BEWARE: Going To Mecca Can be Dangerous

Mecca in Saudi Arabia

Hundreds of Ghanaians are expected to join more than seven million muslims from all parts of the world who will go to Mecca this year to perform a religious duty.

However, there are very strong indications that going to Mecca this year can be very risky.

A posting of the net says that a scary virus is sweeping across Saudi Arabia and the Middle East.

The virus “MERS-CoV) causes what has been named the Middle East Respiratory Syndrone and has already killed 34 patients in Saudi Arabia.

The full report written by Laurie Garrett and Maxine Builder is reproduced unedited below;

When the Black Death exploded in Arabia in the 14th century, killing an estimated third of the population, it spread across the Islamic world via infected religious pilgrims. Today, the Middle East is threatened with a new plague, one eponymously if not ominously named the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV, or MERS for short). This novel coronavirus was discovered in Jordan in March 2012, and as of June 26, there have been 77 laboratory-confirmed infections, 62 of which have been in Saudi Arabia; 34 of these Saudi patients have died.

Although the numbers -- so far -- are small, the disease is raising anxiety throughout the region. But officials in Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned.

This fall, millions of devout Muslims will descend upon Mecca, Medina, and Saudi Arabia's holy sites in one of the largest annual migrations in human history. In 2012, approximately 6 million pilgrims came through Saudi Arabia to perform the rituals associated with umrah, and this number is predicted to rise in 2013. Umrah literally means "to visit a populated place," and it's the very proximity that has health officials so worried. In Mecca alone, millions of pilgrims will fulfill the religious obligation of circling the Kaaba. And having a large group of people together in a single, fairly confined space threatens to turn the holiest site in Islam into a massive petri dish.

The disease is still mysterious. Little is understood about how it is transmitted and even less regarding its origins. But we do know that MERS is deadly, with a mortality rate of about 55 percent -- a remarkably higher lethality than that posed by its close cousin, the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, which in 2003 terrified travelers across the globe but posed a fatality rate of only 9.6 percent. The MERS coronavirus is new to our species, so mild and asymptomatic infections seem to be rare, but the human immune response to infection is itself so extreme that it can prove deadly in some cases.

Like SARS, the MERS virus spreads between people via close contact, shared medical instruments, and coughing. Once inside the human lung, the MERS virus sparks a series of reactions that all but destroy normal lung function. Patients can descend into pneumonia so severe that they require machine-assisted breathing to stay alive, in as little as 12 days. Unlike SARS, the MERS virus is also capable of attacking the kidneys and can be passed on to others via exposure to contaminated urine. And for some of those who survive acute MERS, years of rehabilitation may be necessary, just like for some of the 2003 SARS victims.

And like back in 2003, when health officials worried about airplane travelers in confined spaces transmitting the virus across the globe, the hajj poses a unique risk of transmission, one that could catapult this still-small outbreak into a full-fledged pandemic. Containment will become nearly impossible as millions of pilgrims flock from virtually every country on the globe to the kingdom during the holy month. Indeed, MERS has already crossed continents; two suspected cases were reported in France as recently as June 12, and confirmed cases have been reported in Germany and Britain. The first patient in each of these cases had traveled in the Middle East before reaching his/her home destination, only then to be diagnosed with MERS.

Traditionally, the onus to protect the pilgrimage and prevent disease rests on the shoulders of the Saudi royal family. Today, that responsibility lies with the kingdom's Ministry of Health, which has deployed all its disease-fighting resources to tracking down MERS.

The ministry also must deal with the distinct possibility that pilgrims from abroad could bring other diseases to the kingdom, especially polio. (Saudi Arabia has been polio-free since 1995, but there was an importation as recently as 2004.) Polio is still endemic in several Muslim countries, including Nigeria and Pakistan, and outbreaks this year have surfaced in Somalia and Kenya. It has been eliminated in Saudi Arabia, but pilgrims from outside could carry the disease back into the region. Worryingly, live polio viruses identical to those circulating in Pakistan were discovered in the sewers of Cairo in January and in Israel in June.

Despite these risks of disease transmission, neither the World Health Organization (WHO) nor the Saudi government has placed explicit travel guidelines in advance of this influx. In spite of having previously predicted that the number of pilgrims would increase from 2012, Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Hajj has issued a directive to umrah visa operators to "cut down the number of foreign and domestic pilgrims by 20 and 50 percent, respectively," reported a local newspaper that was quoting an informed source. 

In an unprecedented move, Saudi authorities are urging pilgrims to postpone their hajj plans due to "ongoing expansion work" at the Grand Mosque. Saudi clerics have also approved of this decision. It is unclear whether the timing of these announcements is mere coincidence or a discrete Saudi effort to limit the number of pilgrims without causing panic. Either way, cutting down on the number of pilgrims would be a fairly effective way to prevent the spread of MERS or any other virus.

But even if pilgrims postpone their plans for pilgrimage, they are not the only mobile population in the region who could serve as global vectors. As of April 2013, there were an estimated 7.5 million migrant workers living and legally working in Saudi Arabia; this number does not include the many more thousands of laborers in the country illegally. Migrant workers come from across the world, including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. According to a recent New York Timesreport, approximately 124,000 undocumented workers have left Saudi Arabia since April 1 under an amnesty program that lets them sort out their status without penalties for visa violations. The MERS outbreak also comes at a time when Saudi officials are looking to deport as many foreign workers as possible in order to free up the job market for Saudi nationals. This has caused tension -- and in some cases violence -- which increases distrust between the two groups and makes it less likely for an infected migrant worker to seek out medical care from, or to cooperate with, Saudi officials.

Fear of a MERS outbreak from migrant workers returning home has prompted other countries to take special precautions. In early June, the Philippine government began conducting thermal scans of incoming migrant workers from Saudi Arabia at the airport in Manila, and the Nepalese government wrote a letter to hospitals and laboratories, directing them to adopt precautionary measures when treating patients with respiratory illness. During the SARS epidemic, the WHO did release a travel advisory, and passengers going through Chinese airports were subjected to a temperature scan; thankfully, neither the Philippines nor Nepal has yet reported a case of MERS.

But another reason for concern over disease outbreak in this region is the huge -- and continually growing -- population of Syrian refugees, currently estimated at 1.6 million individuals by the United Nations' refugee agency, UNHCR. Add to that the almost 4.25 million internally displaced Syrians, living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions within the country, and the scale of the problem grows. During humanitarian crises, the WHO works with member states primarily in an advocacy and planning role, helping to minimize suffering and death, as well as protect the country's health system. In this capacity, the WHO has already articulated its concerns about the potential for disease outbreaks in Syria and neighboring countries, particularly within the crowded refugee camps that have sprung up in Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey, noting that the warm summer months bring a heightened risk.

