Sunday, July 6, 2008

Boeing, Lockheed, others may not fare well with Obama or McCain

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. warned its clients last month that Barack Obama would be "a negative for defense stocks" if he became president, because he will cut weapons programs that generate the companies' biggest profits.

Boeing Co., Lockheed Martin Corp. and other military contractors may not fare any better under John McCain.

While the two presidential candidates are hammering each other over their differences on Iraq, they share a skepticism over big Pentagon programs such as Lockheed Martin's F-22 fighter and the Army's $159 billion Future Combat Systems, a modernization plan jointly managed by Boeing and SAIC Inc.

"When you get beyond the issue of the war in Iraq, Senator McCain and Senator Obama sound remarkably similar on many defense issues," says Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia. ...

The Battle of the Surge Was a Win

Page 12 of a Government Accountability Office report published June 23 features data about the war in Iraq -- drawn from the Defense Intelligence Agency -- that must be central to the debate about what the United States does next in that country.

It indicates we have started to win a war we cannot afford to lose.

The GAO report is titled, "Securing, Stabilizing and Rebuilding Iraq; Progress Report: Some Gains Made, Updated Strategy Needed."

The key DIA data is presented as a chart, titled "Enemy Initiated Attacks by Month, May 2003 to May 2008." ...

Anatomy Of A Massacre (Caroline Glick Explains The Truth Behind Thursday's Terrorist Atrocity Alert)

Government and police spokesmen would have us believe that the carnage in Jerusalem on Wednesday was unavoidable. Husam Taysir Dwayat, the convicted rapist, burglar and drug dealer turned jihadist who mowed down innocent people with his bulldozer on Jaffa Road was not suspected of links to terrorist organizations. The sociopathic, violent criminal who had "returned" to Islam over the past month raised no red flags. There was nothing to be done. No one is to blame.

If the protestations of the government and the police that nothing could have prevented Dwayat from using his bulldozer to murder three people sound familiar, it is because they are. Immediately after Ala Abu Dhaim entered into Mercaz Harav yeshiva on March 6 and massacred eight students, government and police spokesmen said the same thing. There was no way to prevent the attack. No one is to blame.

These statements are no more than easy excuses for incompetence. ...

Commentary: Intelligence contractors need more oversight

In the aftermath of Sept.11, Vice President Dick Cheney famously warned that the war on terrorism would be fought on “the dark side, if you will,” using “sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.” ...

... In May, the Government Accountability Office reported that 2,435 former senior Pentagon officials had gone to work for 52 defense contractors, with 65 percent of them landing at seven key intelligence contractors: Science Applications International Corp., Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Raytheon. Of that total, GAO said, 422, or nearly a third, handle contracts related to their former agencies, while nine work on contracts over which they held oversight and decision-making authority while in government. Such a system is ripe for conflicts of interest and corruption. ...

How can the U.S. improve its human intelligence?

One of the most devastating elements of a terrorist attack is surprise, coming at a time and place and by means of an adversary's choosing. The two most costly of such attacks in my lifetime occurred on Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, and on Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, 2001, sixty years apart. ...

...Similarly, human intelligence can also be an important factor in helping our electronic tools focus upon unusual plans or activities on the ground. Each is important in early detection and analysis. Together, they can make an important contribution to the safety of our nation by avoiding surprise and miscalculation of the intentions and capabilities of our adversaries and are thus indispensable to our policy-makers in reaching sound decisions in the best interest of our country. Public source information must also be factored in. But if we want to avoid surprises like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 we must have access to closely guarded secrets. Humint cannot be an afterthought. It must be developed in advance and the intelligence community must be afforded the time and funding to make sure it is in place when it is needed. ...

Murtha Does It Again!... Says US Troops Just Break Down Doors & Kill Innocents (Video)

(Compiler's note: You've gotta go to this site to see the complete video of Murtha's latest comments and then you will also want to read some interesting comments to the Gateway Pundit.

