War

US signs Obama's extension of war in Afghanistan with puppet.

Perpetual war is causing weapon company stocks to rise. War profiteering.

What a fabulous description of the absurdity of our intelligence state.

"It’s quite an achievement, especially when you consider its one downside: it has a terrible record of getting anything right in a timely way. Never have so many had access to so much information about our world and yet been so unprepared for whatever happens in it.
When it comes to getting ahead of the latest developments on the planet, the ones that might really mean something to the government it theoretically serves, the IC is – as best we can tell from the record it largely prefers to hide – almost always behind the 8-ball. It seems to have been caught off guard regularly enough to defy any imaginable odds."

No kidding.

"Let’s focus for a moment, however, on a case where more is known. I’m thinking of the development that only recently riveted the Obama administration and sent it tumbling into America’s third Iraq war, causing literal hysteria in Washington. Since June, the most successful terror group in history has emerged full blown in Syria and Iraq, amid a surge in jihadi recruitment across the Greater Middle East and Africa. The Islamic State (IS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which sprang to life during the U.S. occupation of that country, has set up a mini-state, a “caliphate,” in the heart of the Middle East. Part of the territory it captured was, of course, in the very country the U.S. garrisoned and occupied for eight years, in which it had assumedly developed countless sources of information and recruited agents of all sorts. And yet, by all accounts, when IS’s militants suddenly swept across northern Iraq, the CIA in particular found itself high and dry."

I don't buy this.

"In fact, in part because IS assiduously uses couriers for its messaging instead of cell phones and emails, until a chance arrest of a key militant in June, the CIA and the rest of the IC evidently knew next to nothing about the group or its leadership, had no serious assessment of its strength and goals, nor any expectation that it would sweep through and take most of Sunni Iraq. And that should be passing strange. After all, it now turns out that much of the future leadership of IS had spent time together in the U.S. military’s Camp Bucca prison just years earlier."

This defies credibility.

A year ago, Putin wrote an op-ed, pointing out the US knew about ISIS.

"“There are few champions of democracy in Syria. But there are more than enough Qaeda fighters and extremists of all stripes battling the government. The United States State Department has designated Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, fighting with the opposition, as terrorist organizations. This internal conflict, fueled by foreign weapons supplied to the opposition, is one of the bloodiest in the world."

The US knew about ISIS.

More evidence the US was well aware of the ISIS threat.

"By late last year, classified American intelligence reports painted an increasingly ominous picture of a growing threat from Sunni extremists in Syria, according to senior intelligence and military officials. Just as worrisome, they said, were reports of deteriorating readiness and morale among troops next door in Iraq. But the reports, they said, generated little attention in a White House consumed with multiple brush fires and reluctant to be drawn back into Iraq. “Some of us were pushing the reporting, but the White House just didn’t pay attention to it,” said a senior American intelligence official."

Obama is lying about it.

More on failures of intelligence.

"President Obama has dispatched 60,000 NSA spies to monitor the cellphone and landline calls, as well as the emails, texts, bank statements and utility bills, of nearly all Americans, in utter disregard for the constitutional standard required for doing so: probable cause of criminal acts by the persons spied upon. Yet his spies somehow missed the Boston marathon bombing, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and theft of Crimea, the downing of the Malaysian civilian airliner and the growth of ISIS in the Middle East."

They can't track terrorists because they're too busy reading our emails and listening to our phone calls.

Here's the root problem with our intelligence services.

"Yet Clapper and his spies are more intent on spying on the American people than on those foreigners who have publicly boasted – however unrealistic their boasts may be – that they will cause us harm. This is, after all, the same Clapper who committed crimes in order to insulate his domestic spies from lawful congressional inquiry when he denied under oath that the U.S. government was acquiring massive amounts of private data about hundreds of millions of Americans."

Exactly.

Irony.

"Combating a group known for its violent sectarianism, the five Arab allies ordered by the United States to participate in the bombing campaign against ISIS are themselves the region’s worst sectarian agitators. Jordan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are now at the vanguard of efforts to dismantle an organization that is essentially of their own creation."

They're only superficially fighting ISIS. The real target is Syria, which is being reduced to the stone age.

Using a fake threat to justify war in Syria.

Kissinger wanted to attack Cuba.