Jon Stewart continued his coverage of the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ debate last night, focusing on Fox News’ incongruities harder than he ever has. In a segment called “The Parent Company Trap,” Stewart shared with his viewers how Fox News’ plan to “follow the money” from mosque builder Imam Rauf to terrorists will be a tricky one because it leads right back to Fox News.

Stewart showed clips from his show last week, in which he mocked Fox News for playing a dangerous game of association based on speculation, and wherein Fox continued to mention a nameless man with ties to Imam Rauf through the “Kingdom Foundation.” It turns out the man they are referring to but never name is Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the biggest shareholders of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

Showing a photo of the prince shaking hands with Rupet Murdoch, Stewart exclaimed, “That’s right, the guy they’re painting as a sinister money force OWNS Fox News.” Stewart then used Fox’s own logic to explain how the “terror mosque” is funded by Prince Alwaleed, despite being a co-owner of Fox News, and therefore funding terrorism. So, using their logic, Stewart said, “If we want to cut off funding to the terror mosque, we must, together as a nation, stop watching Fox.”

But with this new information, one thing is now uncertain. Did Fox actually not know the name of the Kingdom Foundation leader or that he is a News Corp investor? Or did they, as Stewart said, “purposefully cover it up because it didn’t help their fear-driven narrative?”

Stewart turned to John Oliver and Wyatt Cynac to figure out whether Fox is, in fact, evil or stupid?

ARTICLE SOURCE: Huffington Post.com

CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States “exporting terrorism”, 2 Feb 2010

This CIA “Red Cell” report from February 2, 2010, looks at what will happen if it is internationally understood that the United States is an exporter of terrorism; ‘Contrary to common belief, the American export of terrorism or terrorists is not a recent phenomenon, nor has it been associated only with Islamic radicals or people of Middle Eastern, African or South Asian ethnic origin. This dynamic belies the American belief that our free, open and integrated multicultural society lessens the allure of radicalism and terrorism for US citizens.’ The report looks at a number cases of US exported terrorism, including attacks by US based or ?nanced Jewish, Muslim and Irish-nationalism terrorists. It concludes that foreign perceptions of the US as an “Exporter of Terrorism” together with US double standards in international law, may lead to noncooperation in renditions (including the arrest of CIA officers) and the decision to not share terrorism related intelligence with the United States.

DOWNLOAD THE PDF FILE HERE

China inaugurated a missile plan in Iran last month, even as the United States and its allies were pressing Beijing to support a new round of tough economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program, Jane’s Defense Weekly reports.

It’s a military relationship that goes back two decades and, in light of Russia’s reluctance to provide the Iranians with advanced air-defense missile system to counter possible U.S. or Israeli airstrikes, is set to expand.

Robert Hewson, editor of Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, reported that the factory for assembling and producing Iran’s Nasr-1 — Victory 1 — anti-ship missile was opened March 7.

The Nasr is identical to China’s C-704 anti-ship missile, Hewson says. Iran’s burgeoning defense industry, much of it controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has been producing Chinese-designed anti-ship missiles such as the C-801 since the early 1990s.

The C-704, developed by China Aerospace Group, targets ships of 1,000-4,000 tons displacement and is the equivalent of the U.S. AGM-119 anti-ship missile. With a range of 106 miles and a 240-pound warhead, the C-704 has a kill probability of 95.7 percent.

The Iranians, possibly with Chinese assistance, have even developed improved versions such as the Noor, an upgraded version of China’s C-802, with a longer range than the original and over-the-horizon capabilities.

Indeed, Hewson observed that “Iran has gone further than China in fielding the C-802, taking what was previously a land- and ship-launched weapon and producing an air-launched version that can be carried by Mi-17 helicopters and fast-jet types.”

Over the years Iran has developed a range of anti-ship missile systems from the Chinese weapons that gives the Islamic Republic’s regular navy and the IRGC’s naval arm the capability to exert a considerable degree of control over waters in the Gulf and the Arabian Sea.

This is the area from which U.S. naval forces would strike if hostilities erupt.

Your UK Registered Office!
On Saturday, the IRGC concluded its annual three-day Great Prophet exercises in the Strait of Hormuz, the choke point gateway to the Gulf and a key energy artery, in a show of defiance against the United States.

The Nasr is a medium-range weapon that can be launched from warships or shore batteries and its development and planned mass production has been trumpeted by Tehran at a time when Iran’s military forces are making preparations to counter possible attacks.

