Category Archives: WMDs

Apr 21 0 comments
Afghanistan, infidels, Iraq, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Terrorists, War, WMDs

War Records: July 17, 2003

State Speech

State Speech

No war is good, when taken from the prospective that a single lost life is a life never again capable of enjoying the fruits of endless debate on the simplest of matters.

But the vital point, or damn well ought to be, is this: The case in favor of overthrowing Saddam’s regime was overwhelming, even without a frosting of yellowcake. Despite the UN’s weakness. That’s why members of Congress from both parties voted to authorize the President to use military force against Saddam more than THREE months BEFORE the State of the Union.

Which of these smartie britch politicians would change their vote now?

In retrospect, the implicit case for overthrowing the Saddam (imagining himself the reincarnation of old Nebuccanezzar) remains persuasive. As days pass, more US soldiers and Iraqis are killed and maimed, and that is a sad fact of life outside the Gates of Eden.

Here in the US, soldiers remain safe, but the general population does not, where madmen and mother nature armed with weapons of mild destruction roam and spit and spar, and shit as they say, simply happens, and happens often. Tis true that these hyped and horrendous weapons of mass destruction have not yet been found in a nation the size of California, most of it dry indistinguishable sand swept by the winds, even more difficult to parse than haystacks, despite technology. Nor have we found Saddam Hussein. Or Osama bin Laden. But Saddam and Osama exist. They were a threat to every one of us. They still are, though less so now that they hide and seek more of the same in safe-houses and caves.

The matrix of rogue dictators, terrorists and WMD is the gravest menace faced by Americans and other free (or unfree) peoples alive in the 21st Century. That is why we so-called Independent thinkers, Republicans, Democrats, Americans, America’s old allies and new (e.g. free Iraqis) have our work cut out for us in the years ahead. And while I am an enemy of this pre-emptive strike doctrine, and fear the worse in historical terms, what’s done is done.

Let’s move on, fight the battle at hand to clear the decks for the future.

Apr 17 0 comments
Anarchy, Punk, Situationist, Time, WMDs

Whole Grains of Salt

Cracking Surface

Cracking Surface

DATELINE MARCH 29, 2004. It was bound to happen. It was bound to happen to me. After three and a half years of critical stagnation, or seven, if you count the ego-soaked swillibuster era—after compiling thousands and organizing hundreds of spewing streams of political, artistic, and theological treatise, essay, opinion, oddball blasphemy, jack wrong nonsense, half-baked curds and whey rolling up the sleeves of the duly infatuated—in a single absent-minded act of accidental shredding, the work that had filled my long gaps of inactivity has finally vanished. If I were more the conspiratorial flogstaff, I’d swear that old bean sprout leftie Len Bracken had something to do with this tragic miscue. Just yesterday, he had me worried that he wanted me to yank up some old 1994 manuscript files of a book I’d typeset for him. I still had them sitting on my drive, but wasn’t anxious to go digging for them.

This was my first mistake. I’d boasted instead of keeping my own counsel. And as is nearly always the case, I soon paid the price for my bravado, always finding new and ingenius ways to suffer the consequences of ego. Here’s my crash report to Bracken this morning:

Thanks again for the editor’s copy of your movie. I think I will take a few breaths before watching it again. In a completely unrelated event last night, I trashed and shredded my entire Scenewash Project, losing forever some 800 MB of text and graphics I had been collecting and coordinating as reference material for both the web site and my own stalled writing career, such as it is. Attempts to recover the data netted only about 200 MB of the original gigabyte of material including what was backed up by virtue of sitting on the webserver already in play, so that’s one small consolation. Bad news is that among the 800 MB was your entire archive of Guy Debord – Revolutionary, the cover I designed, the original typesetting, et cetera, all of which has been lost.

Young Guy Debord

A Young Guy Debord

The only remains of Len Bracken on my system are those web pages I created, and whatever is posted to the web site in the Situationist section where other “conspiracy” material was archived. Of course, I had the whole mess backed up on the wife’s machine, until I dumped it clearing out space in which to edit —yep, you guessed it—The Lazy Ones not so long ago you may recall. Now isn’t that a striking irony.

