's worst mass murder when he shot dead 35 people at the Port Arthur tourist site in the southern state of Tasmania.

April 1999 - UNITED STATES - Two heavily-armed teenagers went on a rampage at Columbine High School in Littleton, Denver, shooting 13 students and staff before taking their own lives.

July 1999 - UNITED STATES - A gunman killed nine people at two brokerages in Atlanta, after apparently killing his wife and two children. He committed suicide five hours later.

June 2001 - NEPAL - Eight members of the Nepalese Royal family were killed in a palace massacre by Crown Prince Dipendra who later turned a gun on himself and died few days later. His youngest brother also died later raising the death toll to 10.

April 26, 2002 - GERMANY - In Erfurt, eastern Germany, 19-year-old Robert Steinhauser opened fire after saying he was not going to take a math test. He killed 12 teachers, a secretary, two pupils and a policeman at the Gutenberg Gymnasium, before killing himself.

October 2002 - UNITED STATES - John Muhammad and Lee Malvo killed 10 people in sniper-style shooting deaths that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area.

April 16, 2007 - USA - Virginia Tech, a university in Blacksburg, Virginia, became the site of the deadliest rampage in U.S. history when a gunman killed 32 people and himself.

November 7, 2007 - FINLAND - Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed six fellow students, the school nurse, the principal and himself with a handgun at the Jokela High School near Helsinki.

September 23, 2008 - FINLAND - Student Matti Saari opened fire in a vocational school in Kauhajoki in northwest Finland, killing nine other students and one male staff member before killing himself.

March 11, 2009 - GERMANY - A 17-year-old gunman dressed in combat gear killed nine students and three teachers at a school near Stuttgart. He also killed one other person at a nearby clinic. He was later killed in a shoot-out with police. Two additional passers-by were killed and two policemen seriously injured, bringing the death toll to 16 including the gunman.

June 2, 2010 - BRITAIN - Gunman Derrick Bird opened fire on people in towns across the rural county of Cumbria. Twelve people were killed and 11 injured. Bird also killed himself.

April 9, 2011 - NETHERLANDS - Tristan van der Vlis opened fire in the Ridderhof mall in Alphen aan den Rijn, south of Amsterdam, killing six before turning the gun on himself.

July 22, 2011 - NORWAY - Police seize a gunman who killed 69 people at a youth summer camp of Norway's ruling political party, on the small, holiday island of Utoeya. Anders Behring Breivik is later charged with the killings, as well as with an earlier bombing in Oslo which killed eight people. The trial ended last month with Breivik saying that his bombing and shooting rampage was necessary to defend the country - prompting a walk-out by relatives of his victims.

December 13, 2011 - BELGIUM - Gunman Nordine Armani killed three people, including a 17-month-old toddler, wounding 121 in a central square in the eastern city of Liege, before shooting himself. The next day Belgian investigators found the body of a woman in warehouse used by the gunman raising the death toll, including the killer, to five.

July 20, 2012 - UNITED STATES - A masked gunman killed 14 people and wounded 50 others when he opened fire on moviegoers at a showing of new Batman film "The Dark Knight Rises" in the city of Denver.

Has the Underwear Bomber Hoax been Designed to Justify Naked Airport Security Checks?

I recently pointed out that the expose on the underwear bomber terrorist hoax has likely been driven by an undeclared political incentive,

Visible ‘terrorism’ effects, as illustrated above, can be manufactured for political reasons—example to justify the existence and or the expansion of government bureaucracies (such as US Homeland Security) or to promote interests of the military industrial complex or both.

Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, writing at the lewrockwell.com proposes this source of motivation,

But the real significance of this latest hoax is to introduce into the fearful American public the idea of an undetectable underwear bomb.

What does this bring to mind? Anyone of my generation or any science fiction aficionado immediately thinks of Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters.

Written in 1951 but set in our time, Earth is invaded by small creatures that attach to the human body and take over the person. The humans become the puppets of their masters. Large areas of America succumb to the invaders before the morons in Washington understand that the invasion is real and not a conspiracy theory.