“In a methodical and deceptively modest manner China has helped Iran take charge of all its surrounding waters and this work between the two nations continues,” Hewson reported.

“Follow-on versions of the Nasr are being developed to include an air-launched variant.

“There are other cooperative tactical missile programs under way and China’s design bureaus have displayed several ‘export only’ weapons (such as the C-705 lightweight cruise missile) that would seem set to follow the established route into Iran,” Hewson added.

“With such a solid relationship established between the two countries it is not difficult to see why China has been reluctant to commit to the Western push for sanctions against Iran.”

China, ever hungry for energy sources to fuel its expanding economy, imports around 12 percent of its oil from Iran and seeks to secure Iranian natural gas through overland pipelines — another reason it has shown little enthusiasm for new U.N. sanctions on Iran.

Hewson said no Chinese envoys were seen at the opening of the Nasr factory conducted by Iran’s hard-line defense minister, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, but the event marked “another milestone in the continuing military/industrial bond between the two countries.”

Hewson observed that unlike Russia, China “has been very successful in offering Iran technology and capabilities that are actually wanted, as opposed to those that might be ‘nice to have.’

“A path has been found through the factions within Iranian officialdom (and its armed forces) to deliver products that build trust in Beijing. In return, China gains influence with Tehran that can be parlayed into access to Iran’s natural resources.”

While these Chinese-origin systems have provided Iran with invaluable missile technology, this has had little or no impact on the development of its ballistic missile capabilities.

“Iran’s strategic weapons can only (ultimately) involve it in a losing battle with the United States,’ Hewson concluded, “but its tactical weapons have already altered the regional balance of power in a much more practical way.”

ARTICLE SOURCE: Official Wire.com

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of former intelligence and military officials, warns President Obama in a memo that Israel is preparing to attack Iran this month, and that Obama needs to publicly denounce such an attack in order to prevent a wider war and the ultimate destruction of Israel.

“We write to alert you to the likelihood that Israel will attack Iran as early as this month. This would likely lead to a wider war,” states the VIPS memo, which is addressed to the President.

The letter is signed by Phil Giraldi, former CIA (20 years), Larry Johnson, former CIA; DoS, (24 years), W. Patrick Lang, Col., USA, Special Forces (ret.); Director of HUMINT Collection, Defense Intelligence Agency (30 years), Ray McGovern, US Army Intelligence Officer, CIA (30 years), Coleen Rowley, FBI (24 years), and Ann Wright, Col., US Army Reserve (ret.), (29 years); Foreign Service Officer, Department of State (16 years).

Eat like a king, stock up at eFoodsDirect today!

The intelligence experts explain that Israel’s tactic is to launch the war suddenly and then make it politically untenable for Obama to do anything other than offer the United States’ full military support for the campaign.

Pointing out that Israel has habitually employed surprise and deception in furthering its geopolitical aims, VIPS warns Obama that misplaced trust in Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s assurances that Israel would not launch a surprise attack would be foolhardy.

The memo highlights Netanyahu’s attitude to how pliable he believes the American government is to satisfying Israel’s demands, making reference to comments he made nine years ago on Israeli television.

“America is something that can be easily moved. Moved in the right direction. … They won’t get in our way … Eighty percent of the Americans support us. It’s absurd,” said Netanyahu.

“As we hope your advisers have told you, regime change, not Iranian nuclear weapons, is Israel’s primary concern,” states the memo, adding, “A strong public statement by you, personally warning Israel not to attack Iran would most probably head off such an Israeli move.”

* A d v e r t i s e m e n t
*

The VIPS members appeal to Obama that only he can now head off an attack on Iran that could take place as soon as this month. But the group’s call on Obama to denounce a planned military assault on Iran is likely to fall on deaf ears, because Washington has been almost as active as Israel in planning an attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities.

A report in Time Magazine last month confirmed that Israel had convinced Washington to put the idea of a military strike firmly at the forefront of strategic planning. The report stated that US Central Command had been finalizing a plan of targeted air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities and that Israel had been brought into that process.

On Sunday August 1st during an appearance on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Admiral Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated that the military option remained on the table.

Any such attack would come from the air and would utilize B-2 bombers and cruise missiles as part of a knockout blow against Iran’s nuclear facilities. This would be followed by a velvet revolution in which opposition groups, which are largely controlled by the CIA and its allies, would overthrow the Ahmadinejad government.

Destabilization efforts in pursuit of this overthrow have been ongoing for years, the latest of which appears to be a claim that Ahmadinejad himself was the target of an assassination attempt today, a story the Iranian state media has strongly denied.

