Category Archives: Israel

A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Nationhood, War

“A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ ‘Duty,’ a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of ‘evening sessions’ during which he’d write condolence letters ‘to the families of service members killed in action.’ There ‘probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,’ he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became ‘on the strain on our troops and on their families.’ After all, ‘they’d been at war for 10 years.’ ‘My highest priority,’ he averred in an interview with NPR, was ‘trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,’ and expressing ‘concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.’

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or ‘save’ another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. …

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Ariel Sharon, Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Homeland Security, Israel, Judaism & Jews, libertarianism, Middle East, Military

As a child growing up in Israel, this 1973 image of the late Ariel Sharon was seared in my mind. Had Sharon himself not performed military miracles, who knows if Israelis, myself included, would have survived. How many Americans can point to a leader who had actually saved their lives, rather than send other men to die in foreign countries and then propagandized his countrymen about having fought for their freedoms?

Seen in the image above, former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon led his men into battle and won the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which the Israeli government and the intelligence failed. Here Sharon is seen during that war “on the western bank of the Suez Canal in Egypt. Sharon said his greatest military success came during that war. He surrounded Egypt’s Third Army and, defying orders, led 200 tanks and 5,000 men over the Suez Canal, a turning point.”

Sharon died, Jan 11, after languishing in a vegetative state for 8 years.

During the Bush years, “libertarian who loathe Israel” would often compare Emperor Bush with Sharon, whom they detested too.

Hated though he was abroad, Sharon was a soldier in the style of “Stonewall” Jackson, not Dubya the Deserter. As a Special Forces commander, he personally led his troops into battle, performing daring assaults that saved Israel in the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Agree or disagree with his methods, it is unarguable that Sharon’s overriding concern was with the security of his citizens. He saw himself as bearing a “historic responsibility” for “the fate of the Jewish people.” By contrast, Bush’s Wilsonian, global missionary movement related not even tangentially to the future and safety of the American people.

Unlike George Bush the internationalist, Arik Sharon was a fierce nationalist who cared first and foremost about his country. Under pressure from the U.S. for his treatment of terrorists, he was expected to make concessions to murderers who kill civilians, while Bush and the international community made no such allowances for al-Qaida.

UPDATED: The TAO Of Tyranny (The Israeli Difference)

Government, Homeland Security, Israel, Technology, Terrorism, The State

The TAO of tyranny was devised in 1997. In the USA.

The German weekly Der Spiegel has performed the service the British Guardian performed before it. Once again it falls to the serious foreign press to expose the machinations of the U.S. state apparatus; in this case, the works of The Office of Tailored Access Operations, or Tao.

“… TAO … is the National Security Agency’s top operative unit — something like a squad of plumbers that can be called in when normal access to a target is blocked.” So writes Der Spiegel.

According to internal NSA documents viewed by SPIEGEL, these on-call digital plumbers are involved in many sensitive operations conducted by American intelligence agencies. TAO’s area of operations ranges from counterterrorism to cyber attacks to traditional espionage. The documents reveal just how diversified the tools at TAO’s disposal have become — and also how it exploits the technical weaknesses of the IT industry, from Microsoft to Cisco and Huawei, to carry out its discreet and efficient attacks. …

… one former TAO chief wrote … that TAO “needs to continue to grow and must lay the foundation for integrated Computer Network Operations,” and that it must “support Computer Network Attacks as an integrated part of military operations.” To succeed in this, she wrote, TAO would have to acquire “pervasive, persistent access on the global network.” An internal description of TAO’s responsibilities makes clear that aggressive attacks are an explicit part of the unit’s tasks. In other words, the NSA’s hackers have been given a government mandate for their work. During the middle part of the last decade, the special unit succeeded in gaining access to 258 targets in 89 countries — nearly everywhere in the world. In 2010, it conducted 279 operations worldwide.

Indeed, TAO specialists have directly accessed the protected networks of democratically elected leaders of countries. They infiltrated networks of European telecommunications companies and gained access to and read mails sent over Blackberry’s BES email servers, which until then were believed to be securely encrypted. Achieving this last goal required a “sustained TAO operation,” one document states.

This TAO unit is born of the Internet — created in 1997, a time when not even 2 percent of the world’s population had Internet access and no one had yet thought of Facebook, YouTube or Twitter. From the time the first TAO employees moved into offices at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, the unit was housed in a separate wing, set apart from the rest of the agency. Their task was clear from the beginning — to work around the clock to find ways to hack into global communications traffic.

