H/T Israel Matzav
Debkafile's military and Washington sources report that Ankara accompanied its hostile acts against Israel with swift permission for the deployment of NATO electronic warning stations on Turkish soil.
Turkey's eyes are fixed on the shared ballistic missile defense facilities the US established with Israel in recent years. Erdogan plans next to warn Washington that it will not allow the data incoming to the Turkey-based stations to be relayed to Israel thereby driving a hole in the missile shield America is building.
Turkey's aim is to drive a wedge between Washington and Jerusalem, derail their close military and intelligence collaboration and cast Israel out of the collective missile shield.
US withdrawal from this partnership under Turkish pressure would leave Israel wide open to Iran's ballistic missiles. Whether or not Ankara succeeds in this maneuver depends on how the Obama administration treats what looks in Jerusalem very much like Turkish blackmail.
Certainly, Turkey is playing to the Arab/Muslim audience with their current anti-Israel dramatics. And they are the inheritors of the Byzantine mind...
A rebuttal to that contentious Ay Pee article accusing the NYPD of bringing in the CIA to spy on innocent citizens.
Kelly is now in his second tour of duty as commish, and New Yorkers are extraordinarily fortunate that their streets have belonged to him for most of the decade since September 11, 2001, when nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens were murdered. You mightn't think so, however, if all you had to go on was the hatchet-job published by the News Agency that Dare Not be Named last week.
By the AP's lights, Kelly is running a rogue domestic-spying operation. To the contrary, the commissioner has crafted an unparalleled counterterrorism strategy. Ever mindful of civil rights and respectful of Islamic culture -- just as the police must be respectful of the variegated cultures in the Big Apple's ethnic goulash -- Kelly has kept the world's No. 1 terrorist target safe from mass-casualty attacks. He has managed this despite 13 known attempts -- and who knows how many others that cannot be spoken of without compromising intelligence sources.
The AP hit was compiled with scads of cooperation from federal-government sources, Islamist organizations, and the Lawyer Left (fancying itself the "civil-rights community"). Its timing is no coincidence. We are approaching the tenth anniversary of 9/11, which our community-organizer-in-chief is feverishly recasting as a "community service" exhibition rather than a day of national remembrance. The AP dropped its purported bombshell hard on the heels of "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States," Obama's recently published strategy for countering terrorism without referring to it as "terrorism" -- a term that, as the Blind Sheikh inconveniently points out, has roots in the Koran (e.g., Sura 8:12, in which Allah instructs Mohammedans, "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their fingertips off them").
Those responsible for protecting millions of lives cannot afford to be willfully blind to this sort of information. It indicates -- just as common sense indicates, just as Ray Kelly's experience indicates -- that you cannot have safety without intelligence. Police need to be a visible presence in neighborhoods. They also need to be an invisible presence. When there are signs of trouble, they have to have informants willing to be their eyes and ears -- meaning our eyes and ears. In Islamist hotbeds, they have to cultivate ties with pro-Western Mohammedans. They need to reach out not just to community leaders but to ordinary Mohammedans who do not want sharia enclaves, Mohammedans who are disposed to help police provide security but fear being ostracized as traitors if their cooperation becomes known.
Proactive, energetic, intelligence-based security is what Ray Kelly has forged. It is not an entirely new concept. It builds on Compstat, the crime-analysis and accountability system pioneered in the 1990s by Mayor Rudy Giuliani and NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton -- a system of intelligence-based policing driven by intensive analysis of crime data. The system drove city crime down by a remarkable 77 percent, and Heather Mac Donald sagely describes it as "the most revolutionary public-sector achievement of the last quarter-century."
In our post-9/11 reality, the imperative of crime prevention has been magnified into mass-murder prevention. Kelly has thus incorporated the tactics that have worked nationally: recruiting aides schooled in CIA intelligence operations to make police better at collecting and analyzing information, and establishing liaisons overseas with foreign police and intelligence services, recognizing that attacks inside the city are often triggered from outside that city and outside the country. But, as Kelly often emphasizes, the system operates within the rigors of law-enforcement protocols.
This is not martial law, and it is not "domestic spying." Investigations are triggered by reasonable, articulable suspicions of criminal activity -- people are not targeted just because they are Mohammedans. The police are trained to be culturally sensitive and to avoid giving gratuitous offense. But, at the same time, culture is not treated as immunity from investigation. Police are duly deferential to community leaders, but they do not delegate their intelligence-gathering duties to them.
#1
culture is not treated as immunity from investigation.
That's going to be a sticking point for CAIR, et al.
Of course, they'll find another way to spin that statement - "Investigation must be sensitive to all cultures" - even those that prohibit speaking to investigators without your guardian male present.
Posted by: Bobby ||
09/04/2011 15:29 Comments ||
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#2
If my HP-12C doesn't fail me, this being the 10th anniversary means the 15th should be two months before the 2016 election. That should be interesting.