The U.S. government has been funding and training the Sunni terrorist group Jundullah, formerly headed by the accused mastermind of 9/11 Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to carry out bombings and other destabilization campaigns in Iran as part of a “campaign intended to destabilise, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs”.

As we have documented, political pressure is clearly being brought to bear on Obama in an effort to get the green light for the attack on Iran. Voices from both sides of the political spectrum are repeating the mantra that the only way to rescue Obama’s plummeting approval ratings is to rally the country behind another war in the Middle East.

Given this backdrop, it seems unlikely that the Obama administration would do anything other than vehemently support an Israeli-led attack on Iran. Perhaps the best way to try and stop such an outcome would be to appeal to current intelligence and military insiders who experienced the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction debacle at first hand and, as the November National Intelligence Estimate proved, are loathe to be hoodwinked into another staged war based on false pretenses.

ARTICLE SOURCE

WIKIGATE ?

There’s a theatrical quality to the publication of the Wikileaks Afghan logs that’s quite at odds with what they contain. You’ll recall that Wikileaks obtained a large number of classified field reports from US forces in Afghanistan and gave three media outlets, the New York Times, Der Spiegel and the Guardian, advanced copies of a small portion of the material, before publishing on Monday.

We’re told that they’re sensational, but this mundane and arcane collection of scraps of information has landed with a thud: it doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. Yet everyone involved has a role to play, and is hamming it up to the full. The oohs and aahs wouldn’t be out of place at a WWE Smackdown, or a Christmas panto. Something feels not quite right here, but what is it?

The star actor and media manipulator is undoubtedly Wikileaks founder Julian Assange himself. Assange plays the part of “master hacker” and “international fugitive” – cliches at home in an airport thriller. But recall that the template is Cryptome, a site operated by New York architect John Young for 15 years. Young doesn’t appear to need Assange’s theatrical garb – such as never staying in the same location for two nights, requiring cryptography, and changing his number and email constantly. Young’s name and address are prominent on his website, and haven’t changed for 15 years. Young has arguably has far more to lose than Assange. So the fugitive role Assange adopts is a lifestyle choice, and not a necessity. Nor does Young feel the need to become part of the story himself: he doesn’t do vanity PR: press conferences or proclamations are not the Cryptome style. On Cryptome, you come and get it. And crucially, you then work out whether it’s genuine or not, and how important it may be.

“Assange is a master at hiding his assets and providing hypnotic illusions,” notes Young.

The Guardian was scooped by the Telegraph with its expenses scandal and the newspaper’s financial position is more precarious than the other ailing broadsheets. Its top investigative reporters such as David Hencke and David Pallister have taken voluntary redundancy – it’s really down to a skeleton crew of just two, and it’s outsourcing its IT operations. You can be forgiven for thinking that the Wikileaks relationship is another form of outsourcing – with the fizz of the ‘glamour’ provided by Assange making up for the brains cupboard looking rather bare.

But none of this has stopped the Guardian – unlike Der Spiegel or the New York Times – from suggesting that it’s pioneering a new form of journalism: “data-driven journalism”, no less.

As many commenters have pointed out since Monday, The Afghan Logs is a subset of (apparently) 90,000 documents which don’t really tell us anything new. They shed no new light on strategic motives, or even tactical alliances. By comparing the Wikileaks logs to the Pentagon Papers, our intelligence is being insulted.

Information isn’t knowledge

Part of the problem is the weight given to “information” itself. In the Wikileaks Show, facts are a strange kind of stuff that almost appears to come from another planet; a luminous substance. This is quite similar to how a conspiracy theorist treats information. For a conspiracy theorist, a factoid is emblematic, it’s a cypher: it represents and stands-in for a wide set of power relationships. In the real world, these are much more complex and contradictory. By hyping a collection of factoids, the Logs become quite symbolic. They foreclose the analysis we must perform as readers.

The only journalist to explicitly highlight this problem is Brendan O’Neill, who points out that the Wikileaks Show leaves us feeling a bit thicker and more poorly informed than before:

“Truth becomes, not something we find out through critical study and investigation, but something we are handed by external forces … this is Truth as a religious-style revelation rather than Truth as the endpoint of thought, interrogation, question-asking, analysis. In reality, it is only through actively engaging with the world and its problems, through gathering facts and objectively analysing and organising them, that we can arrive at any Truth worth its name,” he writes.