MERS has proved difficult to control even in the most advanced, well-funded hospitals, with clusters of infections being reported in health-care facilities in not only Saudi Arabia, but also Jordan and France. This was highlighted in an epidemiological study of 23 cases in Saudi Arabia, published in the New England Journal of Medicine on June 19 by officials from the WHO and the Saudi Ministry of Health. Before this paper was published, officials from both organizations went to great lengths to limit concern over in-hospital spread, reassuring the public that MERS was not as in-hospital contagious as SARS. But this new study demonstrates the contrary: "A total of 21 of the 23 cases were acquired by person-to-person transmission in hemodialysis units, intensive care units, or in-patient units in three different health care facilities."

Controlling the spread of the virus is only half the battle. There is no MERS vaccine, drug, or simple diagnostic test available. And once MERS patients are identified, caring for them presents its own set of complications. Not only is the treatment for MERS intensive and complicated, but health-care workers must carefully protect themselves so as to minimize the risk of contracting or unwittingly spreading infection.

If in-hospital spread is occurring within state-of-the-art, high-tech hospitals, the potential for MERS transmission inside squalid Syrian hospitals and makeshift refugee clinics is significant. It would seem nearly impossible to mitigate in-hospital spread of MERS in Syria, where over a third of public hospitals are no longer in service and supplies of even the most rudimentary medicines and equipment are scarce. Should the MERS virus get a foothold in such settings, further international spread of MERS seems inevitable, especially amid highly mobile populations fleeing political instability.

Although the WHO has publicly praised Saudi Arabia for "urgently taking crucial actions" in this crisis, it is becoming clear that in spite of officials' cooperation, there are some real practical problems facing Saudi authorities.

First and foremost, the Saudi Ministry of Health is understaffed and in need of assistance. At least one foreign laboratory collaborating with the Saudis received samples of MERS that had deteriorated because they were packaged and shipped incorrectly, rendering them unusable. International collaborators who have been eager to aid the Saudis face staffing bottlenecks, causing delays that are agonizing in an outbreak context.

But that one foreign laboratory was fortunate to get the samples sent to it at all, since the Saudi Ministry of Health has also been embroiled in a "patent" dispute surrounding MERS that has reportedly stymied research efforts by foreign scientists. Last summer, a Dutch team from Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam received two patient samples from an Egyptian scientist working then in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The Dutch sequenced the MERS DNA and claimed ownership of the samples. All scientists hoping to work on the MERS problem must either obtain samples directly from the Saudi Ministry of Health or sign legal agreements with Erasmus. For example, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is still waiting to receive samples of MERS for testing that were collected in October 2012 because the legal teams from the CDC and Erasmus cannot negotiate agreeable terms for a material transfer agreement. These legal delays are unusual, especially during a disease outbreak such as this, and Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, publicly criticized Erasmus for putting patent laws ahead of protecting "your people."

Meanwhile, the WHO has its own institutional problems. The organization's emergency-response system is bankrupt (though it only needs $10 million to function for the rest of 2013). Despite these budgetary constraints, surveillance must be ramped up, particularly in the region itself. The WHO has also been trying to improve dialogue and information sharing about MERS, but the organization's efforts have fallen short. Its most recent attempt -- a three-day meeting in Cairo attended by 100 experts -- came up short; the result amounted to little more than language that in essence just reiterated pre-existing agreements about global standards for disease surveillance and reporting that took effect after the International Health Regulations (2005).

Participants at the meeting did recognize the urgency of the situation, however, and acknowledged that the world is at a critical point in the trajectory of the MERS outbreak. As Keiji Fukuda, WHO assistant director-general for health security and the environment, said: "We need to exploit this chance to agree and implement the best public health measures possible across the board, for in so doing, we stand the best chance of controlling this virus before it spreads further."

It wouldn't be possible -- or even desirable -- to stop the flow of people in and out of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, be they migrant workers, refugees, humanitarian volunteers, or religious pilgrims. The immediate challenges are to identify the animal sources of MERS and stop its animal-to-human spread. In lieu of knowing the virus's origin, human-to-human transmission must be halted -- and the best first step to accomplishing this is through radical improvements in hospitals' hygiene practices and through swiftly identifying infected friends, family members, and co-workers of those who develop the MERS disease.

But that's only a stopgap solution. Unless the many barriers to a transparent international research and information-sharing system disappear, it will be exceedingly difficult to reduce the risk of infection. Otherwise, the world could be dragged into another Black Death, and MERS could easily spread far beyond the bounds of the region for which it is named.

Editorial

KEEP IT DECENT

The campaign for the leadership of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) has already began and it is not looking clean.

Some of the contestants have already started accusing each other of using juju and other underhand tactics.

There also appears to be too much money on the campaign trail and the indications are that some of the contestants believe that the highest bidder will ride to victory.

There are also credible reports that some of the contestants are contacting some communicators of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to help them spread mud about their opponents.

Ordinarily, we would have kept quite over these developments but the recognition that the NDC is in power compels us to speak out.

Whatever happens in the NDC will have consequences for the broader society because it is the body which has responsibility for managing the public purse.

 The Insight urges all those who have joined the race for leadership to keep it decent.

If they fail to listen, there could be an explosion in their own party to the detriment of all Ghanaians.

PORTUPHY STARTS CAMPAIGN

Mr Kofi Portuphy

By Ekow Mensah

Mr. Kofi Portuphy, Vice Chairman of the National Democratic Congress(NDC) is throwing everything and anything into the campaign  to unseat his boss, Dr Kwabena Adjei .

Mr Portuphy was then seen widely as an extension of Dr Adjei.

It is still not clear what has brought about the bitter rivalry between the two bosses of the ruling party.

Although, Mr Portuphy has not made his intentions known publicly, groups loyal to him have began an intensive campaign throughout the country especially in the Volta Region.

One of the group is “Youth for Action” which claims to be working from the Volta Regional secretarial of the NDC.

A recent statement endorsing the candidature of Mr. Portuphy was issued on an official party letter head.

The statement claimed that Mr. Portuphy played key notes in securing the victory of the party in the 2012 elections.

It also said that Mr. Portup0hy has been an activist of the party from its birth in 199.

Part of the statement read’s “This is why the VRYA has appreciated and would give their support to personalities like Hon. Kofi Portuphy on his decision to join the race and contest for the national chairmanship”

WARS FOR WATER

By Yuri Skidanov

While major powers continue to cross swords around Syria, a little further south, at a distance of a thousand kilometers, another conflict is flaming. The conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia may become the first struggle of a new type for natural resources, or water, to be more precise. Futurists are correct in their predictions as the 21st century will become the century of wars for survival.

