National Security

The Beach Head Has Been Established..

Leo Pusateri77 Comments

Many would like to portray the supposed #OccupyWallStreet movement as a spontaneous, grass roots effort.

Nothing can be further from the truth:

Billionaire financier George Soros’ fingerprints, for example, have been all over the anti-Wall Street campaign from the very beginning. And this week, the infamous hedge-fund boss publicly announced his sympathy for the protesters and their complaints about bailouts — despite the fact that he lobbied for even greater unconstitutional handouts to bankers in 2009.

“Actually I can understand their sentiment, frankly,” he told reporters while announcing a large donation to the United Nations. “I can sympathize with their grievances.”

But Soros’ support for the protesters goes far beyond his tepid public statements. In fact, the original call to “Occupy Wall Street” came from the magazine AdBusters, an “anti-consumerist” publication financed by, among other sources, the Soros-funded Tides Foundation.

And today, I received this email from Chris Browers of the Daily Kos:

Occupy Wall Street is spreading like wildfire. There are now supportive groups for the protests in over 250 communities in the United States and Canada.

Almost wherever you live, there is an Occupy Wall Street group near you. Many of these groups have already started their own local protests, while the others are planning upcoming events.

Daily Kos is joining with SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, to help grow this new movement of the 99%. We need to let the 1% know that we will no longer be silent in the face of the economic pain they continue to inflict on everyone else.

Please, pledge to join an Occupy Wall Street group near you. After you sign, you will be redirected to a comprehensive list of local groups.

Solidarity is beautiful,
Chris Bowers
Campaign Director, Daily Kos

Make no mistake about it, folks. The far left Soros sock puppets, under the direction of George Soros himself, have established a beach head. What was once ostensibly a grass roots effort are now the marshaled forces of Soros, SEIU, and other fellow travellers.

Much has been said by the usual suspects on the left of this country that #OccupyWallStreet people are just the leftward version of the TEA Party. But when did you ever see a TEA party demonstration in which its members provoked violent confrontations with law enforcement as a means of creating a propaganda opportunity?

And make no mistake–they mean to do violence. In fact, the violence is already occurring.

Note that President Obama has already signaled his not-so-tacit approval.

The ultra far whacko left of this country are making their stand, and have made their intentions known that they will resort to violence and outright revolution in order to meet their nefarious ends.  Via Obama’s failings, they are seeing a living museum of the failure that is Keynesian economics and neo-socialism, and they are getting desperate.  To borrow a coined phrase, they will not go quietly into that good night.

It is my contention that we are in the beginnings of an epic battle; a last-gasp fight for the very heart and soul of America that could very well evolve into the next civil war.

Be on watch, my friends. Be on watch.

Terror Threat Update

Mark Noonan38 Comments

From ABC:

On the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2011, terror attacks, the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement apparatus continued a feverish, around-the-clock effort to find evidence to corroborate an unfolding terror plot. (But) as (0f) early Sunday morning, none was in hand.

However, the picture authorities were working (on) had been fleshed out substantially since … intelligence from Afghanistan arrived Wednesday.

Authorities now believe, like several self-radicalized American jihadists before them, that the Sept. 11 anniversary plotters journey to jihad began in the U.S., took them to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in July and had them, according to the CIA informant whose information is the hard bottom of the case, return to the U.S. on Aug. 31 or Sept. 1 to carry out an anniversary bomb plot.

So far, no new intelligence has come in to support or discount the informant account coming in from overseas…

So far, so good for today…but today also isn’t over.  This is the revised threat – Americans who have turned traitor after having been propagandized in to thinking that the source of the problem is the United States rather than the Islamo-fascists.  If they are American citizens then they will, of course, fit right in…unless they do something overt, no one will really be able to tell who is the Jihadist.  Makes it very hard to run them down.

Let’s just hope our intelligence, special forces and law enforcement people are at the top of their form…and that they get the breaks.

The Terrorist Threat (Bumped)

Mark Noonan74 Comments

From Fox News:

Federal authorities are warning local law enforcement agencies of a potential terrorist threat involving car bombs that could coincide with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, several sources told Fox News on Thursday.

