Britain’s most senior general in Afghanistan has cautioned against any significant troop withdrawal until late next year.
General James Bucknall, who is deputy to US General David Petraeus in Afghanistan, said the coalition had to hold on to recent gains, and should not send “conflicting signals” about its commitment.
The intervention comes amid debate over when the military surge implemented by US President Barack Obama should be wound down.
Earlier this month Prime Minister David Cameron announced that around 450 UK personnel are to be pulled out by the end of the year, and there have been hints that further cuts could follow.
The elimination of Osama bin Laden has added impetus to calls for operations to be scaled back.
Paul Joseph Watson GCN Live.com
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Two more ridiculous examples of the nanny state kicking into high gear add to the overwhelming weight of evidence indicating that America is in a state of terminal decline, with an overtly authoritarian big government enforcing a command and control system at every level of society.
Government environmental permits will now be required in San Diego for any kind of fireworks display, meaning state permission will be required for fireworks at birthday parties or any other outdoor event. Small-scale gatherings would now require an “environmental assessment” before they can take place.
“According to the strictest interpretation of this, jumpy-jumps and everything else would be subject to environmental review if this ruling stands,” said lawyer Robert Howard, who represented the La Jolla Community Fireworks Foundation in the case. “It’s a breathtaking ruling.”
Meanwhile in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church was fined $4,000 dollars by the city government for “improperly pruning its trees.”
“I just couldn’t believe it when I heard about it,” church member Eddie Sales said. “We trim our trees back every three years all over our property, and this is the first time we have been fined.”
The church was fined $100 for each “improperly cut” branch, bring the total fine to $4,000.
“The purpose of the tree ordinance is to protect trees,” Charlotte Land Development Division’s Tom Johnson said. “Charlotte has always been known as the city of trees. When we take down trees, we need to replace these trees,” adding that people whose trees are opposite a public street or on commercial land need to apply to the government for permission to landscape their own property.
The only way the church can avoid the fine is to replace all of the trees, a bizarre demand that illustrates how the farce is about nothing else other than the government deliberately abusing its power to make an example out of the church and intimidate others into blind subservience and acceptance of any ordinance no matter how bizarre.
As we have documented, a shocking acceleration of the nanny state in recent months confirms that the government has launched a total takeover of society under the pretext of keeping everyone safe, when in reality the move is a calculated coup d’etat against individuality and is designed to oppress and enslave the American people.
A brief recap of recent developments confirms America’s slide into an authoritarian command and control society, where big government steps in to regulate every aspect of people’s lives.
- Parents who attempt to take their kids out of their predatory public school system by home schooling are being spied on by authorities. A Mississippi state judge recently ordered that state officials gather the names of every single child is being home schooled in the state in order that they be kept on a list.
- Indeed, New York is the model for the rest of the country. The Department of Health has slapped strict regulations on anything deemed “risky recreational activities” conducted by programs or organizations. Wiffle ball, dodge ball, kick ball, freeze tag, red rover, frisbee tossing and tug of war have all been placed under the new rules. If an organization offers two or more recreational activities, with just one being on the “risky” list, it is deemed to be a summer camp and comes under state regulation which entails fees and the necessity to provide medical staff. “Classics like Capture the Flag, Steal the Bacon and Red Rover are also deemed dangerous in new state regulations for day camps,” reports the New York Daily News. This is all part of the process of the state replacing the parents as guardians of the children and it is designed to ensure that kids become nothing more than drug-addled, dependent slobs with no energy and no life experience, perfectly molding them to grow up as obedient, video-game playing, Clockwork Orange-style droogs.
- The government is also busy protecting us from Thomas Edison’s iconic invention, the incandescent light bulb, by banning the traditional bulb and forcing Americans to buy mercury-filled CFL bulbs that should be “kept as far away as possible from the human environment,” according to a new scientific study because they contain cancer-causing carcinogens.