Ethiopia, thanks to the support of the Soviet Union, was at the peak of its power during the 1970s. The country was a regional leader in East Africa. Since that time, the country has experienced several economic crises, multiple civil clashes and two wars - with Eritrea and Somali armed groups.

Leftist forces, led by the recently deceased Meles Zenawi, proposed a concept of national renaissance. The concept stipulated the construction of a large power plant on the Blue Nile that would be called "The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance." The height of the dam will be 170 meters, its length - almost 2 kilometers.

For Africa, it would be a fantastic project, just like the cost of it - nearly $ 5 billion. The design capacity of the plant is 6000 MW, and there are no other similar power plants on the black continent. As soon as the plant is launched, Ethiopia receives a powerful impetus for development, satisfies the needs of its own economy in energy and water, and also obtains a reliable channel of revenues from the export of electricity. This is a classic example of how a variety of economic and geopolitical problems could be solved in nearly one day.

However, these intentions of Addis Ababa turned out to be highly disturbing to Egypt, the territory of which lies upstream of the Nile. In case the hydropower plant is built in Ethiopia, Egypt loses more than 20 percent of water supplies and at least 40 percent of energy produced by hydroelectric power plants (mostly the Aswan one). This is a disaster for the economy and agriculture of Egypt. Egyptian President Mursi said that he was ready for anything, because the river Neil was the natural wealth of Egypt. "If Egypt is the Nile's gift, then the Nile is a gift to Egypt. The lives of the Egyptians are connected around it... as one great people. If it diminishes by one drop then our blood is the alternative, Mursi stated.  

A mufti of Egyptian Islamist group Al-Gama'a al-Islamiya stated on Al Arabiya TV channel that he would declare Jihad to Ethiopia, should the country begin the construction of the power plant. The mufti also accused Israel of being a part of the project. According to him, the construction of the dam was a "conspiracy to put pressure on Egypt."

We would like to note here that the mufti is wrong. Israel learned how to put pressure on Egypt (and some other countries) a long time ago, by funding politicians of interest directly. Needless to say that this method is a lot less expensive.

In the beginning of June, Egypt urgently sent a delegation to the territory of former Somalia to assess the prospects for the revival of the Somali army that used to be at war with Ethiopia, and the creation of a military alliance with the unrecognized state of Somaliland. It is highly likely that Eritrea will take Egypt's side, taking into consideration the fact that Ethiopia defeated Eritrea in 2000. The governments of Sudan and South Sudan supported the Ethiopian government. Another developed country (by African standards) - Kenya - has not expressed its opinion on the matter. However, Kenya is interested in receiving cheap electricity from Ethiopia.

Six African countries, including Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia signed an agreement that replaced a number of documents of the colonial era. Egypt used to consume up to 70 percent of the Nile waters and could veto any decision on the construction of any type of hydro-technical facilities. Nowadays, restrictions and quotas have been lifted.

As for Egypt, if it were only about the military conflict, then the army of Egypt, which is 10-15 times superior to the armed forces of all signatories and their allies in terms of manpower and 20 times - in terms of tanks and combat aircraft, would crush the enemy in a few days. However, Egypt and Ethiopia have no common border, so the Egyptian military maneuver around semi-guerrilla forces, Somali groups and unprofessional Eritrean armed forces. In addition, the political situation in Egypt is far from being stable. A war could make matters even worse.

To crown it all, Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi has a very limited set of moves to resolve the crisis. Mursi is doomed to start combat actions. If he uses political methods, many would accuse him of betraying vital interests of the country, which would lead to a national revolution. Quite on the contrary, a successful military campaign against Ethiopia would retain the balance of the Egyptian economy and dramatically reduce the political weight of the opposition. In this case, Mursi would be able to take full control of the political situation and finish his reforms.

Should the conflict occur, it will go down in history as the first large-scale war for water.

Herbert Marcuse, the founder of the theory of overpopulation of the Earth, predicted that by the middle of the XXI century, wars for water, food and energy resources would completely replace class wars for geopolitical influence. In a nutshell, people will fight for misery that will help them survive. Will his predictions come true?

Why Snowden is an American hero

Leaker of US Spying programs Edward Snowden

 By Dr. James Fetzer

The espionage charges against Edward Snowden for informing the American people and the world that the NSA has been conducting the most massive spying operation in history are completely baseless and absurd.

Snowden is not revealing information that places the national security of the nation at stake but information revealing the NSA has instead been tracking enemies of the national security state.

Those who seem to be the real targets of this surveillance program include veterans, Constitutionalists, NRA members, 9/11 Truthers, Ron Paul supporters, and any one else who might have both the courage, the integrity and the ability to resist the imposition of a new military police state under DHS. The latest figures about the “Main Core” list of political dissidents stands at around 8,000,000 today.

No domestic terrorist threat

We know from a report released by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Intelligence on 3 October 2012 that, after surveying 680 “fusion center” reports gathered from 2009-2010, it had discovered that there were no indications of any terrorist activity: NONE. ZILCH. NADA. NOT ONE! Yet this astounding data has yet to be broadcast or published by ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN.

This sample, which was obtained under conditions that insured if any domestic terrorist activity had been taking place it would have been revealed, supports the statistical extrapolation that domestic terrorist activity in the United States is virtually non-existent.

It also explains why DHS and the FBI have had to fabricate phony events such as those at Sandy Hook and the Boston bombing, which were staged.

Unwarranted justifications

Even the claim by General Alexander, the head of the NSA, that this program had foiled 50 terrorist plots appears to be hokum. Ron Paul, for example, explained that it was an ad hoc exaggeration and that it included some 40 trivial events that were alleged to have occurred not in the United States but abroad and a story of an attempt to blow up Wall Street that has all the signs of another FBI fabricated event.

So the existence of a bona-find domestic terrorist threat appears to be a cover-story to justify the most massive spying ever undertaking using enormous computer capabilities to accumulate information on our emails, our phone calls, our financial transactions and even (no doubt) our medical records. They want to know everything there is to know about each and every one of us to promote their own agenda.

DHS preparing for civil war

Everyone must know by now that DHS has acquired 2 billion rounds of .40 caliber hollow-point ammunition, which is not ever permissible in combat under the Hague Convention of 1899.

It has also obtained 2,700 light tanks of the kind deployed in Boston (in violation of Posse Comitatus) and 7,000 assault weapons (of the kind that gun control legislation has been proposed to ban). They are preparing for war.

DHS has even made special arrangements with funeral homes and mortuaries to handle “an excess of casualties” should hospitals and emergency care facilities be overwhelmed. 