The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it had information about a “specific, credible but unconfirmed threat,” and the White House said President Obama was briefed Thursday morning and has been updated throughout the day…

Credible but unconfirmed?  Then why tell us about it?  I’d much rather the soldiers and cops just go after the “credible but unconfirmed” threat and let us know  about it afterwards…except, even then, maybe not:  when you’re hot on the trail of a dangerous enemy and you manage to catch him just before he acts, its not really a good thing to let the other enemies out there know how you did it.

There is something strange going on here…whether its just typical, Obama Administration incompetence or that they’ve actually lost the trail of terrorists and are just trying to make it look like they know what’s going on, I don’t know.  I guess we’ll find out by Monday.

UPDATE:  Hot Air has the details on the prospect of the threat being a ‘dirty bomb’.  Not good news if this is true…even a relatively small device exploded in Manhattan would be a gigantic blow to the United States.

San Diego Blackout

Mark Noonan75 Comments

Very strange – from NBC San Diego:

Communities across San Diego went dark Thursday afternoon as a power outage plagued parts of Southern California.

Southern parts of Orange County, Coachella Valley  and northern Mexico are experiencing outages as well.

Officials were unable to say when power would be restored…

…”Essentially we have two connections from the rest of the world: One of from the north and one is to the east. Both connections are severed,” said the SDG&E official, who also noted that the outage had prompted the San Onofre plant to be taken offline as well.

The FBI and SDG&E officials said the power outage was not related to a terror threat that officials notified the nation about at nearly the same time…

It is extraordinarily bizarre that both power lines went down at the same time – the odds against that happening are astronomical…if it wasn’t a terrorist attack, then just what was it?  However it happened, it makes you wonder about the security of our power grid.  Did some hacker break in and shut things down?

Very, very odd…

 

IDF General: War Clouds Gathering

Mark Noonan3 Comments

From Y Net:

Recent revolutions in the Arab world and the deteriorating ties with Turkey are raising the likelihood of a regional war in the Middle East, IDF Home Front Command Chief, Major General Eyal Eisenberg warned Monday.

“It looks like the Arab Spring, but it can also be a radical Islamic winter,” he said in a speech at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv…

The “Islamic Winter” is pretty much what I expect.  We are about to reap an ill harvest…sown since 9/11 by our political inability to carry on the fight with sufficient determination.  As it turns out, our campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven strategic dead-ends – because we did not follow up with the next, logical steps.

Not being privy to strategy sessions of the Bush White House  – and none of us will be for at least 50 years – I don’t know if there was a plan for follow-up to Iraq…but I perceive that there was, at least, a desire to leverage the fall of Baghdad in to a general offensive against all the Islamists of  the middle east.  Syria likely the best post-Iraq target, but it could have been Iran, as well…but we didn’t do it.  There was that moment in the summer of 2003 when Islamism was tottering and ready to fall…but we allowed ourselves to get hamstrung in Iraq, giving the Islamists a breather where they could regain their confidence and bog us down in a  counter-insurgency campaign…a campaign which never would have been possible for the enemy to conduct in Baghdad if we were threatening Damascus and Tehran.

What hamstrung us immediately was not the Islamists, themselves, but the American left…fearful that a continuing series of American victories would cement American supremacy and worse (for the left) relegate the left to political irrelevancy, the left decided that procuring American defeat in the war was necessary…so they began to fire up the anti-war movement, nit-pick every military error and slander the men and women who were fighting the battle.  The rest, as they say, is history…President Bush, whatever his desires might have been, was capable in the end of only holding on…refusing to fold as Johnson did in Vietnam, but being unable to resume the offensive and bring the war to a victorious end.

And now the Islamists are on the march – certain that in President Obama we have a leader who will not strike at the heart of the problem, the Islamists have stepped up their terrorism and their subversion.  Countering our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Islamists are poised to gain control of Egypt; Turkey is slipping in to the Islamist camp, Libya’s Islamists are making a bid for power…and Iran continues to build towards a nuclear force.  As this virulent form of Islam strides from victory to victory, the number and confidence of the adherents grows…they are feeling their oats and thinking they only need keep fighting a bit longer and harder for total victory to be theirs.  This, I think, is where General Eisenberg’s fear comes from…these nuts might start to think they can beat Israel and/or the United States in a stand-up fight.