Apparently when I was thrushing out the the weeds I (or some ghost in the machine) managed to drag the entire Scenewash folder containing all these working archives into the trash, and when prompted to empty I noted the size of the dump was rather high for what I presumed was in the trash by choice, but failed to follow up my suspicion with a quick peek of the contents. Result was instant disaster and chaos, regrets in a handbasket.

Bowing to fate, all this so-called scholarly work has been lifted off my shoulders, for better or worse, for the foreseeable future. The weight has lifted. One day I will regain my strength to sort through what little I was able to recover, and merge them with my paper files, and perhaps only then be rightfully prepared to sculpt a work of art worthy of all those keystrokes and hours lost in sitting. Time will always kill a mockingbird.

This post is republished from the Project Scenewash archives.

Jul 28 0 comments
counterterrorism, Dar-al-Islam, Freedom, GeoPolitics, Immigration, liberalism, Marxism, National Security, Orwellian, Patriotism, Paul Revere, Stock Market, Stupid Undergrounds, Tactics of Domination, Terrorists, The Resistance, War, WMDs, World History

As We Awaken The Sleeping Giant

Vallely

Major General Paul E. Vallely, Ret.

MANY OF US WHO WERE ALIVE during World War II and slightly thereafter may remember the famous quote regarding America being the “sleeping giant.”

“Be fearful of waking her!” Do not wake a sleeping giant. This is an idiom which means: Do not disturb/annoy/provoke someone powerful who was not disturbing you in the first place. Japan woke a sleeping giant when they invaded Pearl Harbor.

Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is portrayed at the very end of the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora! and in the 2001 film Pearl Harbor, as saying after his attack on Pearl Harbor [was quoted in the film], “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” The quotation was abbreviated in the film Pearl Harbor (2001), where it merely read, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant.”

Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Randall Wallace, the screenwriter of Pearl Harbor, readily admitted that he copied the line from Tora! Tora! Tora! The film’s producer, Elmo Williams, had found the line written in Yamamoto’s diary. Williams, in turn, has stated that Larry Forrester, the screenwriter, found a 1943 letter from Yamamoto to the Admiralty in Tokyo containing the quotation. However, Forrester cannot produce the letter, nor can anyone else, American or Japanese, recall or find it.

In The Reluctant Admiral, Hiroyuki Agawa, without a citation, does give a quotation from a reply by Admiral Yamamoto to Ogata Taketora on January 9, 1942, which is strikingly similar to the famous version:

“A military man can scarcely pride himself on having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy’; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.”

Yamamoto believed that Japan could not win a protracted war with the United States, and moreover seems to have believed that the Pearl Harbor attack had become a blunder—even though he was the person who came up with the idea of a surprise attack. The Reluctant Admiral relates that “Yamamoto alone”—while all his staff members were celebrating—spent the day after Pearl Harbor “sunk in apparent depression.” He is also known to have been upset by the bungling of the Foreign Ministry which led to the attack happening while the countries were technically at peace, thus making the incident an unprovoked sneak attack that would certainly enrage the enemy.

After the war, a similar rumor disseminated among occupation insiders that upon learning the attack had been a success, Admiral Yamamoto had said to those around him, “Gentlemen, we have just kicked a rabid dog.” This would have been a tactical metaphor and not intended as an insult, since he was generally fond of America and Americans.

Today we play politics to death. We talk amongst ourselves and the politicians talk and talk in Washington. While I know rational thinking may ultimately rule, rational thinking without emotion ignores the passion that lights the fire of definitive action; and now is the time for definitive action.

Similar to the above quotation was another that, while real, was widely misinterpreted in the US press. Yamamoto, when once asked his opinion on the war, pessimistically said that the only way for Japan to win the war was to dictate terms to the White House, requiring them to eventually invade the United States and march across the country while fighting their way to Washington—i.e., Japan would have to conquer the whole of the United States. Yamamoto’s meaning was that military victory, in a protracted war against an opponent with as much of a population and industrial advantage as the United States possessed, was completely impossible—a rebuff to those who thought that winning a major battle against the US Navy would end the war. However, in the US, his words were recast as a jingoistic boast.

In a recent discussion with friends, we explored the issue of whether the United States is a “Sleeping Giant” any more, and if it is, what percentage of the population would constitute that “sleeping giant?”