This can only be because the government is planning to take out or otherwise “neutralize” the enemies of the state that are being identified by means of its massive surveillance program, which Edward Snowden has revealed to us all.

(1) Violation of the 4th amendment

The first problem with this program is that blatantly violates the 4th amendment’s guarantee to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures and a history of lower court decisions decreeing the right of citizens to privacy.

Rand Paul has spoken out eloquently about this and Snowden appears to have secret FISA court decisions that rule against the legality of the program that Obama is trying to defend. 

Most Americans and others worldwide naively assume that the NSA scandal represents an excess of zeal in attempting to track down domestic terrorists who want to attack targets in America.

What they do not appreciate is that this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with the national security state. They are not the same. From the perspective of DHS, veterans are potential terrorists.

(2) Potential for blackmail and manipulation

Those who say, “I have nothing to hide”, are being extremely naïve, because this surveillance program is complete. It was not designated as “Total Information Awareness” for nothing when first introduced by Admiral Poindexter.

The public outcry led to its re-designation as “Terrorist Information Awareness”, but that did not mean that anything had changed. The NSA wants to know everything about everyone so it can selectively use the information to control or modify our actions.

The use for the purpose of political blackmail ought to be obvious to anyone who knows, for example, that J. Edgar Hoover maintained sex dossiers on the members of Congress, while the Mafia kept one on him.

Relationships with girlfriends and mistresses, watching porn or having had an abortion are illustrations of the kinds of information that could be used to manipulate Senators, Presidents or the Courts.

(3) Surveillance programs privatized

Practically no one in the mass media has observed that Snowden had access to these records because he was working for a private firm, Booz Allen, which gave him opportunities to obtain data that a normal government program would not have allowed. 

And most of our security and surveillance programs are run by Israeli companies, which is one of the mechanisms by which it controls our leaders.
When the US Senate voted 99-0 to support Israel should it decide to attack Iran in its own self-defense without adding that that would have to be in accordance with international law, it thereby violated not only the UN Charter but the US Constitution, which grants treaties, such as ours with the UN, the same status under the Constitution as the Constitution itself. It was a completely unjustifiable act given that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. But it was also an act of treason.

Real traitors 
When Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) declares that the revelations by Edward Snowden are “not going to play out well for the national security interests of the United States”, therefore, she is not talking about the interests of the American people, who are entitled to have their privacy preserved and to be safe-guarded from blackmail and embarrassment. There is no legitimate national security interest than could not be better served by traditional procedures with warrants.

When Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), and (the usual suspects) Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham condemn Snowden for treason, they themselves are the ones who are violating the Constitution, their oaths of office and betraying the American people.

Edward Snowden is an American and international hero for speaking out against tyranny and the conversion of America into a fascist state. He deserves commendation, not prosecution. 

US Soldiers in Afghanistan

Boondoggle Goes Boom

By Robert Draper,

In July 2011, an army combat team known as the Arctic Wolves moved into the Kandahar district of Panjwai, where the Taliban was born and where Osama bin Laden is said to have planned the 9/11 attacks. The area was all but evacuatedit was not yet poppy-growing season, and Panjwai’s residents had gone to nearby cities to find work. For two months, the Arctic Wolves went about their business of clearing the territory of weapons and establishing a combat outpost without suffering casualties.

But as the Wolves continued to patrol the area in their brand new, supposedly bomb-resistant armored vehicles, they could feel eyes watching them. Insurgents were starting to move into the houses abandoned by the villagers. During this season of uneasy quiet, a 21-year-old Army specialist from Wichita, Kansas, named James Burnett called home. Burnett had enlisted while he was still in high school, and he intended to marry his fiancé and become a cop once he returned to Wichita. Those plans seemed distant now.

I’m in a bad place, the soldier told his stepmother. I’m scared. Pray for me.

Burnett and the rest of the Arctic Wolves should have had a keen sense of where the enemy was and what it would do next. The Army had developed a sophisticated data platform called the Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS-A (pronounced d-sigs ) for that exact purpose. The multibillion-dollar system of systems was built to gather, analyze, and share information from a multitude of sensors and human intelligence sources so that an Army commander could immediately assess the threat in his brigade’s environment. It would reveal the enemy’s history in the territory, the danger zones, names, faces. That was the concept, anyway.

In reality, the intelligence data platform had proved all but useless to the analysts supporting the Arctic Wolves. We had no basis of understanding how the enemy was operating, one of them later told me. He explained: We’re using DCGS-A, and my team was pretty solidly experienced with a lot of these tools. And the command generals basically wanted updates every couple of hours what was the threat, where there were additional high-threat areas. And we were nowhere near close to turning around any intelligence with the tools we had.

On November 12, all hell broke loose. One of Burnett’s fellow Arctic Wolves was on foot patrol when a roadside bomb exploded and killed him. The next day, another improvised explosive device (IED) detonated under one of the brigades armored vehicles, killing a sergeant. And on November 16, the Stryker tank containing Burnett ran over a pressure-plate IED and burst into flames, killing him and another specialist.

Back in Kandahar, the intelligence team went into crisis mode, the analyst recalled. Since I’d seen other types of software in the contractor world, I went online and started sending e-mails to different analytical tool companies and saying, what tool do you have that could be used in a counter-IED scenario? And the company that responded was Palantir.

The Palo Alto-based data-integration firm happened to have a field rep in Afghanistan already, and he made fast arrangements to visit the Kandahar base. While the hundred or so DCGS-A analysts continued with their labors, he fired up his company software.

What transpired next was flabbergasting, recalls the intelligence analyst: We had spent probably a day and a half trying to make a map using DCGS-A. And in my three hours with Palantir, he was able to show ten times more information breaking it down into charts, showing patterns. We could see a rotation pattern of where [the insurgents] were moving southwest to northeast across Panjwai district. We started to see some connections where there’d been four other unsuccessful attacks with the same type of device in this area that we hadn’t seen before ... This was my sixth combat deployment, and I’d never been able to pull that level of detail together, certainly not that fast. I was sitting there like, holy shit.

The chief intelligence officer for the 82nd Airborne overseeing all Army activity in southern Afghanistan, Lieutenant Colonel Michelle A. Schmidt, agreed with her analysts: Palantir was mission-critical, something they had to have. The request put in by Schmidt’s command in late November 2011 didn’t mince words. Relying on the more cumbersome Army product, DCGS-A, translates into operational opportunities missed and unnecessary risk to the force. By contrast, Palantir actually worked and would probably save lives. Its price tag to the 82nd was $2.5 million’s a fraction of what the Army had been spending on its new Stryker vehicles and, for that matter, its vaunted data platform. For soldiers like the Arctic Wolves who were literally walking through mine fields, spending loose change on software to protect thousands of young American warriors would seem to be a no-brainer.