They misjudge – Israel is still immensely powerful and even President Obama, if forced by circumstances, will fight.  But it must be remembered that aggressive powers routinely miscalculate the balance of forces.  Time and time again they discount the reserves of strength in their opponents…especially if they are tyrants and their opponents are free people.  Always keep in mind that it was sheer impertinence for Imperial Japan to attack the United States…the total balance of forces between the two nations was such that for Japan it worked out to national suicide…as anyone thinking clearly in Japan would have figured out in an instant…but no one thought about it; they counted on our weakness and their supposed spiritual superiority to carry the day.  Our Islamist enemies are thinking like that…give them control of a couple more nations, and they might think that it is time for war…full scale, conventional war.

We might be heading or a bloody mess in the middle east – literal  millions of lives are at stake.  It is to be hoped that things will work out differently.  But their working out differently is mostly dependent upon people of the Moslem world deciding against Islamism…a cool, rational understanding that war cannot achieve Islamist ends, and so should not be tried.  I doubt there is that sort of sense building in the Moslem world.

Let this be yet another lesson for us – and one I pray we finally learn:  if we’re going to go to war, at all, go all the way to war.  Identify all the enemies and destroy all of them as swiftly as possible.  Leave no sanctuary…no place where the enemy can retreat to regain strength and strike us again.  American war can only be war to the knife…to the utter destruction and unconditional surrender of the enemy.  If we aren’t willing to do that, we’d better not fight, at all.  If another war comes, let it be the last war we have to fight against Islam…just as the war against Japan was fought to the point where it was clearly the last war we’d ever have to fight with that nation.

Turks Expel Israeli Ambassador

Mark Noonan17 Comments

From the Washington Post:

Turkey said Friday that it was expelling the Israeli ambassador and suspending military agreements with Israel, signaling a deepening rift between the former strategic allies in the aftermath of last year’s deadly Israeli raid on a Turkish ship leading an aid flotilla to Gaza.

The crisis with Turkey comes as Israel faces strained relations with another longtime regional ally, Egypt, over a deadly border incident last month, and it raises the prospect of Israel’s increasing isolation in the region at a time of tumultuous change.

Turkey announced its move ahead of the publication of a U.N. report that found that while Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip was legal, its commandos had used “excessive and unreasonable” force when they boarded the vessel, the Mavi Marmara, and killed nine Turks in clashes with activists…

That report is bound to be nothing more than another bit of UN Israel-bashing.  “Excessive and unreasonable” is a subjective judgment and, at the end of the day, Israel wouldn’t have had to use any force, at all, if the flotilla people had simply obeyed the law.  You go to break a blockade and you’re engaging in an act of war…Israel could have just torpedoed the flotilla and still would have been within the law.

But Turkey is taking this bogus incident as an excuse to expel the Israeli ambassador, and that means something.  Turkey, increasingly Islamist, is breaking its ties with Israel and lining on the side of the Jihadists.  This is a watershed moment – it is the end of any large, powerful Moslem nation even making an effort to be Western and civilized.  We can now expect increased pressure on Iraq to toe the Islamist line, especially if any sort of Moslem Brotherhood government emerges in Egypt.  We’re back to 1967 in middle eastern affairs but with a much more virulent strain of anti-Israel and anti-US sentiment in the area.

Our response should be to cut off all military ties with both Turkey and Egypt and refuse both nations any aid.  If we can keep Iraq in our camp that would be great…and we should offer strong inducements to the Iraqis to partner with us, lest they be swallowed up by Turkey, Iran or a combination of both.  But we have to be prepared for Iraq to cut ties with us, as well…they are placed in a difficult position and may decide that it is better to get along with everyone than count on an increasingly distant and distracted United States.

It could be that wiser heads will prevail and all this will blow over – but if the Islamic world really wants to fight, then there’s not much we can do about it, except to fight them.

The Need for a Nuclear Build Up

Mark Noonan24 Comments

Part of the problem with getting slip shod and thinking that the world has changed is that those who are determined and know it hasn’t changed can steal a march on you – China is doing this.  From the Washington Times:

China is expanding its nuclear forces with a new multiwarhead mobile missile and keeps its strategic stockpiles in deep underground bunkers, the Pentagon disclosed in its annual report to Congress on the Chinese military.