The journalist Claud Cockburn, who created the foreign policy scandalsheet The Week in the 1930s that later became the model for Private Eye, and many others, made a similar point many years ago, in his essay Versions of Censorship. Cockburn wrote:

“To hear people talking about facts you would think that they lay about like pieces of gold in the Yukon days, waiting to be picked up – arduous it is true, but still definitely visible – by strenuous prospectors whose subsequent problem was only how to get them to market. Such a view is evidently and dangerously naive”.

Cockburn’s point – and do read it in his own words – was that stories began with a subjective point of view, around which the facts were organised. This idea of the journalist as a flawed medium was heresy, and perhaps upsetting, Cockburn recognized – but it was healthier, as it implied a rational, critical audience and demanded a plurality of “views”:

“One was reminded of the atheistic young man who has told the believer that he would never believe anything he could not understand, to which the believer replied, ‘Young man, your beliefs are likely to be small.’”

The internet has made concealment of information much harder, and that’s good. I’m not knocking the information distribution system Assange has created. But in the face of this, power doesn’t simply keel over and admit defeat. And Assange may simply have invented a new form of concealment – the information disclosed is both edited and highly selective.

The nature of news and journalism hasn’t really changed. We want the world explained, the dots joined, and factoids are a poor substitute, no matter how sensational the trappings. We know that information isn’t knowledge, and sometimes barely causes a ripple.

ARTICLE SOURCE

The White House accused online whistleblower WikiLeaks of endangering the lives of American, British and other coalition troops after it posted around 90,000 leaked US military records today.

The documents amount to a blow-by-blow account of six years of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

The White House condemned the document disclosure, saying it “put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk”.

The documents, including classified cables and assessments between military officers and diplomats, also describe US fears that ally Pakistan’s intelligence service was actually aiding the Afghan uprising.

The documents, dated between January 2004 and December 2009, are largely what is called “raw intelligence” – reports from junior officers in the field that analysts use to advise policymakers.

White House national security adviser General Jim Jones stressed that the documents described a period from January 2004 to December 2009, during the administration of President George Bush.

That was before “President Obama announced a new strategy with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and increased focus on al-Qa’ida and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan, precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over several years”, he said.

The New York Times said the documents suggested Pakistan “allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organise networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders”.

General Jones praised a deeper partnership between the US and Pakistan, saying: “Counter-terrorism co-operation has led to significant blows against al Qaida’s leadership.” Nevertheless, he called on Pakistan to continue its “strategic shift against insurgent groups”.

German magazine Der Spiegel reported that the records showed Afghan security officers as helpless victims of Taliban attacks.

It said the documents showed a growing threat in the north, where German troops were stationed.

While the documents provide a glimpse of a world the public rarely sees, the overall picture they portray is already familiar to most Americans.

US officials have already publicly condemned Pakistani officials’ co-operation with some insurgents, like the Haqqani network in tribal areas.

The success of US special operating forces teams at taking out Taliban targets has been praised by US military and intelligence officials.

And newly-resigned General Stanley McChrystal, who was leading the Afghan war effort, made protecting Afghan civilians one of the hallmarks of his command, complaining that too many Afghans had been accidentally killed by Western firepower.

One US official said the Obama administration had already told Pakistani and Afghan officials what to expect from the document release, in order to head off some of the more embarrassing revelations.

Another US official said it may take days to comb through all the documents to see what they mean to the US war effort and determine their potential damage to national security. The official added that the US was not certain of the source of the leaked documents.

US government agencies have been bracing for the release of thousands more classified documents since the leak of a classified helicopter cockpit video of a 2007 firefight in Baghdad. That leak was blamed on a US Army intelligence analyst working in Iraq.

Spc Bradley Manning, 22, of Potomac, Maryland, was arrested in Iraq and charged earlier this month with multiple counts of mishandling and leaking classified data, after a former hacker turned him in.

Manning had bragged to the hacker, Adrian Lamo, that he had downloaded 260,000 classified or sensitive US State Department cables and transmitted them by computer to Wikileaks.org.

Lamo turned Manning in to US authorities, saying he could not live with the thought that those released documents might get someone killed.

ARTICLE SOURCE

Something about this story sounds contrived and propogandaish.

This appears to be yet another example of Media tomfoolery. Heres an interesting post I found on ATS.

I am not sure if this is the correct forum so apologies if not. I was poking around CNN a bit ago and came across a story about Afghanistan and has an image of 2 soldiers. I just wanted to get some others opinion on it because to me the image looks sloppily shopped and I even made mention of that and the post was deleted on CNN’s site.

