Russia approves hike in defence spending

.... The President spoke as the Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, passed a 25 per cent increase in defence spending next year from $40 billion to $50 billion. Russia's three-year budget forecast includes further increases to $54.5 billion in 2010 and to $58 billion by 2011. ....

Walid Phares: To Contain Jihadism, You Need Pluralism and Democracy

The U.S. change of command in Iraq this week comes with violence levels at four-year lows and a slight reduction planned in U.S. troop figures. Although large-scale attacks remain a concern, many observers regard a weakening of al Qaeda in Iraq as a major reason for the reduction of bloodshed.

Walid Phares, a visiting fellow at the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, talks to RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel about Al-Qaeda's setbacks in Iraq and the future of its ideology.

He says young Muslim minds must be offered "a model of pluralism and democracy" as an alternative to a "fighting caliphate." ....

Current Credit Crunch Harbinger of Worse Things to Come?

Colonel Kenneth Allard (US Army, ret.)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in receivership. Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers going belly-up while AIG gets a government bailout to avoid even more chaos. And you thought Gordon “Greed-is-good” Gecko was only a fictional movie character? Personally, I’m glad to be living light years away from Wall Street as a transplanted Texan, where we long ago produced two people who had exactly the right idea about banks: Bonnie and Clyde.

I’m not entirely kidding but don’t miss the deadly serious point: things are going to get a lot worse unless we fundamentally change the way American financial firms operate, from Wall Street to Main Street. While former military officers aren’t expected to offer opinions on business issues, much of my writing and research since Enron has focused squarely on business leadership.I teach MBA’s and my2004 book, Business As War, argued that American business should exploit such cutting-edge 21st century techniques as business intelligence.

But it was only during a recent fight over identity theft that the vulnerability of our financial sector became vividly personal. Although I had never had an account with either of them, the fraud involved such prominent banks as Capital One and Bank of America, the latter easily the worst of the lot.

If you have ever wrestled with an inaccurate credit report, you can easily understand how the credit information game is played fast-and-loose by some banks. Capital One simply sent a blank check to a former address. Someone else cashed it by forging my name and introducing me to the world of steadily compounding credit card debt. The Bank of America account was opened using only a name and an address that were never cross-checked. Even worse, their “credit verification” data were entered electronically, without such rudimentary back-ups as a signature or a driver’s license photograph.

I did all the things you are supposed to do: placing innumerable telephone calls to bank voicemail systems (usually outsourced to Third World countries); writing angry letters to indifferent corporate offices and filing complaints with overworked local police departments. But eventually I cleared my name only through an expensive, year-long civil suit in Alabama. Even there, Bank of America stiffed trial subpoenas while an incompetent local judge declined to enforce sanctions.

So you might consider these tentative conclusions about the current state of the American establishment, financial and otherwise:

1. Who’s on first? Banks and credit reporting agencies have failed to verify the customers they are really dealing with, much less their ability to repay subprime mortgages or rising credit card debts. Often confused with data warehousing, better business intelligence systems are part of the answer. But even simpler common-sense practices – like picking up a phone and calling a prospective customer – can go a long way toward reducing fraud and bad debt.

2. The love of money: Really IS the root of all evil, but especially when banks are able to charge 37% interest on credit card balances, usury once available only from the Sopranos. With profits so high, small wonder that customer verification or preventing identity theft are all but ignored. The only thing that really matters is continuing to rake in all that swag so if some loans turn bad, what of it? Enough other schnooks will obediently pay their minimum monthly balances.

3. Bad structure compounds bad business. Wall Street now resembles what Marx gleefully prophesied – capitalists devouring other capitalists. But even he could never have imagined the perverse effects of aggressively decentralizing our financial institutions. Organized around innumerable stand-alone “profit centers,” effective leadership became impossible so what was everybody’s business became no one’s business. With disaster no longer being left to chance.

4. The best government money can buy. All you need to know about where the buck really stops is that two ranking Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee got sweetheart deals from the very same mortgage brokers they were supposedly overseeing. As George Costanza used to say, “Not that there’s anything wrong with it.” Indeed not, nor with those sky-high interest rates that are authorized by law, regulated by various Federal agencies and entirely controlled by the American Banking Association.
   