… The TAO workers authorized to access the special, secure floor on which the unit is located are for the most part considerably younger than the average NSA staff member. Their job is breaking into, manipulating and exploiting computer networks, making them hackers and civil servants in one. Many resemble geeks — and act the part, too.

Their leader: the dangerous NSA Director, Keith Alexander.

Read on about “‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE), the goal [of which] is to “subvert endpoint devices,” according to an internal NSA presentation that SPIEGEL has viewed. The presentation goes on to list nearly all the types of devices that run our digital lives — ‘servers, workstations, firewalls, routers, handsets, phone switches, SCADA systems, etc.’ SCADAs are industrial control systems used in factories, as well as in power plants. Anyone who can bring these systems under their control has the potential to knock out parts of a country’s critical infrastructure.”

The most well-known and notorious use of this type of attack was the development of Stuxnet, the computer worm whose existence was discovered in June 2010. The virus was developed jointly by American and Israeli intelligence agencies to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, and successfully so.

AND READ HOW TAO techies are “Having Fun at Microsoft’s Expense”—and at ours, since so many of us use Microsoft’s Windows.

UPDATED (12/31): The Israeli Difference, in reply to the Facebook Thread:

Israel possesses this capability, Don Darkes. But Israel seems far more prone to using these “tools” to do what they believe, and most of Israelis believe, is in the interest of national survival. The US state, however, turns on its own people, seldom acting in their interest. I mean, if Uncle Sam is so smart, and is spying on Mexico, why give drug dealers weapons to kill Americans and innocent Mexicans? A lot of people hate Israel. But a lot of what the state does (and I do not necessarily support these intrusions) is executed by a leadership that perceives its interest to be one with the people it represents. In other words, when Israelis release a cyber-virus on Iran, it is b/c Mosad members are not emigrating (they can’t; no one will have them). They want to secure the future of their own kind.

Ordinary Iranians Deserve Relief

Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel, Trade

Isreali Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a patriot. About that there can be no doubt. Unlike American pols, whose policies vis-a-vis the American people border on treason, Netanyahu generally acts in the interests of his countrymen. As the patriot he is, one expects Netanyahu to disapprove of the deal Western powers are hammering out with Iran.

“I told them that according to the information reaching Israel, the deal that appears to be in the offing is bad and dangerous,” said Netanyahu. “Not just for us but also for them. I suggested that they wait and give it serious consideration, and it’s good that that is indeed what was decided. We will do everything we can to convince the leaders not to reach a bad agreement.”

The truth, of course, is that the “deal” is not dangerous to the U.S.

Israel’s concerns notwithstanding, pursuing negotiations that ease sanctions on Iran are good for the U.S. and indubitably fair to the Iranian people. Detailed in “The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us” are the costs to Americans—as opposed to their overseers in Washington—of sanctions:

Not to be overlooked are the costs to Americans of sanction enforcement, avers Harmer. In addition to the opportunity costs—the missed business aforementioned—there are “direct costs.” The Office of Foreign Asset Control in the U.S. Treasury Department squanders around $1 billion a year in developing lists of “financial institutions that are subject to sanctions,” and then infringing on the rights of individuals and companies to freely exchange privately owned property.

“Indirect costs” are incurred in the course of cultivating a massive U.S. intelligent infrastructure—a veritable alphabet soup of agencies—upon which the Treasury draws in enforcing a regimen of sanctions.

So, too, are the “deterrent costs” borne by the American taxpayer who pays for patrolling the Persian Gulf, the Northern Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz. …

The toll on ordinary Iranians is orders of magnitude greater. Especially pressing: “the disbursement to Iran in installments of up to about $50 billion of Iranian funds blocked in foreign accounts for years.”

Ultimately, trade, not democracy, is the best antidote to war with Iran. The more economically intertwined countries become, the less likely they are to go to war. More than boycotts, barter with Iran is bound to promote good will and reduce belligerence on both sides. As a general rule, state-enforced boycotts harm honest, hard-working Americans who use the economic means to earn their keep. They benefit servants of Uncle Sam—the political class and its media and think-tank hangers-on. For they deploy the political means to advance their ends and grow their sphere of influence. As libertarian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, these “are two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth”—the economic means is honest and productive, the political means is dishonest and predatory.