But Schmidt’s request for Palantir was denied. Instead, the Army sent over more DCGS-A equipment and personnel to Kandahar. The consequence, as one internal memo from the 82nd would state, was that the troops on the ground continued to struggle with an ineffective intel system while we’re in the middle of a heavy fight taking casualties. This was not the first time the Army brass had rejected a units urgent request for Palantir and, owing to the Pentagons stubborn refusal to concede that there might be a better way than their own, it would not be the last.

America’s struggle to understand, anticipate, and outsmart its enemies has been rigorously discussed since 9/11. Where the story becomes turgid where we stop paying attention is on the decidedly unsexy but crucial question of how that intelligence, once gathered, is organized and made available in a way that will allow it to actually be put to use. Where the days following the September 11 attacks found us painfully groping for on-the-ground assets in Afghanistan, today our intel units have gobs of information they have no idea what to do with, such as thousands of detainee cell-phone numbers that have yet to be analyzed. The immortal Donald Rumsfeld litany of known unknowns leaves off the most infuriating conundrum of all namely, that there are also unknown knowns: disjointed facts that languish in a warehouse or in the ether, unreachable to the cops or colonels who urgently need them but aren’t aware that such facts are already there for the asking.

A longtime high-level Pentagon intelligence analyst walked me through the reasons why the government tended to do a lousy job of producing military intelligence tools. An ambitious Army intelligence commander might want to impress his superiors by coming up with some new way of graphing intel. The procurers at the Pentagon go through the motions of ordering up the visionary new graphing software, secure in the knowledge that the commander will soon be promoted and out of their hair. The idea gets kicked over to some government agency’s development shop, which issues a design contract to one of the big defense contractors within the military-industrial complex that has developed a tight relationship with the Pentagon and has no incentive to deliver something on time and on cost, said the veteran analyst. At no point would anyone second-guess the ambitious commander. The agency bureaucrats were, he told me, amateurs, essentially, who are incentivized to make their customers, the government requester, happy to the point where they engineer things that won’t work. They accept everything as a requirement, and they judge every requirement to be equal. You say to them, I want something with a bell that’ll go off whenever something interesting comes up, so they spent five million dollars on that, and no one asks, why the fuck would you want a bell?

The mindless perpetuation of dubious Pentagon technologies is especially infuriating in a time when all government agencies, including the Department of Defense (DOD), are expected to do more with less. And the ethical implications take on a darker hue when the supposed overseers stand to benefit from keeping things cozy between industry and the military. (Witness, most recently, former Raytheon lobbyist Bill Lynn. President Barack Obama waived ethics rules in 2009 so that Lynn could become his deputy secretary of defense in charge of procuring weapons systems like those made by Raytheon. Lynn held this position until late 2011, when he left the administration to become CEO of yet another weapons-technology contractor, DRS.) Still, the Pentagons lumbering insularity puts more than just money and morals at risk. After all, hundreds of uniformed men in Humvees lost their lives from IED attacks in Iraq from late 2003 until early 2007 while DOD procurers ignored urgent requests for more bomb-resistant armored vehicles. And now the multiyear saga between Army intelligence officials and a Silicon Valley innovator begs a question of existential proportions: Are we losing our edge in the war on terror because a few military bureaucrats don’t want to admit that they were given a mission and failed?

If there’s a thing that keeps me and my leadership awake, Lieutenant General Mary Legere told me in her office one afternoon last month, it’s that nobody’s sons or daughters come back injured don’t come back because we failed to get intelligence to them.

Legere is the Armys top intelligence officer, affable and nerdy, a lanky marathon runner and three-star general with more than 30 years of military service. Her office, known as the G-2, oversees the DCGS-A program. She knows its history intimately. Promoted as a post-9/11 remedy for the failure of agencies to share intel (which in turn had allowed the hijackers to evade detection), DCGS-A was jointly developed by a who’s who of giant military contractors Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin, among others and was first tested on the Korean peninsula in 2003, before being rolled out for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. It now supports 1.1 million Army troops stationed in the Pacific, South America, Europe, and Asia. And its intelligence data can be accessed by 25,000 Army analysts using the platform’s various formatting tools, including commercially designed mapping (Google Earth), geospatial (ArcGIS), and link-analysis (IBM Analyst Notebook) software. It’s actually the thing that underpins all our decisions and informs our weapons platforms,Legere said with evident pride. We’re now confident in the data and its richness.

Only DCGS-A has access to every layer of intel, she said. Without all data at a brigade’s disposal, I don’t know that the one piece of data that wasn’t ingested won’t make a difference, she warned. But the general’s contentions are problematic. For starters, DCGS-A doesn’t have its own exclusive data it’s simply a kind of high-powered search engine that reaches into the intelligence community’s various sources of information. And according to the intel analyst in Kandahar who experienced difficulties with the system: It was quantity versus quality. A lot of it is the same reports in like ten different databases. The intel provided by DCGS-A wasn’t just duplicative, he added it was also, contrary to Legere’s assertion, incomplete: A source we actually wanted, the National Intelligence Service biometric data, wasn’t in DCGS-A.

Though Legere implicitly views DCGS-A’s mission as one that’s so vital that a price cannot be put on it, she also insisted to me that the Army product really is not a more expensive option than a commercial alternative. This claim would be more plausible if Legere’s own office had not estimated the cost of DCGS-A as being more than $2.3 billion so far. As a Senate military aide who has studied the matter puts it, the system has repeatedly shown an inability to do anything on time or on budget. (More bluntly, a House staffer refers to DCGS-A as the new nine-hundred-dollar toilet seat.) Though Legere vigorously denies that DCGS-A has continually been developed behind schedule, a person who works on DCGS-A explained to me how the Army obfuscates the matter: They’ll say, OK, we delivered Increment One on time. But what they delivered has only forty percent of the requirement that it was supposed to have when it got started. The rest of the requirement gets slipped into Increment Two.

We could talk for a week on the missteps over the program’s life, the engineer who works on DCGS-A told me. DCGS-A frequently locks up, causing information to be lost. (Defense News reported last August that the DCGS-A screens suddenly went black during a joint military exercise in South Korea while attempting to track simulated North Korean troop movements.) And one Army intelligence officer recounted: As I was being deployed to Afghanistan, I was given a DCGS-A system with a twenty-two-thousand-dollar laptop. When I got to my unit at a company level, it did not function. I couldn’t pull data off the map I ended up just using the Internet, literally using Google Earth to plan my operations. He added: I was later told, when I complained about DCGS-A, that it was my problem, even though I’d been through training and was a certified user. Probably seventy to eighty percent of my course instructors said to us, we understand that it doesn’t work, that you don’t like it. But find a way to make it work.