- In their infinite wisdom, health authorities are pushing for Americans to be mass medicated against their will by putting statin drugs in the water supply, despite the fact that scientific studies have linked them to liver dysfunction, acute kidney failure, cataracts, muscle damage, depression, mood swings and memory loss.
- If any of the zombies break their conditioning and dare complain about their treatment, they are treated as criminals or terrorists. If you don’t like TSA agents putting their hands down your child’s pants or simply have an attitude deemed negative by a TSA “behavioral detection” officer, you will be subject to special harassment.
These examples barely scratch the surface of the nanny state offensive that has been launched as part of the establishment’s social engineering program.
The state is deliberately being extreme in its smothering takeover of society so as to shock and awe Americans into obeying without question. The move is akin to how a stallion horse is castrated and gelded in order to alter their behavior by making them docile.
These developments represent a total power grab on behalf of the federal government as it bids to become the supreme authority over Americans from cradle to grave. This is about a complete transformation and re-engineering of society.
It is imperative that Americans re-assert their individuality and the right to make their own choices and live their lives as they wish by resisting every encroachment the state makes as it tramples personal freedom.
*********************
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
President Barack Obama on Monday nominated Army Gen. Martin Dempsey as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, putting the finishing touches on his new national security team and starting what the administration hopes will be a gradual U.S. withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan.
In a Rose Garden presentation, Obama said he was moving Dempsey from Army chief of staff to the higher post overseeing all Pentagon and military operations, selecting him in part because of his past two tours helping lead the war in Iraq.
Dempsey took over as Army chief of staff in April.
“Marty, your tenure as chief may go down as one of the shortest in Army history. But it’s your lifetime of accomplishment that brings us here today,” Obama said.
If confirmed by the Senate, Dempsey will replace Adm. Mike Mullen, who is retiring when his term expires in September.
As Obama’s senior military adviser, Dempsey must balance the administration’s desire for the Afghanistan troop withdrawal with the Pentagon’s desire to keep as many troops there as long as possible to preserve fragile security gains. Obama has said he will start the withdrawal in July, and he expects all U.S. forces to be gone and the Afghan government to take over by 2014.
Is Texas Gov. Rick Perry the Bilderberg group’s Republican candidate-in-waiting in the 2012 presidential race? The shadowy globalist group is scheduled to meet secretly behind locked doors over the weekend of June 9-12 in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and AFP will be on location to cover it.
It is not without precedent to tap state governors for broader vistas. Bill Clinton at one time was the obscure governor of Arkansas—a land with strong Rockefeller influence since the days of Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. As governor, Clinton attended his first Bilderberg meeting in 1991 and was elected president about a year later.
Like Clinton, Perry has attended a Bilderberg meeting. In June 2007 Perry attended the Bilderberg confab in Istanbul, Turkey, making the mandatory promise of secrecy and to follow orders. At the time, Perry was chastised in the newly aroused independent press.
Speculation that Perry is the Bilderberg group’s ace card was prompted by the current political climate, which can largely be gleaned from the fact that Perry is a longtime, unwavering supporter of the NAFTA Superhighway and related infrastructure projects. These pave the way for the Bilderberg-supported North American Union (NAU) proposal that would merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
The word is that Bilderberg is concerned about the boring field of Republican presidential candidates. One of the current GOP candidates, former Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich, once told AFP, eyeball to eyeball, that he never had participated and never would participate in Bilderberg or Trilateral Commission meetings, although Gingrich is still a fervent globalist, nonetheless.
President Obama, as AFP has reported, is a tool of Bilderberg. He had been sought out at the 2008 Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Va., just before winning the 2008 Democratic nomination. While receiving his instructions from Bilderberg, the dutiful Obama appeared to be bobbing for apples.
But just owning the Democratic nominee won’t do, as Bilderberg likes to own both horses in a two horse race for the White House.
