The policy you have when you don’t have a policy Australia’s Prime Minister Julia Gillard delivered a statement about the country’s national security policy to a carefully selected crowd of defense, public service, and academic personnel at the Australian National University late last month. The 58 page paper titled Strong and Secure: A Strategy for Australia’s National Security supersedes the last one given by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd back in 2008 and is considered a supplement to the White Paper, Australia in the Asian Century presented by Premier Gillard last October. The paper outlines the country’s assessment of priorities, risks, and capabilities.
Category: Head Stories
The Real New World Order. Bankers Taking over the World How quickly best laid plans become passé. New world orders come, it seems, as frequently as eclipses. The old world order (ancien régime), along with 16 million people, died during the Great European War which began on June 28, 1914 when the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, in Sarajevo. (Today he would be called a terrorist.) This assassination sent nations that had no desire to go to war into the most destructive war the world had yet experienced. Europe at the beginning of 1914 consisted of six major empires and an assortment of minor states that the major empires didn’t care much about. The six major empires, (the Austro-Hungarian, French, German, British, Ottoman, and Russian) were ensnared in military alliances (much like the US is today) which were formed to keep the peace. The diplomats, like those today, believed that forming alliances that balanced the powers of different groups would keep them from attacking each other. The Central Powers consisted of Austro-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire; the Triple Entente consisted of the other three. Peace, the diplomats thought was assured. What happened?
Does the United States still have the same level of control over the energy resources of the Middle East as it once had? The major energy-producing countries are still firmly under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships. So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is limited, but it’s not insignificant. The Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example, if you go back 50 years, the energy resources — the main concern of U.S. planners — have been mostly nationalized. There are constantly attempts to reverse that, but they have not succeeded.
Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.
Tensions are escalating since North Korea’s launch of a satellite into orbit on December 12, 2012. Overwrought news reports termed the launch a “threat” and a “provocation,” while U.S. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor called it “irresponsible behavior.” Punishment for North Korea was swift in coming. North Korea’s Kwangmyongsong-3 was just one of 75 satellites that a variety of nations sent into space last year, but Pyongyang’s launch, and a failed launch earlier in the year on April 12, were the only ones singled out for condemnation. [1] In Western eyes, there was something uniquely threatening about the Kwangmyongsong-3 earth observation satellite, unlike the apparently more benign five military and three spy satellites the United States launched last year.
Ten years ago, the Space Shuttle Columbia exploded on descent during a top-secret mission. At the time, my analysis of the cause of the blast drew support from American aerospace engineers along with angry death threats from zealots in the Israeli Air Force. Not only was the Israeli military incensed by my revealing that their faulty laser gun system had destroyed the U.S. space craft from within but also that the expose was seen as insulting to astronaut Ilan Ramon, the Israeli war hero who had earlier led the air strike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. The Challenger disaster of January 28, 1986, was immediately followed by the greatest cover-up in aerospace history, an information blackout that continues till now, even after the termination of the shuttle program.
Does a shadowy group of obscenely wealthy elitists control the world? Do men and women with enormous amounts of money really run the world from behind the scenes? The answer might surprise you. Most of us tend to think of money as a convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also represents power and control. And today we live in a neo-fuedalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings. When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am not just talking about people that have a few million dollars. As you will see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year and still be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt. That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible. Under this ne0-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments. Just look around – everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier. But the ultra-wealthy don’t just sit on all of that wealth. They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations.
With North Korea declaring its intention to push ahead with a third nuclear test following the United Nations Security Council resolution on its launch of a long-range rocket, it seems hardly a coincidence that the US, China, and Japan have launched their own interceptor missiles and spy satellites. As the intensity of the North Korean nuclear crisis soars and the strategic competition between the US and China, and between China and Japan, heats up in the Asia-Pacific region, military tensions are on the rise in Northeast Asia. On Jan. 26 (local time), the US Defense Department announced that it had succeeded in a test of a missile defense system that can intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that are aimed at the continental US while they are still outside the atmosphere. This test is part of a project that is being conducted to defend the continental US from the ICBM threat posed by North Korea and Iran.
Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests. Hillary Clinton France’s military intervention into Mali may at first glance appear to have little to do with the U.S. “pivot” to Asia. But as a French mission supposedly meant to bolster a U.N. sanctioned and African-led intervention has gone from “a question of weeks” to“the total re-conquest of Mali,” what may have begun as a French affair has now become a Western intervention. And this in turn has drawn wider strategic interests into the conflict. Strategic interests, it is becoming clearer, shaped by the imperatives of the U.S. Asia pivot.
This is a list of names of innocent children killed by America’s drones But behind each name there is the face of a child with a family history in a village in a far away country, with a mom and a dad, with brothers and sisters and friends. Among the list, are infants of 1, 2, 3 and 4 years old. In some cases brothers and sisters of an entire family are killed. Four sisters of the Ali Mohammed Nasser family in Yemen were killed. Afrah was 9 years old when she and her three younger sisters Zayda (7 years old) , Hoda (5 years old) and Sheika (4 years old) were struck by an American drone. Ibrahim, a 13 year old boy of the Abdullah Mokbel Salem Louqye family in Yemen was struck by a US drone, together with his younger brother Asmaa (9 years old) and two younger sisters, Salma (4 years old) and Fatima (3 years old) These children are innocent. They are not different from our own children. Their lives were taken away at a very young age as part of a military agenda, which claims to be combating “international terrorism” These drone attacks are extremely precise. We are not dealing with “collateral damage”. Drone operators have the ability of viewing from a computer screen their targets well in advance of a strike.
There is a great deal of sensitivity to one of the most notorious of the many Holocausts humankind has suffered: the Nazi Holocaust against Jews, Gypsies and others. Movies like Schindler’s List are a constant reminder of massive suffering that must never be forgotten and historical lessons that must be learned. Most believe that something like the Holocaust of the Nazis against Jews or Gypsies or other victims targeted by the Nazis could never happen here in America or in Canada. Imagine that something like what happened to Jews in Germany happened in America or Canada. Imagine that Jewish children were forced to repeat Christian prayers and were beaten or even murdered if they spoke or prayed in Hebrew or Yiddish and spoke or prayed Jewish prayers.