Free enterprise is a wonderful thing. On the assumption that these excesses might present opportunities, several of us here in San Antonio just launched a new start-up focusing on the competitive exploitation of business intelligence. With all that wreckage on Wall Street, a turn-around management firm seems like an awfully sure bet.

Editor’s note: Col. Allard will now be writing exclusive articles for FSM, using his background and expertise to discuss the military and emerging dimensions of national security – specifically, the economic and informational components of security, including business intelligence and cyber security. We welcome his contributions to a topic that is important to us all.

State-Local Discord Stalled Storm Aid at First

....Thousands of Houstonians waited, in some cases all day long at PODs — "points of distribution" — for food, water and ice and were turned away empty-handed Tuesday.

Why? A difference of opinion between state and local officials about the role of government in a disaster.....

U.S. Homeland Security To Utilize Physiological Screeners To Pinpoint Terrorists

Upper Marloboro, MD. (AHN) - The Homeland Security Department is pilot testing at a Maryland airport a prototype of a physiological screener to spot terrorists. The model bio-scans air travelers.

The model works like a lie detector machine by indicating large fluctuations in body temperature, pulse and breathing which are likely indicators of anxiety often exhibited by a terrorist or criminal. The prototype, called Future Attribute Screening Technology, scans passengers as they pass through a set of cameras.

According to Jennifer Martin, Homeland Security consultant, the FAST picks up things often not detected by human eye.

The department is on its second year of testing the system targeted to last five years. Over 2,000 screeners have been trained by the Transportation Security Administration to observe travelers and question those who appear to be agitated or nervous.

But agitation or nervousness must not be linked with criminal intent, warned Timothy Levine, Michigan State University expert on deceptive behavior. One possible cause of agitation is learning of a flight's delay. "What determines your heart rate is a whole bunch of reasons besides hostile intent... This is the whole reason behavioral profiles don't work," Levine told USA Today.

The FAST is one of the measures the Homeland Security has put in place to tighten security in U.S. ports of entry. Last week the department announced it granted $29 million to the New York City Police Department, which will attempt to prevent a radiological or nuclear attack in the Big Apple through the enhancement of regional capabilities to detect and stop illegal radioactive materials.

Making Better Use of Volunteers

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) should incorporate the resources of voluntary organizations such as the American Red Cross into its evaluations of mass care capabilities, congressional investigators determined in a report published Thursday, but FEMA disagreed with the recommendation.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) suggested that FEMA take some measures to improve its use of the capabilities of voluntary organizations in mass care situations, citing congressional directions to the agency in the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act to set up a comprehensive assessment system to evaluate national prevention and preparedness capabilities. FEMA, however, argued that it did not have the authority to follow the recommendation as stated because it cannot direct the activities of private sector resources. ....

Homeland Security 3.0: Making It National

by David Silverberg

WASHINGTON, DC—The next administration should leave the organizational structure of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as it is and concentrate on making homeland security a “national enterprise,” according to David Heyman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation, both Washington think tanks.

The two scholars unveiled their recommendations in a report, Homeland Security 3.0: Building a National Enterprise (to read the report, click here), which was unveiled at a press conference at the National Press Club yesterday. The report was the product of a task force that drew on the contributions of 23 other scholars, experts and executives.

A similar report four years ago, DHS 2.0 - Rethinking the Department of Homeland Security by the same authors provided the basis for the department’s Second Stage Review and its fundamental restructuring. (Click here to see the full report.) ....

Government plans bold financial rescue

Paulson says handling banks’ bad assets costly, but needed ....

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U.S. government should bail out of bailouts

The last thing government officials should do is try to bail us out of the economic crisis they are responsible for creating in the first place.

The lack of oversight provided by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank of the Banking and Financial Services subcommittee is unprecedented and should require the immediate dismissal of both men. Their decisions, which have in large part brought about the current market crisis, make the decisions made during Hurricane Katrina look like sheer genius.

Campaign contributions have a miraculous way of clouding any career politician's ability to make intelligent choices that would directly benefit the American public. They know those choices will greatly disappoint their 'masters' who run Wall Street and thus slow the flow of campaign money for re-election. ....

Government plans bold financial rescue

Paulson says handling banks’ bad assets costly, but needed ....