China is thought to have up to 75 long-range nuclear missiles, including hard-to-find, road-mobile DF-31 and DF-31A intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), according to the report, which was released Wednesday. China also has 120 intermediate- and medium-range missiles…

The additional information that China has developed a massive underground network to protect its nuclear force indicates that China is reaching for a first class nuclear force – something which will give China the strategic ability to start wars, and then retreat behind a nuclear umbrella if the war does not go in China’s favor.  While the United States maintains sufficient nuclear force to destroy the Chinese population, we may lack means to strike hard a China’s nuclear force.  And massacring Chinese is not making war – no decent American government would ever contemplate doing that except in the extremity of the Chinese government massacring the American people via nuclear war.

While China is building a 21st century nuclear force, the United States has not produced a nuclear weapon in 20 years – and recent (asinine) nuclear agreements require us to reduce our aging force to 2,200 warheads or less – none of which, I’ll bet, are capable of penetrating China’s very hardened nuclear sites.  While the Strategic Defense Initiative  will increasingly protect us from an “out of the blue” nuclear strike, the fact that we lack “first strike” capability  (ie, the ability to hit it so hard that any response would be suicidal on China’s part) gives China immense strategic flexibility.

They can use this flexibility to start wars – on their own or via proxies like North Korea – with impunity.  If we fight and lose, China is happy – if we fight and win, we can’t fight it to a finish because China can retreat behind a nuclear umbrella and threaten a massive attack against the United States if we go for total victory.  We must redress this strategic balance.

First and foremost must come the most aggressive possible deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative.  Technology is advancing so fast that we may soon have the capability even of thwarting a massed attack upon the United States.  This will go far towards curbing any Chinese nuclear-armed ambitions.  But crucial to a balanced nuclear strategy is the ability to wipe out all or most of China’s nuclear force in a first strike.  This will take new types of warheads designed for deep penetration, as well as the most advanced targeting systems to ensure we hit the target squarely.

It is time to wake up from the 1991 false hope that strategic nuclear thinking was obsolete.  We live in a world of nuclear weapons, and those weapons are simply going to spread, and more and more nations will develope the capability of hitting the United States.  As in all things military, the safety of the United States lays in maintaining an overwhelming qualitative edge.  In 1991, we easily had that over China – we very likely still do, but we won’t have it for long, if we don’t start rebuilding our nuclear force.  This is not a plea, necessarily, for more warheads than we have now but, instead, a plea that the warheads we have be of the latest technology, and fitting for our needs…and our need right now is to be able to destroy deeply buried nuclear sites (and not just in China – Iran and North Korea also deeply bury their nuclear forces).

The real world goes on, whether we will or no…time get back in to it as far as nuclear weapons are concerned.

 

Dealing With China’s Aircraft Carrier

Mark Noonan47 Comments

How Obama is dealing with it:

As China’s first aircraft carrier takes to the open seas today for its inaugural sea trials, the U.S. government directed a pointed question at the Chinese military: Why would you need a warship like that?

“We would welcome any kind of explanation that China would like to give for needing this kind of equipment,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland told reporters today. “We have had concerns for some time and we’ve been quite open with them with regard to the lack of transparency from China regarding its power projection and its lack of access and denial of capabilities.”…

Why would they want a carrier?  Uh, here’s a clue, guys – to challenge us.  You know, the only nation with a genuine navy and a substantial carrier force.

Now, there are two actual ways we can deal with this – grimly announce that we will always maintain at least three aircraft carriers for each Chinese carrier, or we can “Copenhagen” it.

Asserting that we’ll always build sufficient to be overwhelmingly powerful is essentially what Britain did in the early 20th century when challenged in battleships by Imperial Germany – after a certain point, asserting to Germany that Britain would lay two keels to one in order to maintain an overwhelmingly superior force no matter what the Germans built.  This is a fine response, but it does tend to a long-term increasing of tensions…in other words, it is an arms race.

The other way – “Copenhagen” – involves sinking the Chinese carrier.  The reason for describing it as “Copenhagen” is because in 1801 the British attacked and destroyed the Danish fleet in Copenhagen because of a concern that it might cooperate with the French against Britain.  This does have its attendant risk of full scale war, but it also is a complete solution to the problem…even if there is a war, one side then lacks a fleet to prosecute the war, so the conflict becomes rather one-sided.