By the Gateway Pundit
What's wrong with Pennsylvania?
Have they no shame?
How do they keep voting for this antiwar, anti-military detestable gasbag?
(Here's some advice to wcbstv-- Murtha is not a "strong defense advocate." He is a selfish man who has made it a habit of slandering the US troops at war!)

Democrat John Murtha does it again...
Murtha admits the surge is working but only because the terrorists "are worn out" and American troops aren't just beating down doors and killing innocents! ...

PS-- don't forget to see the video with Murtha's complete remarks.

U.S. reported to fear Israeli strike won't take out Iran nukes

Senior United States defense officials fear that a much-anticipated Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities would fail to destroy them due to lack of intelligence about their location, the Sunday Telegraph reported.

The British newspaper stated that evidence of the CIA and Mossad espionage agency's dearth of knowledge on the matter emerged during recent Israel-U.S. talks. ...

Cool crisis management? It's a myth. Ask JFK

by Michael Dobbs rca
WASHINGTON -- Imagine a President McCain or a President Obama receiving the following top-secret briefing from his national security adviser: "Iran has successfully developed a nuclear warhead and may have already mated it with a medium-range Shahab-3 missile targeted at Israel. A pre-emptive strike could trigger a nuclear exchange. What do we do, Mr. President?"

After recent exchanges in which the campaigns duked it out over national security, it's reasonable to wonder how either man would react to such an emergency. Chances are that in such a bind, our next commander in chief will want to consider how one of his predecessors dealt with the ultimate crisis, the 1962 standoff over Soviet nuclear missiles secretly placed in Cuba. Both sides in the presidential race have already invoked the image of President John F. Kennedy going "eyeball to eyeball" with Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War: the McCain camp to emphasize the need for firmness in dealing with America's enemies, the Obama camp to praise JFK for opening a dialogue with the Soviets.

But it's easy to draw the wrong lessons from the missile crisis. The history of those 13 terrifying days when the world stood at the nuclear precipice has become encrusted in mythology and riddled with basic errors of fact.

To use the 1962 showdown as a guide to handling modern-day crises, we must separate history from political spin. Kennedy and his aides had an obvious interest in stressing the president's cool resolve under fire. Camelot's court historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., has described the way JFK "dazzled the world" through a "combination of toughness and restraint, of will, nerve and wisdom, so brilliantly controlled, so matchlessly calibrated." Kennedy's Defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, declared that "there is no longer such a thing as strategy; there is only crisis management."

In fact, crisis management is an art, not a science. I have spent thousands of hours over the past three years assembling a minute-by-minute chronology of the crisis, combing through archives and interviewing American, Soviet and Cuban participants. I was startled to discover that the debates inside the White House (secretly tape-recorded by JFK) were often out of sync with events in the rest of the world. Much of what Kennedy thought he knew about Soviet actions and motivations during the crisis rested on flawed intelligence reports and assumptions. Far from being an example of "matchlessly calibrated" diplomacy, the Cuban missile crisis is better understood as a prime illustration of the limits of crisis management -- and the importance of the ever-present screw-up factor in world affairs.

Lest anyone think that faulty intelligence started with the Bush administration, let me say that I uncovered numerous examples of bad information flowing into and out of the Kennedy White House -- beginning with the celebrated "eyeball to eyeball" episode on Oct. 24, 1962, when JFK was led to believe that Soviet freighters transporting missiles toward Cuba had reached the U.S. blockade line around the island and turned around at the last moment. Declassified U.S. and Soviet records show that the Soviet ships were 500 miles from the closest U.S. warship at the moment when then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk famously declared, "We were eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked." The incident never happened, at least as depicted by Kennedy aides, Harvard professors and Hollywood moviemakers. Khrushchev had ordered his ships to return to the Soviet Union more than 24 hours earlier.