[Dawn] Just when Sindh's former, firebrand, minister Zulfikar Mirza was proudly revealing to the media in Badin the other day that during his tenure as a minister he got 300,000 arms licenses issued to a bunch of ghairatmand citizens (those with a sense of honour), interior minister Rehman Malik Pak politician, current Interior Minister under the Gilani administration. Malik is a former Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) intelligence officer who rose to head the FIA during Benazir Bhutto's second tenure. He later joined the Pak Peoples Party and was chief security officer to Bhutto. Malik was tossed from his FIA job in 1998 after documenting the breath-taking corruption of the Sharif family. By unhappy coincidence Näwaz Shärif became PM at just that moment and Malik moved to London one step ahead of the button men. rewarded a boy in Bloody Karachi with Rs25,000 for breaking his toy gun.
While Mirza said he would do what he did over and over again if given the opportunity, so that every time an innocent person is killed in Bloody Karachi citizens will shoot down at least five terrorists, Malik urged little boys to not play with toy guns and promised to deweaponise Bloody Karachi.
Earlier, on the eve of Eid, Malik, while visiting the Bloody Karachi Saddar shopping district, had annulled the ban imposed on riding double by the city administration for the duration of Eid holidays. Mirza may be wrong on many counts, but when he says that Malik as a federal representative has no right to manage and run Bloody Karachi's affairs, and terms it interference from the centre into what are provincial matters, you have to agree that he is right.
If you look at the conduct of these two PPP ministers, you realise how deeply rooted the feudal mindset is in Pakistain. Whimsically issuing verbal orders to put the ban on riding double in abeyance and rewarding a young boy with Rs25,000 instantly, or issuing arms licenses to people and asking them to kill the terrorists, are actions that make a mockery of rule of law, and with it of democracy. Is there really no law in this country or administrative procedures to be followed to impose and lift bans in public interest, or for issuing arms licenses for that matter?
In any other democracy, Malik would have stopped at promising the young men in the street who asked for the lifting of the ban on riding double that he would request the competent authority to look into this demand to lift the ban at least for Eid holidays to facilitate free movement of youngsters.
But no, he spoke like a king; he first asked the lads to give 'him' assurance that no criminal activity would take place if 'he' lifted the ban. The boys readily gave the assurance, and voila, the ban was declared lifted, even though Malik had no legal authority vested in him to do so (the provincial government and the city administration are the competent authorities in deciding all such matters). Then, again like a king, he rewarded a boy with a cash award. Why? And wouldn't Rs500 have been a more decent amount instead of Rs25,000, out of the minister's own pocket, hopefully. Or has he come to Bloody Karachi loaded with someone's discretionary funds, tax payers' money or worse still, an expensive loan from international money lenders, to blow on such frivolities?
It is preposterous to be carrying so much cash in your pocket; it is vulgar to go around doling such sums out to show 'your' pleasure. Arab despots like Saddam or Qadaffy ...Custodian of Wheelus AFB for 42 long years... or absolute monarchs in the same region may do so because they are accountable only to themselves. When democratically elected leaders make such gestures, they only reveal their undemocratic mindset which says it all: 'I am king, I can do anything'.
This is precisely what is wrong with our governance. It simply lacks respect for the rule of law, decorum and all convention and procedure as laid out in the system. From the president and prime minister to the chief ministers and their cabinets (all elected individuals), just notice the abuse of the personal pronoun 'I' and its possessive form, 'my'.
At international forums, President Zardari calls the army 'my army' and the police 'my police'. PM Gilani, while ordering the release of the judges sent packing by Gen Musharraf (also verbally), declared in his inaugural speech in 2008, "I hereby order immediate release of all judges," to a roaring thumping of the desks by the MNAs. And the judges were released, because they were jugged under a similar verbal order given by President General Musharraf. Former foreign minister Shah Mahmood Quraishi suffered from similar delusions of grandeur as his interaction with US senators and Hillary Clinton ... sometimes described as the Smartest Woman in the World and at other times as Mrs. Bill, never as Another Dean Rusk ... showed. He, too, was all about 'I, me, myself' when he was actually representing his country and not personal opinion.
There is sharp contrast between how our elected leaders behave and how their counterparts from other countries do. When the Indian prime minister met Gilani in Egypt and Gilani asked him to revive the stalled grinding of the peace processor, Manmohan Singh politely told him that on that particular trip that was not the mandate given to him by parliament, so he'd have to go back to Delhi to consult the institutions that run the Indian democracy. While Gen Musharraf went to Agra to single-handedly decide outstanding issues with India, Prime Minister Vajpayee had to seek approval from his aides in the government and in the party on a clause by clause basis before he could sign an agreement. It was not given.