Nato plan for rapid-reaction force to counter Russian agression

Nato defence ministers were today reported to be considering the creation of a rapid-response military force to respond to Russian aggression.

The proposal, a compromise dreamed up by the Pentagon to reassure allies, was to under discussion at today’s Nato defence ministers meeting in London, the Los Angeles Times reported. ....

Taking a moment to remember those that made a difference...

(Compiler's note: MUST READ rca)

Once they were Soldiers....

Ed Freeman

You're an 18 or 19 year old kid. You're critically wounded, and dying in the jungle in the Ia Drang Valley, 11-14-1965. LZ Xray, Vietnam. Your Infantry Unit is outnumbered 8 - 1, and the enemy fire is so intense, from 100 or 200 yards away, that your own Infantry Commander has ordered the MediVac helicopters to stop coming in.

You're lying there, listening to the enemy machine guns, and you know you're not getting out. Your family is 1/2 way around the world, 12,000 miles away, and you'll never see them again. As the world starts to fade in and out, you know this is the day.

Then, over the machine gun noise, you faintly hear that sound of a helicopter, and you look up to see a Huey, but it doesn't seem real, because no Medi-Vac markings are on it.

Ed Freeman is coming for you. He's not Medi-Vac, so it's not his job, but he's flying his Huey down into the machine gun fire, after the Medi-Vacs were ordered not to come.

He's coming anyway.

And he drops it in, and sits there in the machine gun fire, as they load 2 or 3 of you on board.

Then he flies you up and out through the gunfire, to the Doctors and Nurses.

And, he kept coming back...... 13 more times..... and took about 30 of you and your buddies out, who would never have gotten out.

Medal of Honor Recipient Ed Freeman died last Wednesday at the age of 80, in Boise, ID......

May God rest his soul.....

Saudi Infiltration into U.S. Education

To hear and/or download the entire interview, click here.

Solution for the Wall Street Crisis

Cut off all medical, educational, legal and housing benefits to illegal aliens immediately. Deport all illegal immigrants now in jail.

Arrest, indict and try the CEOs and CFOs of Wall Street firms suspected of financial misdeeds.

Seize the assets of CEOs and CFOs when their chicanery is proven. Turn their ill-gotten gains over to the American people.

Fire Chris Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, for his criminal negligence in allowing Wall Street to rape the American economy.

Replace him with Eliot Spitzer, who, before he was taken down by the money changers, was the only one going after the criminals on Wall Street.

Stop the Federal Reserve from bailing out multi-billion dollar companies at the taxpayers' expense.

Fire Ben Bernanke and let him get a job at NYU Film School.

Fire Hank Paulson and let him get a job as a celebrity chef.

Click here and here and here for additional information

Congressman's son caught smuggling immigrants

TUCSON, AZ - The son of a U.S. Congressman was arrested in Willcox Sunday, charged with human smuggling. According to court documents John F. Boyd, son of Democratic Florida Congressman Allen Boyd, attempted to drive through a Border Patrol checkpoint in Willcox on Sunday with five illegal immigrants, including a 6-year-old girl. ....

Russia ratchets up US tensions with arms sales to Iran and Venezuela

.... The head of the state arms exporter said that he was negotiating to sell antiaircraft systems to Iran despite American objections. Russia has already delivered 29 Tor-M1 missile systems under a $700 million (£386 million) deal with Iran in 2005.

....Reports have circulated for some time that the Kremlin is preparing to sell its S300 surface-to-air missile system to Iran, offering greater protection against a possible US or Israeli attack on the Islamic republic’s nuclear facilities. The missiles have a range of more than 90 miles (150km).....

Villagers Storm School to Save 300 Children From Suicide Bombers

Locals attacked the Islamic radicals who kidnapped 300 school children in northwest Pakistan on Thursday.
Hundreds of armed people from 10 villages took part in the action.

Two of the suicide bombers blew themselves up during the battle another one was captured.
The children escaped death thanks to the brave villagers.
AKI and ROP reported:

Local people in northwest Pakistan on Thursday fought three militants and freed about 300 school students who had been taken hostage earlier in the day.

The residents stormed the primary school building in the Upper Dir district of the North West Frontier Province, bordering Afghanistan, where three suicide bombers were holding the children. ....