In other words: The Army product costs too much, isn’t inclusive, is prone to crashing, and doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. What’s not to love?

Still, the military bureaucrats deemed DCGS-A to be the Army’s program of record in 2005 a position it contentedly held for the next four years, until Palantir offered its services.

Palantir is the Palo Alto based brainchild of PayPal’s creators, and it was partially funded by In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture-capital firm created by the CIA to invest in intelligence technologies. (In-Q-Tel had also provided seed money for Keyhole, a mapping software product founded in 2001 that was later sold to Google, which renamed it Google Earth.) With offices in places like Washington, London, Santa Monica, and Singapore, Palantir’s reach is global, and the fraud-detection software it has developed was used by the White House to root out abusers of the federal stimulus program.

We understand that it doesn’t work, that you don’t like it. But find a way to make it work.

Palantir’s fundamental raison d’être is similar to that of DCGS-A: to provide a data platform that integrates information quickly so as to facilitate decision-making. But because Palantir isn’t a Frankenstein monster of numerous software languages and cumbersome requirements that only a super-user is equipped to navigate, it has accrued as many admirers as DCGS-A has detractors. Says the DCGS-A engineer with noticeable envy: The people who know and understand the two systems understand that the difference is in the database. I try not to use hyperbole, but Palantir really has a game-changing capability in the way you can connect types of data. The database for DCGS-A is really 1990s, very static, versus Palantir, which is much more itemized and flexible. Palantir has become one of the largest private tech companies in the world, with a client list of big-data users ranging from Citigroup to the NYPD not to mention the FBI, CIA, Special Operations, Marines, and America’s military counterparts in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. Mark Bowden reported in his book The Finish that Palantir’s data analysis assisted in the raid on Osama bin Laden.

But the biggest of all military services, the U.S. Army, has viewed Palantir with hostility from the start. In January 2009, the company made its pitch to the Army and was subsequently invited to have its product evaluated at the Joint Intelligence Laboratory in Suffolk, Virginia. The day before the scheduled evaluation, the G-2 office informed Palantir by e-mail that the meeting was canceled, without giving an explanation. In fact, the G-2 office both before and after Legere took charge in 2012 led an effort to block every Army request for Palantir, even when it came from the Army’s director of intelligence in Afghanistan, Michael Flynn, who in a 2010 memo condemned DCGS-A’s haplessness, which Flynn said translates into operational opportunities missed and lives lost.

On the morning of November 30, 2011, a rather large and unusual meeting took place at centcom headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Among the 20 or so in attendance were two representatives from Palantir and several adamant defenders of DCGS-A chief among them, Lynn Schnurr, the chief information officer for the G-2 office. Chairing was centcom J-2 Brigadier General Robert P. Ashley Jr., though the meeting was hardly his idea. Three U.S. senators Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison and Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Tom Carper had written centcom’s commander, expressing concern that the Army wasn’t making use of available commercial intel tools. Instead, said the letter, the Army’s in-house systems have been funded in the billions of dollars over more than a decade and have yet to meet the requirements of the users. The centcom brass knew what this meant: DCGS-A needed to make nice with Palantir.

Despite the pissy letter from Capitol Hill, the DCGS-A advocates showed up to the November 2011 centcom meeting with nostrils flared. Palantir, Schnurr’s team claimed, did far less than DCGS-A. It operated on only one network, it was proprietary, it was noncompliant, it lacked essential data, and its clients were only trial users. As an internal centcom document summarizing the meeting would characterize it, Lots of bad blood here and one side or the other was definitely lying.

Recalls a participant not employed by either side: The Palantir guys had an answer for every objection. But the Army guys were rude on every level, would interrupt when the Palantir guys were speaking, and I was embarrassed as a service member to see how unprofessional they were. Some of them were flat-out lying, and the Palantir guys knew it but as contractors, they had to have a measured response. At one point, it came out that they’d refused to provide Palantir with some of the government-derived codes so of course it’s not gonna communicate fully. What are we, in eighth grade here? It’s utterly juvenile. Brigadier General Ashley put his head in his hands couldn’t believe this crap.

The meeting resolved nothing. The Army, this neutral participant went on to say, decided to fight it. They’ve put so much stinking money in DCGS-A over the years and still had a dog. And jobs are at stake now: If you’re one of the mediocre-to-poor engineers working for the U.S. Army and you’ve developed the all-source tools within DCGS-A and have produced a Studebaker, and here comes this Ferrari that costs less than your Studebaker, it’s an existential crisis! Of course you’re threatened.

Threatened, and also annoyed. The letter from the senators that had compelled the centcom meeting was one of several that the Army had received from Congress. An alpha dog in the tech world, Palantir was not used to rolling over to anyone, not even the government. And so instead of meekly showing gratitude for a few scraps of business, the company had sent lobbyists to Capitol Hill. The lobbyists in turn were telling legislators and their staffers that the Army was wasting money and risking the lives of its soldiers.

This was no way to make friends. The time-tested way to ingratiate one’s self to DOD bureaucrats was there for Palantir to see, courtesy of America’s giant military contractors, who of course have whole squadrons of lobbyists. Take Raytheon, whose vice president for technology strategies was Heidi Shyu until last year, when she was appointed the Army’s assistant secretary in charge of acquisitions. Or take saic, whose former vice president, Dr. Russell Richardson, is now one of the Army’s architects of a future iteration of DCGS-A. Or take General Dynamics Information Technology, which recently hired G-2 Chief Information Officer Lynn Schnurr. Each of these mega-firms has been among DCGS-As principal subcontractors for years, despite the system’s continued failings and cost overruns. As Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz told me, with specific reference to Schnurr’s lateral move into the private sector, If you’re nice to a contractor, your payday will come.

It’s a complete scam, said Representative Duncan Hunter as he plopped down onto a couch in his office in the Cannon Building one afternoon in April. The 36-year-old former Marine had just finished using his service connections to access the Cloud, which the G-2 office has touted as a dazzling DCGS-A update, one that would instantly link up the data between U.S. command centers and those out in the field. For all of Afghanistan, it’s got a total of sixty-six persons of interest. You would think thousands. So we pull up and Hunter mentioned a suspected terrorist. No known relationships. No known IED guys. No link saying he’s done anything.

Agitated, the tall California Republican sucked on an electronic cigarette, as he’d recently stopped smoking the real things. We’re asking five hundred million dollars for this? he asked. It’s supposed to be like this big cloud portal, so that anybody can access it. But nobody does because it doesn’t work! It’s like opening PowerPoint or whatever and clicking on everything and nothing works. They’re just buttons, made to look like Palantir’s buttons.