On clothed humans, the creatures cannot be detected, and the edict goes out that anyone clothed is a suspect. Everyone must go about naked. Women are not even allowed to carry purses in their hand, because the creature can be in the purse attached to the woman’s hand.

Obviously, if the CIA, the news sources, and Dianne Feinstein’s briefers are correct that defeated al-Qaeda has come up with an “undetectable” bomb, we will have to pass through airport security naked.

In short, create a scenario to justify the TSA’s lust for naked security checks (perhaps this porno entertainment for them).

Could be.

Nonetheless the current trend of airport security checks has been dehumanizing and symptomatic of the expanding rule of tyranny.

False Flag: Underwear Bomber was a CIA Double Agent

From the Globe and Mail

The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of al-Qaeda last month to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner was actually a double agent who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, U.S. and foreign officials said Tuesday.

In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the agent left Yemen, travelling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his air attack and critical information on the group’s leaders to the CIA, Saudi and other foreign intelligence agencies.

This accounts for another example of what could be a false flag (Wikipedia.org)

operations are covert operations designed to deceive in such a way that the operations appear as though they are being carried out by other entities.

And this is why I staunchly adhere to the great Frederic Bastiat’s doctrine that aims to distinguish the seen and the unseen

Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference - the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.

Visible ‘terrorism’ effects, as illustrated above, can be manufactured for political reasons—example to justify the existence and or the expansion of government bureaucracies (such as US Homeland Security) or to promote interests of the military industrial complex or both.

Or seen at another angle, maybe the war on terror may have spawned their own monsters.

Quote of the Day: Terrorism Cannot Take Away Our Freedoms

The goal of terrorism is not to crash planes, or even to kill people; the goal of terrorism is to cause terror. Liquid bombs, PETN, planes as missiles: these are all tactics designed to cause terror by killing innocents. But terrorists can only do so much. They cannot take away our freedoms. They cannot reduce our liberties. They cannot, by themselves, cause that much terror. It's our reaction to terrorism that determines whether or not their actions are ultimately successful. That we allow governments to do these things to us—to effectively do the terrorists' job for them—is the greatest harm of all.

That's from Mr. Bruce Schneier, a security expert, in a debate on Airport Security at the Economist (hat tip Cato's Julian Sanchez)

How War Policies will Hurt the US

The economics of war will eventually weigh on the US.

The following is an excerpt from a must read article by investing guru Doug Casey (bold emphasis mine)

An AK-47 costs less than $500 most places in the world; the bullets cost about 20 cents apiece, and the teenager to employ them costs nothing at all. In fact, teenagers in the Muslim world are in such oversupply that they can be said to have a negative cost.

A US soldier, by contrast, is immensely expensive. Even though most of them come from lower socio-economic levels, a substantial investment has been made in taking them even through Grade 12. Then comes the cost of recruiting, training, equipping, paying, insuring, housing and transporting them in the military. I’m not sure the cost of a US soldier in the field has ever been accurately computed, but it has to be well over a million dollars for a simple grunt and much more for a specialist. That’s not counting the lifetime of pension benefits and medical care for the maimed. And with battlefield medical as good as it now is, the ratio of seriously wounded to dead is much higher than ever before. You may sympathize with the US soldier, but he’s definitely on the wrong side of the equation.

An M-1 tank costs about $5 million a copy. It, or any other vehicle, can be destroyed by an IED fabricated from fertilizer or unexploded ordnance. Even if it’s not destroyed, or not even severely damaged, the brains of its occupants are likely to be scrambled by the blast wave. This is, incidentally, something that is underappreciated. A blast wave bounces a brain around in a skull like an egg inside a tin can. Considering that IEDs are both devastating and extremely hard to detect, it’s no wonder they’re so popular.

Have you ever wondered why there’s no reporting on the numbers of tanks, APCs, Humvees, helicopters and other (immensely expensive) hardware being destroyed in the current US wars? It’s classified, because the numbers would be so embarrassing. Unlike in Vietnam, there’s no longer any body count of the enemy because that would be politically incorrect. But it doesn’t matter how large it is; every dead jihadi is a dragon’s tooth that will grow back as ten replacements. That’s why there’s really no way to win a guerrilla war before you go bankrupt – no way short of genocide or at least serious mass murder.