Best estimates indicated that maybe 10-15% of America now would be considered the “sleeping giant” and the remainder of population is unaware of the serious threats to the United States, or are truly asleep at the “switch” and clueless to our continuing demise and weakening as a people and country.

Mohammad

Mohammad In Arabic

I listen to the unfolding, ever more negative news each and every morning and the continuing ineptness so clearly on display by our elected and appointed leaders. At once, while struck with horror, I now feel strangely disconnected from the passions it stirs in me. I walk the river near my home with my dog into the sunshine of Montana and I want, and expect something to be occurring in this country that will awake America today. Even here in the beautiful and rugged mountains of western Montana people are hiking, golfing, strolling, smiling and acting as if nothing of any momentous consequence is occurring in or outside the United States. Our belief in our safety and security is being shattered, yet strangely, people seem to continue as if there is nothing to worry about too deeply.

There are so many more threats and risks to our families today then before 9/11 and thousands upon thousands of Americans have been killed across the globe since. While walking my dog, I look at the faces of people with these thoughts in mind, and I see people who look strangely blank or “normal.” But this is not normal. This is acting normal in the face of insanity. Therefore, I cannot remain calm, I must act.

I find myself thinking about World War II and the refusal of the United States to aid the millions of people being killed by the Nazis. The safety of our American sanctuary was shattered by Pearl Harbor and we woke up. Denial was no longer an option, and isolationism was no longer the rule of the day. Today we play politics to death. We talk amongst ourselves and the politicians talk and talk in Washington. While I know rational thinking may ultimately rule, rational thinking without emotion ignores the passion that lights the fire of definitive action; and now is the time for definitive action.

Personally, I do not believe in turning the other cheek. Yet, I do not want to become what I so despise—a fanatic driven by virulence and hatred as to do violence. I do not sanction any kind of fanaticism, because fanaticism feeds on itself and is driven by blind emotion. It demands unquestioning obedience and intolerance, rather than acceptance of diverse and genuine viewpoints. However, I do not believe in passivity either. Nothing goes away until you are willing to take a stand that says: “you may not cross this line because if you do, this will be the consequence.” Well, I am convinced that this line has been crossed. You hurt my people, you hurt my country – you hurt me.

I do not excuse dishonesty, corruptness, and behavior by members of Congress and the White House. Behavior counts, character counts! If a child of mine is threatened, I become a lion. If my people are threatened I feel a personal sense of violation that I need to react to in much the same way. If my country is threatened, my patriotism soars to its highest level, and my blood boils. Punishment for this transgression of my person and my country’s boundaries and way-of-life is essential; it is in my opinion, mandatory as a citizen. Instead of our current dissolution and chaos, we must reunite and roar like the lion we are, the father who is reacting to a wrong done to his child.

Enough politicking and talk

Action and retaliation are crucial. We have been so afraid to be the lion, afraid to be seen as the bad guy, that we have NOT drawn the line in the sand and said: “you may not cross this line or these are the consequences.” To take a stand is not being the bad guy. It is quite the opposite, it is to be lauded; taking a stand with very clearly defined consequences is being responsible. We need to do more than simply reacting, we need to be pro-active.

I believe we must reclaim our status as courageous warriors, as outraged fighters, as the parents of the child that has been set upon, and say to those that have crossed the line and caused us pain: “there will be reprisal and punishment.”

I want to see our people; our fellow citizens do just that, not just as a reaction to the current economic and security threats, but on a continual basis. It’s the equivalent of being a parent who is afraid of being firm and setting boundaries, letting their child run out of control for fear we may be thought the ogre, and then reacts only situation by situation, each time confirming softness instead of resolve. That parent needs to step back, size up the situation and say this is what MUST be done now, so we do not have to face it again.

The response must be reprisal and punishment, in a manner that is civil, yet unmistakable in message, it has to go far enough to forestall similar activity in the future. We must change our political philosophy, awaken from our lethargy, erase our apathy and above all, we must abide by our well designed Constitution.

Similarly, it must be conveyed that it is folly and foolish for other countries to confuse our softness and courtesy with weakness. However, we ARE, more than ever, a soft country. Politically, we make so many mistakes; most in the name of misguided politics, foreign perceptions ill-understood, and isolationism. We do not speak out strongly enough about abuses to people in so many other countries, and the blatant evil that exists.