When I asked General Legere about Hunter’s experience, she insisted that the congressman had only looked at an experimental cloud called UX and that they had already shifted to a new one known as Red Disk. In fact, Red Disk won’t be operable until the end of the year, while the UX software system remains the version of the Cloud being used at the ground intelligence center based at Fort Bragg as well as at the other Cloud center, based at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Except that the latter has been offline for months now. Meaning, there is no synchronicity between centers. Meaning, by definition, that the Cloud is not a cloud.

As a former data programmer during his college years in San Diego, Hunter understands not only arcane software terminology, but also the mindset of its creators: I used to code till like four in the morning, because I enjoyed it and that’s what these Silicon Valley and Palo Alto guys do. You don’t get that at the Pentagon. You just don’t. As a Marine deployed to IED-laden Fallujah in 2004, he yearned for an intel system like Palantir that would be able to piece together all of the thousands of different connections between people and places and draw logical conclusions out of all that with the click of a mouse. As the son of a veteran congressman, he could see how Duncan Hunter Sr. had to bypass the normal acquisitions system to get his son’s fellow soldiers the sniper scopes they needed with the result that the logistics guys were pissed, because it meant more work for them. And now, as a congressman himself since 2009, Hunter has also butted heads with Pentagon middle-managers by using his influence to aid troops on the battlefield. Having heard about the deadly Stryker attacks in November 2011 and the 82nd Airborne’s urgent pleas for Palantir being met with three months of obstinate pushback from General Legere’s G-2 office, Hunter personally appealed to Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno and thereby got the unit what it wanted.

Hunter is a lone congressman, however. And while DCGS-A has managed to achieve the near-impossible feat in Washington of uniting numerous politicians on both sides of the aisle against it from liberal Houston Representative Sheila Jackson Lee to moderate Senator Claire McCaskill to Tea Party Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas bureaucracies can display a unique form of agility when confronted with a whiff of their own mortality. They can charm, befuddle, deceive and thereby endure. By 2012, DCGS-A’s big subcontractors like General Dynamics began showing up to Capitol Hill with a two-page Congressional Engagement Strategy with such misleading talking points as, DCGS-A provides a suite of analytical tools while Palantir provides a small subset of DCGS-A capabilities.

Still, when medal-studded commanders like Odierno and Legere look a legislator in the eyes (as both generals have done in the past several weeks) and declare that DCGS-A is working splendidly while Palantir by comparison is little more than an app, few have the nerve and expertise to call bullshit. (Hunter did so to Odierno, during a House Armed Services hearing in April; the exchange went viral on YouTube.) It’s far easier for a beleaguered, jargon-deficient congressional staffer to advise the boss that, OK, let’s just trust the military brass and move on to something else.

The Army guys were rude on every level, would interrupt when the Palantir guys were speaking.

As one influential Democratic staffer admitted after receiving a briefing with DCGS-A personnel to explain the Cloud’s persistent ineffectiveness: They’re really good at saying, ‘We’re just one step from full roll-out, and then you’ll find out six months later they’re delayed. They get into super acronym mode, and it becomes kind of a confusing game. A Senate military aide whose boss has become deeply interested in the DCGS-A versus Palantir saga confessed to me that nothing in his expertise covered the writing of software codes. And when a Senate Appropriations Committee staffer was given a tour of the DCGS-A facility in Aberdeen, Maryland, this past February, she was shown a demo of the system’s latest version. The system crashed during the demonstration and had to be rebooted, according to another eyewitness, but the Senate staffer appeared not to notice.

For my part, General Legere momentarily succeeded in bewildering me with an arsenal of jargon. Palantir, she said, can’t link up with Army data sources because they have a different ontology for tagging. (While this is true, Palantir’s ontology, according to the military users of Palantir with whom I spoke, in no way makes the system less open, only more efficient.) Over and over, Legere damningly referred to Palantir as proprietary, a dirty yet meaningless word that also applies to the Army’s industry partners IBM and Google, neither of whom has sold off its intellectual property to the government. She insisted that the few Army units that had requested Palantir only used it for link analysis and visualization. (The military users later told me this was laughably untrue. As soon as someone says that, I know they don’t know what they’re talking about, the intel analyst from the 82nd Airborne told me. The link analysis in Palantir isn’t better, honestly. What makes Palantir powerful is you can find and connect all this data with all these other parts of the system.) And she spoke ominously of Palantir’s data latency gaps. This does appear to be a fair criticism: Palantir’s architecture is rigged in such a way that slightly slows down data’s path from its repository to a user. But the Marines and Special Operations don’t seem particularly hamstrung by this liability. By contrast, says one of the Marine officials who was involved in the services acquisition of Palantir and counts himself as an admirer, we took a look at DCGS-A and talked to soldiers who’d used it, and it was panned.

The Army’s latest gambit has been to exhibit a show of conciliation by entering into a cooperative research agreement with Palantir. Duncan Hunter is unimpressed. As we speak, DCGS-A is making Palantir integrate into their shitty system, he told me. This is like Google having to integrate into Microsoft Access. It’s totally backwards. In the meantime, a total of nine Army brigades have been permitted to use Palantir. The other 129 are stuck with DCGS-A which, just this past November, was described by the Army’s own evaluation office to be not operationally effective, not operationally suitable and not operationally survivable against cyber threats. The G-2 office headed by General Legere has routinely responded to criticisms of DCGS-A by blaming the victim telling the users who can’t make sense of the system, you need more training. I don’t think Legere has seen it in use in the field, except by people trying to convince her how good it is, said the analyst from the 82nd.

Still, Legere, the marathoner, knows that time is on the side of bureaucrats, who have every reason to believe that politicians like Hunter will eventually turn their attention elsewhere. By 2014, the United States will cease combat operations in Afghanistan turning away from the land of IEDs and low-intensity conflicts that require the kind of skilled instant mapping of enemy tactics that DCGS-A seems incapable of providing. Instead, as one veteran Senate military aide suggested to me, The services are already pivoting to Asia, back to their happy place where they can refocus on traditional forms of warfare.

But as our tragic misadventure in Iraq proved, even invading a country that is equipped with inferior conventional weapons doesn’t guarantee anything like victory. Protracted asymmetrical warfare waged by un-uniformed insurgents this is the new normal American troops can expect to face. Without intelligence data that is rich not only in quantity but also in accessibility, we don’t know what we know, and the enemy regains the edge. When I asked the aforementioned Army intelligence officer how he would feel about going into Syria or Iran with DCGS-A, his reply was immediate.