By contrast, historians have given scant attention to a much more frightening moment -- the accidental overflight of the Soviet Union by an American U-2 spy plane amid the swirling tensions of what White House aides called "Black Saturday," Oct. 27. Capt. Charles "Chuck" Maultsby was on a routine mission to keep an eye on Soviet nuclear tests when he took a wrong turn at the North Pole and ended up in Soviet airspace on the most dangerous day of the Cold War. Air Force chiefs failed to inform Kennedy and McNamara for an hour and a half that they had a plane over the Soviet Union, even though the Soviets sent MiG fighters to shoot Maultsby down and the Alaskan Air Command responded by scrambling nuclear-armed U.S. fighter-interceptors.

As I studied the Cuban missile crisis, I was repeatedly struck by modern-day parallels. For any future president struggling with an "Iranian missile crisis," I suggest the real lessons most worth learning from 1962.

1. The view from the Oval Office can be very limited. The president may be the best-informed person in the world, but there's still much that he doesn't know. The beginning of wisdom for any president -- certainly including JFK -- is understanding that you are groping about in the dark.

Consider just a few examples of "what the president didn't know and when he didn't know it." Unbeknown to Kennedy, the Soviets had deployed nuclear cruise missiles within 15 miles of the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the early morning hours of "Black Saturday" -- something I learned decades later, from interviews with Soviet participants and declassified U.S. intelligence documents reporting the movement of "unidentified artillery equipment." The missiles, which were equipped with Hiroshima-sized bombs, could have destroyed Guantánamo in five minutes.

Nor was this the only major failure to see the full chessboard. While Kennedy had relatively good (if belated) intelligence about the medium-range Soviet missiles capable of hitting the United States, he had no idea on Black Saturday where the nuclear warheads were stored and how they had been dispersed to various missile sites. As it turns out, U.S. reconnaissance planes had actually taken photographs of the Soviet nuclear-storage bunkers at Bejucal and Managua, 15 miles south of Havana -- but the CIA concluded that neither site could have been housing the warheads because of the lack of adequate security.

Kennedy was also woefully misinformed about the size of the Soviet troop presence on Cuba. On Oct. 20, following the discovery of the missiles, McNamara told the president that there were about 6,000 to 8,000 Soviet "technicians" on the island. In fact, there were 43,000 heavily armed Soviet troops on Cuba, equipped with tactical nuclear weapons targeted at suspected U.S. beachheads. Kennedy rightly rejected as too risky the Joint Chiefs' calls to invade, but he didn't know the half of it.

2. Somebody always screws up. When Kennedy learned that Maultsby's spy plane had gone missing over the Soviet Union on Black Saturday, his reaction was laconic: "There's always some sonofabitch who doesn't get the word."

Which, of course, makes precisely calibrated "crisis management" impossible. Kennedy understood that the chances of dangerous, unpredictable events occurring skyrocket once you set the machinery of war in motion. He knew that history is determined not just by the "rational actors" but also by the irrational ones -- the blinkered generals, the excitable ideologues, the prophets living in caves.

The president understood, better than any of his advisers, that events were spiraling out of control by Black Saturday. That's why he moved to bring the crisis to an end by sending his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, to meet with the Soviet ambassador to Washington and offer to dismantle U.S. Jupiter missiles in Turkey if the Soviets would withdraw their missiles from Cuba. That little detail remained a secret for nearly three decades, even as historians and journalists churned out books celebrating Kennedy's concession-free victory in his game of brinkmanship with Khrushchev.

3. Personality matters. The White House tapes from October 1962 demonstrate conclusively that Kennedy was the most dovish member of the 13-man Executive Committee of the National Security Council, known as the ExComm, that he set up to handle the crisis. On Black Saturday, most of the ExComm was unwilling to swap the obsolete Jupiters in Turkey for the Soviet missiles on Cuba. Kennedy "seems to be the only one in favor of it," Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Maxwell Taylor reported to his fellow generals. "He has a feeling that time is running out." So it was: Later that afternoon, the Joint Chiefs recommended a massive U.S. air attack on Cuba, to be followed by an invasion within seven days -- which we now know could have resulted in tens of thousands of U.S., Soviet and Cuban casualties, the nuking of the Guantánamo naval base and, quite possibly, full-scale nuclear war. We can only be grateful for JFK's restraint.