To confuse our softness with weakness is beyond STUPID, it is perilous and self-defeating, and you cannot fix STUPID with politicians who think and act as they do here at home today. When this country is threatened, when our allies face any external threat, we can be very dangerous, and our enemies need to understand this with clarity and utter fear. At home, concerning our internal problems and our outward projection, we, as a unified country, must change that perception for our country’s safety. We must act now, decisively.

I believe we must reclaim our status as courageous warriors, as outraged fighters, as the parents of the child that has been set upon, and say to those that have crossed the line and caused us pain: “there will be reprisal and punishment.”

In our American Exceptionalism, one borne of varied and mixed cultures, peoples with differing origins, of diverse religious affiliations; putting aside our petty differences which keep our combined culture fragmented, is crucial. I am one of those “Sleeping Giants” that has been awakened and want you to be awakened, and join me as a “Sleeping Giant” freshly awoken, a giant no longer asleep that sees the light of day before it is too late and is willing to ACT.

Please America…

Help Us Stir the “Sleeping Giant!”

MG Paul E. Vallely, US Army (Ret)
Chairman of Stand Up America

Apr 21 0 comments
Activists, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, War, WMDs

WikiLeak Revelations You Might Not Have Heard

THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A FREE PRESS to finally realize that you get what you pay for. That is to say, a propped up state-run press, an “abominable thing” feeding our mainstream media no longer the people’s voice but who seem entirely content to merely corrupt the people. Gone are the days of discover, parse, print, and serve. Now they spin, spaz, and punt, and then complain about an unlevel playing field of their own creation. We don’t even need to read or hear the news anymore, because the bias is so ingrained, so ubiquitous, we can already furnish the story ourselves. Yes, the story has already been told. There is nothing new here to consume in the name of all the news that’s fit to print. Here’s a clue for those who have been paying attention. Just connect the GODDAMNED DOTS! For those who haven’t been paying attention, and yes, these minions are restless, it appears your time is about up. You will be strategized, and you won’t even recognize the sound of your own voice.

WikiLeaks’ latest publication of Iraq war documents contains a lot of information that most reasonable people would prefer remained unknown, such as the names of Iraqi informants who will now be hunted for helping the U.S.

And although the anti-war left welcomed the release of the documents, they would probably cringe at one of the most significant finds of this latest crop of reports: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

“By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,” Wired magazine’s Danger Room reports. “But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal that for years afterward, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins and uncover weapons of mass destruction.”

That is, there definitively were weapons of mass destruction and elements of a WMD program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq when U.S.-led coalition troops entered the country to depose Hussein.

Predictably, the liberal media did their best to either ignore the story—like the New York Times and Washington Post did—or spin it. It’s not an easy choice to make, since ignoring the story makes you look out of the loop and hurts your reputation as an informative publication, yet spinning the story means actively attempting to confuse and mislead your readers. CBS News chose the latter.

Read it all.

Jan 22 0 comments
Asia, China, Communist, Cyber Security, GeoPolitics, Nuclear, Tactics of Domination, WMDs, World History

China In The Sky With Bombs

Chinese Missiles

Chinese Missiles

First impressions are all over the board, but generally the idea that although China offers no present threat, the fear is that if there were a stand-off over Taiwan, the Chinese might be tempted by the option of destroying US satellites. Worry is also being expressed by China’s near neighbors, Japan and South Korea.

Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, has stated the Japanese position that all nations must use space for peace.

Alexander Downer, the Australian foreign minister, while visiting New York, said Beijing’s ambassador to Australia, Fu Ying, had been called in for an explanation with concern that to have a capacity to shoot down satellites in outer space is not consistent with the traditional Chinese position of opposition to the militarization of outer space.

China is militarily weaker than many people think, especially compared to the United States. This, despite lots of showy jet prototypes and plenty of other factory-fresh equipment. But Beijing has a brutally simple—if risky—plan to compensate for this relative weakness: buy missiles. And then, buy more of them. All kinds of missiles: short-range and long-range; land-based, air-launched and sea-launched; ballistic and cruise; guided and “dumb.”