Bilderberg’s GOP favorite, such as he is, is starchy Mitt Romney, but the former Massachusetts governor keeps tripping over his mouth trying to explain his health reform positions. As governor, he imposed the kind of topdown mandatory healthcare reform that Bilderberg likes. As a presidential candidate, Romney is suddenly trying to explain how he opposes it. So, he is unlikely to be nominated. The rest of the field is also weak, but any nominee could be elected if the country remains in recession—something Bilderberg has engineered.
So enter Perry to “save the day” for internationalism.
In 2007, when confronted by the local press on his return from Turkey, Perry insisted that the Bilderberg boys do good work and Americans should be grateful.
But Perry appeared confused when asked about the Logan Act, which outlaws meetings of government officials with private citizens to make public policy unless they are held in public, not behind locked and guarded doors as is the case at the annual Bilderberg meetings.
Foes of the Logan Act argue that it passed in 1789, so it’s “out of date.” To this, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) responds that unless it’s repealed, it remains the law. And it has been amended and strengthened over the years, including in the 20th century.
Paul has called for a criminal investigation into Perry’s Bilderberg trip. “This information about him going over there and violating the Logan Act and getting involved . . . I’m just impressed that that’s in the ordinary media—I think that’s encouraging, too,” he said on a talk radio show, adding that Perry’s attendance was “a sign that he’s involved in the international conspiracy.”
Perry has repeatedly denied that he is running for president, but several campaigns have been put forth to draft the three term Texas governor. In addition, Perry keeps pushing himself as a Bilderberg wild card. At Republican events, he has described the type of nominee the GOP needs (like himself) without naming himself.
The Bilderberg backed NAU that he supports would erase the boundaries between Mexico, the United States and Canada. The plan is to expand the “union” throughout the Western Hemisphere, resulting in an “American Union,” similar to the European Union that is draining Europe dry of its former prosperity, with Switzerland— the location of the 2011 Bilderberg meeting—faring better because it’s neither an EU nor a NATO member.
His support of the Trans Texas Corridor within the state’s boundaries has been unflinching, since that is Texas’s part of the greater NAFTA Superhighway network to connect the NAU nations physically.
Bilderberg, true to form, wants the U.S. recession to continue throughout 2012 and for oil prices to remain high and increase further. This could make Obama a one-term president. But at this point it appears Bilderberg’s “other horse” is headed for the stable, to be groomed as their ace in the hole.
The Pentagon has announced that computer intrusions from abroad are to be considered acts of war against the United States and will be answered with conventional military force.
“If you shut down our power grid, maybe we will put a missile down one of your smokestacks,” a military official told The Wall Street Journal. In part, the Pentagon intends its plan as a warning to potential adversaries of the consequences of attacking the U.S., according to the Journal.
The Pentagon document is 30 pages in its classified version and 12 pages in the unclassified one. It concludes that the Laws of Armed Conflict are applicable in cyberspace as in traditional warfare.
The Pentagon established a new command last year, headed by Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the NSA, to consolidate military network security and attack efforts. Alexander told the Washington Post last November that the new outfit wants maneuvering room to mount what he called “the full spectrum” of operations in cyberspace.
The NSA announced its ambitious cyber security plan last year. Dubbed “Perfect Citizen,” it is designed to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to the New York Times.
According to the Post, offensive actions may include shutting down part of an opponent’s computer network to head off a cyber-attack or changing a line of code in an adversary’s computer to render malicious software harmless. They are operations that destroy, disrupt or degrade targeted computers or networks, the newspaper reported.
Alex Jones talked with RT about the Pentagon’s cyber army.
The United States and Israel apparently employed this doctrine when they inserted the Stuxnet worm on a computer network associated with Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran had not attacked the United States or Israel, thus demonstrating that U.S. cyber warfare efforts against official enemies are not limited to offensive capability.
Since at least 2003, the Pentagon has considered cyberspace a battlefield. A Pentagon document entitled the Information Operation Roadmap was released to the public after a FOIA request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006.
On October 30, 2003, then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld signed a secret order for the classified 74-page directive. “DoD’s ‘Defense in Depth’ strategy should operate on the premise that the Department will ‘fight the net’ as it would a weapons system,” the report states.