Kennedy derived his capacity for independent judgment from his own prior experience, both in and out of the White House. As the commander of PT-109, a patrol boat in the Pacific during World War II, he had learned to be mistrustful of abstract military theorizing. The Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961 had taught him to be skeptical of the assurances of the spymasters and the military brass.

Kennedy viewed history not as a propaganda argument to justify his decisions but as a cautionary tale. Earlier in 1962, he had read The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman's now-classic history of the way Europe blundered into World War I. He was so taken by the book that he asked all his aides to read it and had it distributed to every U.S. military base worldwide. The passage that impressed him most was a scene in which a German statesman asks why the war broke out and receives the reply, "If only one knew." Kennedy was determined that no survivor of a nuclear war would ever ask another, "How did it all happen?" only to be told, "If only one knew."

Had someone else been president in October 1962, the outcome might have been very different. We can only hope that the two men now vying for Kennedy's old job have absorbed the most important lesson of the Cuban missile crisis: that the choice between war and peace sometimes comes down to the decisions and judgment of a single, very lonely individual.

Michael Dobbs is the author of "One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War." He writes the "Fact Checker" column for The Washington Post

Businesses offer plans on hiring of workers

Under pressure from the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in two decades, employers nationwide are fighting back in state legislatures, the federal courts and city halls.

Business groups have resisted measures that would revoke the licenses of employers of illegal immigrants. They're proposing alternatives that would revise federal rules for verifying the identity documents of new hires and would expand programs to bring in legal immigrant laborers. ...

Al-Qaeda finds three safe havens for terror training

Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organisation, driven out of Afghanistan and defeated in Iraq, is re-emerging in strength in three alternative safe havens for training, operational planning and recruiting – Pakistan, Somalia and Algeria – according to Western intelligence and defence sources. ...

'Obama will immediately birth Palestinian state'

JERUSALEM – The Palestinian Authority is hoping Sen. Barack Obama wins the presidential election in November and expects Obama to immediately set out to create a Palestinian state once he takes office, a top PA official said.

... Abdullah, who is the former head of the Palestinian Communist Party, said the PA expects Obama to win in November. He said once the Illinois senator takes office, "he will immediately study the Palestinian cause and will try to push it forward."

"Obama promised he will not wait until the last period of his office to relaunch negotiations ... he will begin doing this since his first day in office unlike President Bush, who waited until his last period of power."

Homeland Security for Sale

(Compiler's note: This post is from Dec 2007, but the information is still interesting and the report mentioned herein is worth considering. Be sure you've taken your high-blood pressure medication BEFORE you precede)

Click here for a MSNBC video overview with an interview of an Air America personality -- the home for defiantly liberal talk radio

Five years ago, President Bush signed legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security. Over the past five years, the American people have become far too familiar with stories about DHS and its gross overruns on projects, the worst employee morale in the federal government, the inoperability of information technology, our exposure to cyber-terrorism or FEMA’s fake press conference.

Today, CREW is releasing a report, Homeland Security for Sale - DHS: Five Years of Mismanagement, detailing massive failures and billions wasted at the Department of Homeland Security.

The report can be found at www.homelandsecurityforsale.org. The website includes a video prepared by Brave New Films.

In the report, CREW details billions of dollars in waste and mismanagement of taxpayer dollars, for example:

• $24 billion has been spent, and at least $178 million wasted, on the failed Coast Guard Deepwater program;

• over $600 million has been allocated for unworkable radiation border scanners;

• $1.3 billion has been lost on the USVISIT program, which was never fully implemented; and

• projected $2 billion loss on the SBInet “virtual fence” border program.

CREW is releasing its report to hold those who run the agency accountable for its massive failures and to spark a public debate about how DHS can and must be improved in the next administration. The next President will have to fix DHS -- and all the candidates need to provide specific plans to address the massive failings outlined in Homeland Security for Sale - DHS: Five Years of Mismanagement.