CNN LINK

So after taking a gander at the image myself, I had to agree something is out of place about this picture. The first thing my gianormous brain said was….”Pssst, thats photoshopped”.

Lets take a closer look:

And obviously I’m not the only person that that agrees, another poster on the site said:

Yeah these shop jobs are always so easy to confirm.

Just zoom in on the pic and look for bad cutting signs like straight lines or sharp 90 degree corners.

Then there’s this interesting bit of insight:

Lemme get this straight – The U.S. Military spends a Trillion Dollars a year on “stuff”, but they can’t afford Adobe Photoshop CS5 with the new “Content Aware Fill” and a more robust “Refine Edge” dialog (would have made it indistinguishable)?

The duder does look a bit deformed somehow (wrong respective perspectives?), but if it is a fake, it seems like conspiri-fodder to me – like it was meant to look fake to give us all something to jabber-jaw about.

I like how the other dude’s all decked out, but this cat doesn’t deserve the same protection. lol

But, when coupled with the fact that the OP claims his post was deleted from CNN’s website and the fact that each soldier has 2 different arm patches as noted below by another reader, something just aint right.

One soldier has MP on his shoulder, the suspected shop job soldier has TP?

Maybe focus on the units patches and the TP designation, to see what they are?

Could the shopped soldier have been an Afghan soldier? I don’t know, but it seems that the photo was manipulated to remove the identity of the one on the left..

Interesting..

Well if its any Photoshop experts out there that have an opinion feel free to leave me a comment.
This smells like smoke and mirrors to me.

SOURCE

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The document collection will shortly be available on a DEDICATED PAGE HERE

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and more than 1,000 US troops.

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama’s “surge” strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US naval personnel captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

In a statement, the White House said the chaotic picture painted by the logs was the result of “under-resourcing” under Obama’s predecessor, saying: “It is important to note that the time period reflected in the documents is January 2004 to December 2009.”

The White House also criticised the publication of the files by Wikileaks: “We strongly condemn the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations, which puts the lives of the US and partner service members at risk and threatens our national security. Wikileaks made no effort to contact the US government about these documents, which may contain information that endanger the lives of Americans, our partners, and local populations who co-operate with us.”

The logs detail, in sometimes harrowing vignettes, the toll on civilians exacted by coalition forces: events termed “blue on white” in military jargon. The logs reveal 144 such incidents.

Some of these casualties come from the controversial air strikes that have led to Afghan government protests, but a large number of previously unknown incidents also appear to be the result of troops shooting unarmed drivers or motorcyclists out of a determination to protect themselves from suicide bombers.

At least 195 civilians are admitted to have been killed and 174 wounded in total, but this is likely to be an underestimate as many disputed incidents are omitted from the daily snapshots reported by troops on the ground and then collated, sometimes erratically, by military intelligence analysts.

Bloody errors at civilians’ expense, as recorded in the logs, include the day French troops strafed a bus full of children in 2008, wounding eight. A US patrol similarly machine-gunned a bus, wounding or killing 15 of its passengers, and in 2007 Polish troops mortared a village, killing a wedding party including a pregnant woman, in an apparent revenge attack.

Questionable shootings of civilians by UK troops also figure. The US compilers detail an unusual cluster of four British shootings in Kabul in the space of barely a month, in October/November 2007, culminating in the death of the son of an Afghan general. Of one shooting, they wrote: “Investigation controlled by the British. We are not able to get [sic] complete story.”

A second cluster of similar shootings, all involving Royal Marine commandos in Helmand province, took place in a six-month period at the end of 2008, according to the log entries. Asked by the Guardian about these allegations, the Ministry of Defence said: “We have been unable to corroborate these claims in the short time available and it would be inappropriate to speculate on specific cases without further verification of the alleged actions.”

Rachel Reid, who investigates civilian casualty incidents in Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch, said: “These files bring to light what’s been a consistent trend by US and Nato forces: the concealment of civilian casualties. Despite numerous tactical directives ordering transparent investigations when civilians are killed, there have been incidents I’ve investigated in recent months where this is still not happening.

Accountability is not just something you do when you are caught. It should be part of the way the US and Nato do business in Afghanistan every time they kill or harm civilians.” The reports, many of which the Guardian is publishing in full online, present an unvarnished and often compelling account of the reality of modern war.