Rumsfeld’s directive notes the importance of psychological operations. “In the battle of perception management, where the enemy is clearly using the media to help manage perceptions of the general public, our job is not perception management but to counter the enemy’s perception management,’ said the chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita in December 2004.
The reported attacks on the Pentagon’s computer network have served to further boost the impression that crafty enemies are at war in cyberspace with the United States. It provided an impetus to attack official enemies. “Recent attacks on the Pentagon’s own systems – as well as the sabotaging of Iran’s nuclear program via the Stuxnet computer worm – have given new urgency to U.S. efforts to develop a more formalized approach to cyber attacks,” writes the Journal.
The Pentagon has publicized a number of alleged attacks, including “the most significant breach of U.S. military computers ever,” a 2008 episode in which a foreign intelligence agent used a flash drive to infect computers, including those used by the Central Command in overseeing combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, the New York Times reported last August.
In May of 2010, Richard Clarke, a former adviser to both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, warned that the United States should prepare for a cyber attack that he claims could cause destruction on the scale of 9/11 in less than 15 minutes.
Prior to the announcement by the Pentagon today, major defense contractor Lockheed Martin reported over the weekend that its computer network was infiltrated by shadowy adversaries.
“Officials had no information on the origin on the attack, but one of the US diplomatic cables released by the WikiLeaks website suggested that China had jumped ahead of the US when it came to cyber-espionage,” The Telegraph reported on Saturday, two days before the Pentagon announcement.
The government and the corporate media have hyped the marginal threat of computer attacks over the last few years.
In late February of 2010, CNN rolled out a slick propaganda presentation called “Cyber Shockwave” that posited a cyber attack on the United States. The aired scenario was created by former CIA Director, General Michael Hayden, and the co-chairs of the 9/11 Commission, former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) and former Gov. Thomas Kean (R-NJ). Other government insiders and establishment types participated, including former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and former CIA director John McLaughlin. The scenario sketched out a dire scenario of knocked out power grids and the prospect of the United States being pitched into the Dark Ages.
Dire cyber threat propaganda.
“How should the government deal with the threat?” we asked at the time. “Federalize the National Guard to deal with unruly mobs freaking out over the loss of electricity. Nationalize utility companies so the NSA and the government get electricity. The participants also recommended new powers be granted to the president. Not surprisingly, they declared the president has the authority to take unprecedented action against the states and the private sector under the Constitution.”
In April of last year, CIA director Leon Panetta said that the next “Pearl Harbor” is likely to be an attack on the United States’ power, financial, military and other internet systems, the Sacramento Press reported. Panetta said the United States faces thousands of cyber attacks daily on its internet networks. The attacks are originating in Russia, China, Iran and from even hackers.
The government and the corporate media are overplaying the threat of a cyber attack for political reasons. It is a key component of an effort to install a sprawling surveillance grid.
“It is alarming that so many people have accepted the White House’s assertions about cyber-security as a key national security problem without demanding further evidence. Have we learned nothing from the WMD debacle? The administration’s claims could lead to policies with serious, long-term, troubling consequences for network openness and personal privacy,” writes Evgeny Morozov for the Boston Review. “Much of the data are gathered by ultra-secretive government agencies — which need to justify their own existence — and cyber-security companies — which derive commercial benefits from popular anxiety. Journalists do not help. Gloomy scenarios and speculations about cyber-Armageddon draw attention, even if they are relatively short on facts.”
The supposed cyber threat now hyped by the Pentagon is not limited to foreign adversaries. Last October, Obama instructed the Pentagon to attack “cyberthreats” within the United States. “The Obama administration has adopted new procedures for using the Defense Department’s vast array of cyberwarfare capabilities in case of an attack on vital computer networks inside the United States, delicately navigating historic rules that restrict military action on American soil,” the New York Times reported.
In short, Obama gave the Pentagon orders to attack a supposed cyber threat within the United States.