In CREW fashion, we name names. The report is divided into five sections. For each, we name the worst offender and the runner up earning dishonorable mention:

I. Most Troubled DHS Component: FEMA

Dishonorable Mention: TSA

II. Most Outrageous Contract: Deepwater

Dishonorable Mention: Radiation Detection Portal MonitorsIII.

III. Failed Program: US-VISIT

Dishonorable Mention: SBI

IV. Component with the Most Serious Crime Problem: CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

Dishonorable Mention: TSA

V. Beneficiary of the Revolving Door: Tom Ridge

Dishonorable Mentions: Holman, Buchholz, Davis, Hutchison

The Department of Homeland Security is an embarrassment that would be comical if only our national security were not at stake. The agency and its leadership must be held accountable for its failures and pushed to do better.

This is a shocking and disturbing report. The American people deserve far better from their government. Much better.

What can you do? Ask your presidential candidate what he or she would do to fix DHS in the next administration. The massive problems at DHS have to be solved by the next President. If you get an answer, please send it to fixdhs@citizensforethics.org and it will be posted at HomelandSecurityForSale.org.

Eskimo Jihad

... Fjordman has written previously about Muslim attacks on Inuits, the indigenous people of Greenland, who are Danish citizens and have been for hundreds of years.

Here’s the latest installment in this sorry saga, as reported in Århus Stiftstidende. Our Danish correspondent Kepiblanc has translated it, and follows it with his own comments:

Greenlanders driven out of their homes due to racist assaults

Residents’ Board is powerless when it comes to young, violent Arabs assaulting tenants. ...

A Lion Roars: Al-Qaeda is Purged

By Richard Fernandez -- The furious attack against Al-Qaeda underway in Northern Iraq is a key element of the effort to shape the battlefield in the war on terror. But the fight is far from over.

.... Taken together these developments provide a rough, but fairly probable picture of what the situation will look like when the Bush Administration leaves office. Domestically, Al-Qaeda will probably have been reduced to insignificance, but remain dangerous within its dormancy. The Iranian militias will likely have been reduced to a shadow of their former selves, but still capable of occasional mayhem. On the international front, Iran will enter 2009 still unbeaten but Teheran will be casting an anxious eye at its protege, Hezbollah, which the US and Israelis will be trying to strangle. The Ayatollahs will look warily at the new Iraq, not only for the reasons of traditional geopolitical rivalry but also because the Iraqi Shi’ite south could be a sanctuary for political subversion against it. Most of all Teheran will be closely watching the United States bases in Iraq, knowing their utility goes beyond preserving Iraqi sovereignty but also as points from which the US can exploit any weaknesses in Iran.

All in all, the incoming administration will inherit a winning, but not a won hand in the region. Whether it holds up or folds up is up to them.

Obama website the latest thing that offends Muslims

As I noted here, Obama has been going to some lengths to make sure nobody thinks he's a Muslim. Nor has he been making any particular effort to add, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." This is an example of Obama's canny political calculation and tacit awareness that people are suspicious of the violent and supremacist elements of Islam, but the Perpetually Angry are angry again, and soon he may have to issue an unequivocal Islam Is A Religion Of Peace declaration. ...

Israel successfully tests missile interceptor: report

Israel has successfully tested a new defence system designed to intercept rockets fired from southern Lebanon and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, public radio reported on Sunday.

The "Iron Dome" system is expected to be fully operational within a year and will be able to intercept the military-grade Katyusha rockets used by Lebanon's Hezbollah militia and the cruder Qassam rockets favoured by Hamas. ...

Merkel Warns Food Crisis Could 'Destabilize Nations'

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has set a tone ahead of this week's G-8 summit in Japan by sending a starkly-worded warning to her colleagues about the consequences of rising food prices. The crisis, she wrote in a six-page letter to other G-8 leaders last Monday, might "endanger democracy, destabilize nations and lead to international security problems."...