That terrifies me more than you know,he said.

West war of terror comes out of closet

Syrian terrorists supported by Hussein Obama

By Jim W. Dean

Western publics sit like deer in the headlights, unable to move despite the illegal night hunter about to shoot them through the head.

But it also could be said we are shooting ourselves in the head.

I use that dramatic analogy because that seems to be exactly what is happening to us. A new generation of terror is being created right before our very eyes using our own tax dollars to do so, and the effort led by those sworn to protect us...people we elected.

Let's review the current Syrian mess and how some very evil people, maybe an evil empire really, saw a way to exploit the situation to launch a new generation of terror not only in the Mid East but the Caucus region and Europe and North Africa.

The devastation that this will bring upon those areas is so certain I can only conclude that it is actually the purpose of the whole effort. The motivation seems a bit hazy as there is no real understandable beneficial motive for the people of these countries...like a real security threat. A war for commercial interests is the only feasible reason.

Syria in particular has not been a threat to any of the new terrorist sponsor club members that just met in Doha. It has no strategic offensive power whatsoever. Why did it so quickly become the replacement for the bogus Iran threat? Was it because the world became more educated about the attempted hoax over Iran's nuclear programs, peddled upon us by international institutions that are forever stained for the deception?

Let's take a look at the new terrorist cheer leading club...Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States. Israel was there in spirit. What the UAE is doing in there I have no idea.

Egypt was the big surprise when Morsi finally showed his cards by giving the green light to Egyptians to go fight with the Free Syrian Army which has been completely rejected by a large majority of the Syria people. They are exposed as greedy opportunists leading nearly a 100 different groups of thugs and religious mercenaries, over whom they have no real control.

But radical Salifists who did not want to travel to Syria to murder Shias just killed some outside of Cairo. Several hundred cowards murdered the top Shia cleric in Egypt, Sheikh Shehata and some of his staff at his home, and then set it on fire at the village of Abu Mussalam. 

After having his body dragged through the streets the local hospital reported that he had been slaughtered (his throat cut). The Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil had to carry the ball on denouncing the killings because president Morsi, who was clearly the cause of the incitement, was hiding out.

Jordan has been pitiful, recently claiming that they wanted no American invasion of Syria from their country, something they know will never happened. What they left out was Jordanian cargo planes have been flying arms to the Syrian rebels, coordinated by the CIA. Dear Jordanian Intel, plane tail numbers are recorded everywhere they go and put into databases for pattern analysis...A,B,C stuff. You should find something else to lie about.

Qatar has been a big funder of Egypt during its difficult post revolution financial transition. This has been made worse as Morsi and the Muslim brotherhood have focused on maintaining their political monopoly and letting the country's future drift in the wind. I suspect that Qatar twisted his arm by asking him to promote more Egyptian terrorist recruits heading off to rape, rob and terrorize in Syria.

The Western terrorist puppeteers still have their eye on Lebanon. Salafist Sheikh Ahmed al-Assir attempted to trigger a new Lebanon civil war which began first in Sidon in 1975. His gunman attacked an army checkpoint, killing some soldiers, and more were killed taking over the mosque which al-Assir used as his base. The army is in complete control now with 60 of al-Assir's followers arrested.

But the army went further, not waiting for opposition to snipe at them at their chosen time. It asked all religious leaders to state whether they stand with the army in maintaining security, or if they prefer drenching the country in blood again. It was a smart move. 

Lebanese soldiers were killed and wounded defending their country from being another Geo-political shooting gallery for Western interests along with Israel, and then the Saudis who are heavily invested in Lebanon. They are looking for strategic pipeline routes through both Syria or Lebanon, and cutting Iran off from the same.

Despite Iran's disappointment in Turkey's support of the Syrian Rebel disaster, Iran's religious leaders have not called for 'volunteers' to go fight in Syria, or open a second front in Turkey. Iran is standing by its pledge to seek resolution via a political settlement and has made no threats, only promises of retaliation if attacked which every country has the right to do under international law.

The world public is going to have to get proactive on this growing state sponsored terrorism threat. The UN has shown itself totally useless with these privately country financed terror brigades now roaming around the planet with nation state approval and protection.

Qatar, always in the thick of the intrigue, has been flying arms out of Libya to the Syrian rebels for some time, from stockpiles captured during Gaddafi's war. And Libyan Salafists have been fighting in Syria almost from the beginning.

The Tunisians have no trouble seeing this threat as they estimate 800 of their young people are fighting in Syria, having entered via Turkey. They fully expect when Syria is over to see these well trained native born extremists returning to turn Tunisia into a battlefield, and consequently are pushing for them to be all be arrested.

Why is it that newly democratic Tunisia has figured out what Western jurisprudence has not, or does not want to...that all of these religious mercenaries should have arrest warrants put out on them? They are a danger to everybody while they are running around loose. 

But I would take it a major step further. Those who are funding, transporting and and arming them should also have arrest warrants put out on themselves under the existing anti-terrorism laws that exist. These aiders and abettors are now the mega-terrorists of our time because they are industrializing terror by proxy.

The Israelis mainstreamed state terrorism and are consulting the Gulf states, with big brother America agreeing to go along with it. The goal is a twisted kind of Neo-colonialism to effectively increase their territorial borders and geopolitical power by using the terrorism that we have been writing about on Press TV for almost a year.

The BRIC countries now have a huge opening to pick up the mantel for peace and justice which has been squandered by the West. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff has made a brilliant move to settle unrest in her own country by pledging oil royalties, (the people's wealth) to be spent on healthcare and education, along with $25 billion in more mass transit infrastructure investment which will be a big boon not only to the economy but the good faith of her government.

But she went even much further, calling for a a referendum to elect an new constituent assembly tasked with political reform. And yes, she admitted that corruption was a big problem. But the wording she used was critical, and caught my attention. I pray that it is accurate. 

The word 'elect' was the silver bullet. It means this new assembly can make new law. Rousseff has handed real power back to the people, an incredibly brilliant move, and one you would never see any western country do.

We need a new elected assembly here in the US. At the top of my list would be a new branch of government, a law enforcement, judicial and intelligence body that reported directly to the people and had full prosecutorial power over the other three branches. Our entire corrupted and compromised political structure would no longer be the pet of the American elites, be they Dems or Repubs. We could really do some housing cleaning with that tool.

Our prayers are with presidents Rousseff and Rohani as they are game changers in a world that needs them badly. Iran I suspect, will find itself a major BRIC player in the not too distant future. And it looks like their major opponents will be bankrupt Western countries with their parasitic medieval banking cabal, endless war threats and state terrorism sponsorships.