Most of the material, though classified “secret” at the time, is no longer militarily sensitive. A small amount of information has been withheld from publication because it might endanger local informants or give away genuine military secrets. Wikileaks, whose founder, Julian Assange, obtained the material in circumstances he will not discuss, said it would redact harmful material before posting the bulk of the data on its “uncensorable” servers.

Wikileaks published in April this year a previously suppressed classified video of US Apache helicopters killing two Reuters cameramen on the streets of Baghdad, which gained international attention. A 22-year-old intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, was arrested in Iraq and charged with leaking the video, but not with leaking the latest material. The Pentagon’s criminal investigations department continues to try to trace the leaks and recently unsuccessfully asked Assange, he says, to meet them outside the US to help them. Assange allowed the Guardian to examine the logs at our request. No fee was involved and Wikileaks was not involved in the preparation of the Guardian’s articles.

ARTICLE SOURCE

A young woman sits at a computer, she is highly intelligent, skilled and part of the US Military’s UAV Ground Control Station team. Three thousand miles away her target sleeps in his bed. Little does he know a Predator is bearing down on him and his companions, in their camouflaged hideout.

Silent and deadly the remote controlled UAV approaches it’s target. A minuscule time delay is followed by the lighting up of the militant hideout.

Target acquired.

Our beautiful and deadly assassin takes another sip of her coffee.

The future of warfare, a terrifying disconnected killing machine.

UAVs are launched at actual combat locations but flight control, and weapons operations are done by a mix of military and contract personnel sitting in the USA, often in communication and coordination with on-the-ground units. Control is fully electronic “real time” via satellite uplink/downlink, including computer controlled loiter mode.

This is the ultimate war by proxy. A proxy that takes the dehumanisation of warfare to a whole new level. The glory and honour of meeting your opponent in battle and looking him the eye is long gone, and has been for some time.

In the future many of our ‘soldiers’ will have the ability to treat the army as a nine to five. A quick day in the office fighting simulated battles thousands of miles away, then return home to their families.

However these battles are not just simulations, and they do not only affect the bad guys. In war civilians will always pay the highest price, and in this high tech cyber war this truth remains.

How many civilians have been killed in the U.S. drone war in Pakistan? The number could be as high as 320 innocents, according to an analysis released today by the New America Foundation. That’s about a third of the 1,000 or so people slain in the robotic aircraft attacks since 2006.

These figures do not take into account operations since October 2009, as we know drone strikes have been increased considerably since then.

ARTICLE SOURCE

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as though they are being carried out by other entities. The name is derived from the military concept of flying false colors; that is, flying the flag of a country other than one’s own. False flag operations are not limited to war and counter-insurgency operations, and have been used in peace-time.

Afghanistan’s Taliban warlords have developed a bizarre way to deal with foreign forces: they have trained monkeys who love to eat bananas and peanuts to be killers.

Taliban forces have taught monkeys how to use the Kalashnikov, Bren light machine gun and trench mortars. They also teach them how to identify and attack soldiers wearing U.S. military uniforms.

Ironically, the idea of training monkeys to fight was first invented by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA in the Vietnam War initiated a program that used the peanuts and bananas as prizes to train some “monkey soldiers” to kill Vietnamese in the jungle, according to a report by British media on June 27, 2010.

It is reported that these monkey soldiers are mainly composed of macaques and baboons hunted at an early age in the jungle and sold to the Taliban. These monkey babies who lost their mothers are sent to a secret Taliban training base one-by-one to become killer monkeys. Taliban militants use a series of rewards and punishments to gradually teach them how to use the lethal weapons.

Recently, a British journalist went to Pakistan and Afghanistan border of Waziristan’s tribal region where he witnessed a few of the monkey soldiers armed with an AK-47 rifle and Bren light machine gun. Taliban militants in the past have strictly kept the program secret.

However, Taliban leaders have recently taken the initiative show monkey soldiers to tourists of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area. Apparently, the Taliban look on monkeys as “propaganda tools.”

“If a person who loves animals knows the monkeys may be injured in the war, they might pressure the government to force the withdrawal of western forces in Afghanistan,” said one Taliban insider.

A senior U.S. military source confirmed the existence of the Taliban monkey soldiers, military experts call armed monkeys “monkey terrorists.”

SOURCE

Many people have speculated and asserted that this is a deformity caused by the U.S and Great Britain using depleted uranium shells as weapons in Iraq. That is quite possible however…since when have deformities included 3 toes with clawed hands and feet ?
You decide for yourself