Our leaders really could use a lesson two in humility for starters. The day they learn to obey the law and show respect for doing things through the proper channel will be the day democracy will start taking root here. Until that day comes, the people will make little distinction between a dictator's and an elected leader's conduct.
Posted by: Fred ||
09/04/2011 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[6 views]
Top|| File under: Govt of Pakistan
Long piece (3144 words) In the Sydney Morning Herald pulling together many of the stories we've seen here at Rantburg, and adding further details. The author's conclusion: despair, agony, probable doom. The problem is, the alternative to fighting the jihadis is surrender... It will be interesting to see how General Petraeus' move to the CIA and the new man in his spot in the DoD change things -- a CIA quietly concentrating on finding and killing bad guys coupled with a beefed-up JSOC quietly concentrating on hunting down and killing bad guys, while the regular forces shape the battlefield, clear and hold, and get the headlines.
The West has spent billions trying to buy Pakistan's friendship but the jihadists are stronger than ever, writes Paul McGeough.
Search for a firm footing in Pakistan and there is none - all is quicksand ... strategically, politically, morally.
Here in south Asia, strategically sandwiched between failing Afghanistan and the China and India powerhouses, is a country in which journalists are abducted in the night by agents of the state and murdered; in which the only advance after a decade in which Washington has tried to buy friendship with cheques for more than $20 billion, is the expansion of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal - which is on the verge of surpassing Britain's as the fifth biggest in the world.
#4
The answer involves the "G" word. Reduce, concentrate and quarantine.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
09/04/2011 3:51 Comments ||
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#5
i wont sign off on a genocide, but the culture must die along with the ideology that feeds it.
Posted by: abu do you love ||
09/04/2011 3:59 Comments ||
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#6
The demise of jihadis and their culture won't happen absent a nuke or similar destroying a major American city, followed by overwhelming retaliation in kind. Otherwise our civilization slowly bleeds away as passive jihadis flood in and gain power with the help of obtuse domestic enablers.
Pretty depressing when the most hopeful outcome involves your enemy wreaking unprecedented carnage on your fellow citizens and visiting slaughter orders of magnitude greater on them.
#9
i wont sign off on a genocide, but the culture must die along with the ideology that feeds it.
Uh huh, you say that now, but events may change your mind later. My opinion is already formed.
As for the second part, that can only be realized by punishing the Umma collectively, brutally and without mercy. We will need to be, the strong horse.
Posted by: Secret Asian Man ||
09/04/2011 9:04 Comments ||
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#10
I think we've seen how to do it with minimal collateral damage. The imams show stark fear of satellite dishes because it reveals the outside world. We have the technology and the means to saturate even their primitive environment with this weapon that can ultimately undermine their own universe.
#12
If Pak is nuked, it will be for one of three reasons.
The first is that they pitched a nuke at India, trying some lame excuse that terrorists captured it and fired the missile, and India responds forcefully.
The second is that there is a protocol, which I have long suspected, that the US has told both nations that whichever one uses nuclear weapons first will receive full retaliation from the US. Of course this is solely directed a Pak, because India would never initiate fires, as its conventional army could once again whump the Pak army.
Three is "scenario X", which could mean that yet another player gets involved.
Agreed. It is however impossible to beat something with nothing. First we need to reestablish our western tradition. Only once we get our mojo back can we even presume to change, let alone banish, another culture.
Posted by: My two cents ||
09/04/2011 10:34 Comments ||
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#15
Economic depression has a miraculous way of restoring bourgeois values. A shame it seems to require so much pain.
Post-'60s liberals, with the president as their standard bearer, seek to make a virtue of decline.
By SHELBY STEELE
If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.
Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. In this liberalism America's exceptional status in the world follows from a bargain with the devilan indulgence in militarism, racism, sexism, corporate greed, and environmental disregard as the means to a broad economic, military, and even cultural supremacy in the world. And therefore America's greatness is as much the fruit of evil as of a devotion to freedom.
Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Streetas if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.
#3
Ulsterman's White House Insider:(Demon-Rat himself)
Insider: (Leans back folds arms across chest) You and too many godd**n Americans dont see it so dont feel so bad. You know, other world leaders see it. Putin. Sarkozy. Merkel. Harper Barack Obama is incapable of anything remotely resembling leadership, but he is also quite capable of the kind of dangerous arrogance that the very worst leaders in history possessed. (Pauses) Look, let me try and paint a picture for you a clearer picture of what Obama really is. If you were to step into the White House and see the man at work, or whatever the hell it is he calls it. Its not the same as what some of his own people are calling it I know that for certain. The jokes, the sneers that go on behind the presidents back. You want to see that picture? The real Barack Obama? Maybe then you might understand what the man is capable of really capable of.
"On reconnait les cons par ce qu'ils sont capable de tout"
"You recognize the cretins by that they are capable of anything"
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Hillary Clinton