‘Germ warfare’ fear over African monkeys taken to Iran

Hundreds of endangered monkeys are being taken from the African bush and sent to a “secretive” laboratory in Iran for scientific experiments. ...

...“Iran is very secretive,” said Manji, who has been exporting monkeys for 22 years. “They said it [the monkeys] was for ‘our country’, for vaccine. [They said] ‘We don’t buy vaccine from anywhere; we prepare our own vaccine’.

“But I think they use it for something else. You know why? Because they don’t go on kilos. Iran wants [monkeys weighing] 1.5kg to 2.5kg, [but] 1.5kg for vaccine is not possible.”3

... According to US intelligence, the pharmaceutical industry in Iran has long been used as a cover for developing a germ warfare capability.

In 2005 the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Iran “continued to seek dual-use biotechnology materials, equipment and expertise that are consistent with its growing legitimate biotechnology industry but could benefit Tehran’s assessed probable BW [biological weapons] programme”. Earlier this year it reiterated this.

...— Baboons are used for research into the brain, endometriosis and strokes. Vervets are often used for testing the effectiveness of new vaccines

Monkeys are commonly used to test vaccines for ‘biological weapon’ diseases such as anthrax and plague

— The World Health Organisation says mice can be used to test the polio vaccine. However, monkeys will still be bought and killed by some scientists to use their kidney cells to create the vaccines

Sniffer dogs to wear ‘Muslim’ bootees

Police sniffer dogs will have to wear bootees when searching the homes of Muslims so as not to cause offence.

Guidelines being drawn up by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) urge awareness of religious sensitivities when using dogs to search for drugs and explosives. The guidelines, to be published this year, were designed to cover mosques but have been extended to include other buildings. ...

A Betty Ford clinic for jihadis

It has been called the Betty Ford clinic for jihadists and within minutes of arriving at the Care Rehabilitation Centre on the outskirts of Riyadh, you can see why. The small complex, where the Saudi Arabian government is exploring a new way of reforming its wayward radicals, feels more like an exclusive boarding school than a Saudi jail.

Inmates have access to swimming pools, table tennis and PlayStations. In the evenings, guards and prisoners play football. An air-conditioned tent sits adjacent to the sports field, serving as a dining hall and common room where, when I visited, the prisoners were tucking into rice and lamb with fresh fruit for pudding.

In return for this privileged treatment, the prisoners – Islamic extremists, some of whom are convicted murderers – are obliged to attend lessons based around Islamic law and the jurisprudence of jihad. A team of psychologists teaches detainees how they should manage their emotions, particularly when reacting to world events. ...

Owner of broken rifle surrenders for 30-month sentence

A Wisconsin man today surrendered to federal authorities to begin serving a 30-month prison term for having a broken rifle, prompting the Gun Owners of America to issue a warning about the owner's liability should any semi-automatic weapon ever misfire.

"A gun that malfunctions is not a machine gun," Larry Pratt, executive director of GOA, said. "What the [federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] has done in the [David] Olofson case has set a precedent that could make any of the millions of Americans that own semi-automatic firearms suddenly the owner [of] an unregistered machine gun at the moment the gun malfunctions." ...

Iraqis lead final purge of Al-Qaeda

(Compiler's note: It will be interesting to watch and see how the standard media handles this one -- if at all.)

American and Iraqi forces are driving Al-Qaeda in Iraq out of its last redoubt in the north of the country in the culmination of one of the most spectacular victories of the war on terror.

After being forced from its strongholds in the west and centre of Iraq in the past two years, Al-Qaeda’s dwindling band of fighters has made a defiant “last stand” in the northern city of Mosul.

A huge operation to crush the 1,200 fighters who remained from a terrorist force once estimated at more than 12,000 began on May 10.

Operation Lion’s Roar, in which the Iraqi army combined forces with the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, has already resulted in the death of Abu Khalaf, the Al-Qaeda leader, and the capture of more than 1,000 suspects. ...