I’d prefer we just sent a submarine over to Chinese waters and sank the blasted Chinese carrier.  They have no business having such weapons – the seas belong to us, won at great cost in blood and treasure and as we keep them freely open for navigation, no one has any need to challenge the United States in this area.  Unless, of course, they are envisioning a life-and-death struggle with us.  China is either just idiotically flexing muscle, or is seeking to be an existential challenge to the United States.  In neither case is it worth our while to just sit tight and let China build up a fleet.

But, you say, wouldn’t China go to war with us if we did that?  I doubt it.  Remember, the rulers of China are corrupt despots sitting atop an increasingly restive Chinese population.  Their economy is teetering on the edge of disaster and only massive exports to the United States keeps them afloat.  They don’t, at this time, have the capability of projecting power against the United States, nor our main Pacific bases.  War with us at this juncture would be entirely too costly – and so they won’t do it.  They’d complain and threaten and bluster…but at the end of the day they’d just have to take it.  And learn a valuable lesson – don’t bother putting money in to a fleet because when you put it to sea, we’re just going to sink it.

At any event, we do need a President who won’t have his staff merely ask stupid questions – anything is better than idiocy in policy.

Yet Another Incursion By the Mexican Military

Mark Noonan33 Comments

From the Houston Chronicle:

A Mexican military helicopter landed Saturday afternoon at Laredo International Airport by mistake, said a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Mucia Dovalina, the uniform public affairs officer for the Laredo Port of Entry, said the helicopter landed about 3 p.m., but she couldn’t share details such as the number of occupants or whether they were armed.

Dovalina said that, following protocol, CBP officers checked out the helicopter’s occupants, then allowed them to return to Mexico in the aircraft.

“The only thing that I can tell you is that they did land here,” she said. “It was by mistake. They were processed and they were returned to Mexico.”…

We seem to be getting a lot of mistakes by the Mexican military…seems the poor guys can’t tell north from south and often find themselves on our side of the border.  The airport, itself, is two or three miles north of the Mexican border…which is, of course, the Rio Grande river..one does wonder how the pilot missed that in the old landmarks?  Not like the river moves around a lot…unless this was the pilot’s first flight – and he didn’t have a compass – I’m mighty suspicious of this “mistake”.

My concern is that these incursions of the Mexican military are actually to assist the criminal element in Mexico – basically challenging our forces to stay out of the way so that the drug cartels can gain de-facto control of the ground.  The next time a Mexican military force crosses, we should hold the men and the materials until we’ve had a chance to thoroughly investigate the matter…and we should insist upon compensation from the Mexican government for the violation of our national sovereignty (yes, we do have that…just like all other nations, we really do have a right to keep foreign military forces out of our nation).

Enough is enough, already…time to let the Mexicans know there is a border, and they can’t cross it without our permission.

Syrian Army Crushes Rebels

Mark Noonan11 Comments

From Bloomberg:

Syrian soldiers stormed Hama and other flashpoints of unrest, leaving at least 121 dead, an activist said, as President Bashar al-Assad’s forces sought to reassert control on the eve of Ramadan, when protests are likely to intensify.

Tanks shelled Hama, Syria’s fourth largest city, where at least 100 people were killed today, said Mahmoud Merhi, head of the Damascus-based Arab Organization for Human Rights.

Three people died near the city of Daraa, and fighting in other areas raised the toll to 121, Merhi said…

Why is the Syrian government doing this?  Because they know that the one nation on earth which can enforce decency won’t act…or, even if we did act, then under Obama we would act with sufficient speed and power to affect the outcome.  Get used to this boys and girls – because Obama has abdicated America’s leadership role, the world now belongs to whomever is willing to be the most evil.  This massacre in Hama is just a slight foretaste of what is to come.  Tyrants around the world are watching events and getting ready grab what they can and settle scores…all in the knowledge that Obama is more likely to condemn a US ally than an enemy.

The world is becoming a very dangerous place…and to help you sleep better, the word is that the Democrats want 50% of all spending cuts to come out of defense, alone.