Those are the two striking themes that emerge from Chinese Aerospace Power, a new collection of essays edited by Andrew Erickson, an influential China analyst with the U.S. Naval War College.

Today, the PLA possesses as many as 2,000 non-nuclear ballistic and cruise missiles, according to Chinese Aerospace Power. This “growing arsenal of increasingly accurate and lethal conventional ballistic and land-attack cruise missiles has rapidly emerged as a cornerstone of PLA warfighting capability,” Mark Stokes and Ian Easton wrote. For every category of weaponry where the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lags behind the Pentagon, there’s a Chinese missile to help make up the difference.

The need is clear. Despite introducing a wide range of new hardware in recent years, including jet fighters, helicopters, destroyers, submarines and a refurbished Russian aircraft carrier, China still lacks many of the basic systems, organizations and procedures necessary to defeat a determined, well-equipped foe. Take, for example, aerial refueling. To deploy large numbers of effective aerial tankers requires the ability to build and support large jet engines—something China cannot yet do. In-air refueling also demands planning and coordination beyond anything the PLA has ever pulled off. As a result, “tanker aircraft are in short supply” in the PLA, Wayne Ulman explained.

That’s putting it lightly. According to Chinese Aerospace Power, the entire PLA operates just 14 H-6U tankers, each carrying 17,000 kilograms of off-loadable fuel. (The U.S. Air Force alone possesses more than 500 tankers, each off-loading around 100,000 kilograms of fuel.) So while the PLA in theory boasts more than 1,500 jet fighters, in reality it can refuel only 50 or 60 at a time, assuming all the H-6 tankers are working perfectly. In an air war over Taiwan, hundreds of miles from most Chinese bases, only those 50 fighters would be able to spend more than a few minutes’ flight time over the battlefield. Factoring in tankers, China’s 4–1 advantage in jet fighters compared to Taiwan actually shrinks to a roughly 7&ndash1 disadvantage. The gap only grows when you add U.S. fighters to the mix.

The PLA’s solution? Missiles, of course. Up to a thousand ballistic and cruise missiles, most of them fired by land-based launchers, “would likely comprise the initial strike” against Taiwan or U.S. Pacific bases, Ulman wrote. The goal would be to take out as many of an opponent’s aircraft as possible before the dogfighting even begins.

The PLA could take a similar approach to leveling its current disadvantage at sea. Submarines have always been the most potent ship-killers in any nation’s inventory, but China’s subs are too few, too noisy and their crews too inexperienced to take on the U.S. Navy. Once the shooting started, the “Chinese submarine force would be highly vulnerable,” Jeff Hagen predicted.

And forget using jet fighters armed with short-range weapons to attack the American navy. One Chinese analyst referenced in Chinese Aerospace Power estimated it would take between 150 and 200 Su-27-class fighters to destroy one U.S. Ticonderoga-class cruiser. The entire PLA operates only around 300 Su-27s and derivatives. The U.S. Navy has 22 Ticonderoga cruisers.

Again, missiles would compensate. A “supersaturation” attack by scores or hundreds of ballistic missiles has the potential of “instantly rendering the Ticonderoga‘s air defenses useless,” Toshi Yoshihara wrote. Close to shore, China could use the older, less-precise, shorter-range missiles it already possesses in abundance. For longer-range strikes, the PLA is developing the DF-21D “carrier-killer” missile that uses satellites and aerial drones for precision targeting.

The downside to China’s missile-centric strategy is that it could represent a “single point of failure.” Over-relying on one weapon could render the PLA highly vulnerable to one kind of countermeasure. In this case, that’s the Pentagon’s anti-ballistic-missile systems, including warships carrying SM-3 missiles and land-based U.S. Army Patriot and Terminal High-Altitude Air-Defense batteries.

Plus, missiles are one-shot weapons. You don’t get to reuse them the way you would a jet fighter or a destroyer. That means, in wartime, China has to win fast—or lose. “China’s entire inventory of conventional ballistic missiles, for example, could deliver about a thousand tons of high explosives on their targets,” Roger Cliff explained. “The U.S. Air Force’s aircraft, by comparison, could deliver several times that amount of high explosives every day for an indefinite period.”

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