A $1,000 RPG will easily destroy a million-dollar armored personnel carrier and its occupants. A $10,000 shoulder-launched missile can take out a $10 million helicopter or a $40 million F-16. It may be practically impossible to shoot down a $1 billion B-2 bomber, but that’s academic; they were built to fight a nuclear war against the USSR. They’re useless except to deliver atomic weapons, but the new enemy lives in refugee camps and scattered within teeming cities. The B-2’s codename should be changed from Spirit to Albatross, because it’s not only totally uneconomic, it’s almost totally useless.

So the economics of guerrillas attacking an invading superpower are excellent. In response, the economics of a superpower attacking guerrillas or terrorists are disastrous. In its current wars, the US winds up using cruise missiles, at around $1.5 million each, to blow up wedding parties. The direct expense is bad enough; the vastly greater indirect expense is the creation of a clan of new enemies. The best result is for the missile to just pulverize some sand. Even if it hits a few mujahidin, that’s placing an implied value of several hundred thousand dollars apiece on their heads.

In other words, whether we’re looking at offense or defense, the economics of destruction are tilted not just 10 to1, not just 100 to 1, but probably closer to 1,000 to 1 in the favor of insurgents.

Perhaps you’re thinking further advances in technology will tilt the equation back toward the US. But as I explained above, the effect of each innovation will be just the opposite after only a short period of technological monopoly. People have a lot of misplaced confidence in the so-called "defense" establishment to come up with marvelous devices to confound groups designated as the enemy. Of course advances will be made, at least for as long as the US government has scores of billions to spend on R&D annually – which it soon may not, for financial reasons. But even if it diverts funds from its myriad other projects, the procurement process is stultifyingly bureaucratic, slow and costly. It’s not at all entrepreneurial, which it still was to a degree even during WWII, when the P-51, the best fighter of the war, was taken from concept to production in nine months and turned out for $50,000 a copy.

The US will even lose the war for new weapons as time goes on, simply because the Defense Department bureaucracy is so counterproductive. It’s like the company Dilbert works for in the cartoon pitted against millions of independent entrepreneurs in the Open Source world. Dilbert’s company moves like a dinosaur, while the Open Source world watches, imitates, innovates and improves at warp speed.

Today a ponderous state supposedly represents our side (I italicize that because, although I truly dislike many of the people it’s fighting against, I consider it to be an even greater danger). At best, it resembles a dim, tired old Tyrannosaurus up against hundreds of smart young Velociraptors intent on eating it. The outcome is obvious: a bunch of the attackers will get killed, but the T-Rex is dead meat.

Remember that there are more scientists and engineers alive today than in all of human history before them, the vast majority from non-OECD countries. The ones who are any good don’t want to work in a constrained, bureaucratic environment with no financial upside. Entirely apart from that, if the minions of the perversely named Defense Department come up with a real super-weapon, in today’s world it’s easy to replicate and improve on, and for a fraction of the original cost. That’s why there are scores of thousands of apps developed for most any electronic device that hits the market today – in addition to the device itself being "knocked off" illegally by small factories that could be anywhere.

Terrorism icon Osama bin Laden’s goal was reportedly to bankrupt the US. And the US has been fighting a 20th century modeled war, when times (or warfare’s evolving dynamics) has been dramatically changing.

In line with the way incumbent political institutions have been structured, the US political establishment has been failing to keep with the new realities (or with the emergent forces of decentralization). And at worst, they seem to be falling right into bin Laden’s ‘war of attrition’ trap.

Yet you can profit from terror (or political folly) as Doug Casey points out, read the rest here

Top Secret America: How Big Government Feeds On Fear

The Washington Post investigates how the infamous 9/11 has nurtured a leviathan.

Here is the Washington Post, (all bold highlights mine)

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

More:

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex," which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

The response by a former military official:

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview. "The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

Read the rest here

As General Douglas MacArthur once said,

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour -with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it."