Agent OOObama, Louisiana Top Kill

Eugene Robinson
Meghan McCain
Steve Inskeep
Tenzin Gyatso

"These days we need to highlight what unifies us." - Tenzin Gyatso

One of the side benefits of having the US help build your government, besides the insane amount of money being used to bribe everyone, is getting to have your own spy service, courtesy of Agent OOObama...  Today the Afghani spy service blamed the Pakistani spy service for supporting a recent suicide bombing of a US convoy of SUV's that killed four colonels and 12 Afghan civilians: "The remarks came in a news conference announcing the arrest of seven people suspected of organizing the attack last Tuesday, in which a suicide bomber drove a minivan full of explosives into a convoy of armored S.U.V.’s... The seven were also charged with involvement in other suicide attacks in Kabul that killed another 25 people.


“All the explosions and terrorist attacks by these people were plotted from the other side of the border and most of the explosives and materials used for the attacks were brought from the other side to Afghanistan. Of course, when we say that those attacks were plotted from the other side of the border, the intelligence service of our neighboring country has definitely had its role in equipping and training of this group.” 

We know how much everyone loves to use spies, especially the American military, whose budget for black operations in 2011 will be $59 billion. General David Petraeus has signed an order to spend a lot of that money building secret intelligence networks in the Middle East and Africa: "The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces. Officials said the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.


While the Bush administration had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order is intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term, officials said. Its goals are to build networks that could “penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy” Al Qaeda and other militant groups, as well as to “prepare the environment” for future attacks by American or local military forces, the document said. The order, however, does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries." For some reason, Graham Greene's, Our Man in Havana, springs to mind. I wonder if I can convince them that we need to watch the watchers here where I live, then I could become Our Man in Colorado Springs. Doesn't have the same flair or ring to it, I know.  I would love to get a piece of that pie, many of our homegrown terrorists have had ties to Colorado. And like most of our private contractors, I wouldn't have to do very much to get extremely well paid...

The military is tired of the expanded role of the CIA trooping around in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and want to depend on them less in the future: "In broadening its secret activities, the United States military has also sought in recent years to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant American troop presence." We have Donald Rumsfeld to thank for the fascination and expansive use of private contractors, or mercenaries, in war zones. After he left, the CIA flexed its muscles, after it had almost been ready to disband after several major failures of intelligence. They hired a bunch of new hotshots and let the clandestine branch run the rest of the service, running their own mercenaries and the drone program. Obama helped the CIA further by naming Leon Panetta as the new director, and he has organized it into a lean, mean fighting organization that can topple the heads of any other intelligence service, say goodbye Dennis Blair... The downside of all of this spy networking was also pointed out in another Graham Greene book, The Ugly American... It takes months for the NSA to look at and decipher all of the communications it intercepts, and we have serious problems with different organizations not sharing information, all we need are a few more cooks tossing in ingredients to the stew. No wonder we have so many think tanks and policy centers, all coming up with neither insights or answers to today's global problems.


North Korea has severed all ties with South Korea over being blamed for the torpedoing of a South Korean Navy ship. Time for another war? Why not, let's drag what's left of the Asian econmy down the drain, too. I think what we will need when Jesus is Resurrected, is to hope that his accounting skills are up to the task...

louisiana top kill...

Today BP is going to try stopping the oil leak through a collapsed pipe by using a method known as top kill, with a Pat Campbell in charge.. Basically, they are going to put drilling mud into the lines, hoping that the weight will stop the flow of oil, then they can further plug the hole and create a cement cap. This is a tried and true method that worked well in stopping 900 bombed oil wells in Kuwait, and Mr Campbell has had over 40 years experience doing this all around the world, but it has never been done at a mile below the ocean's surface. The problem rests in the work all being done by remote controlled robots, with their handlers controlling them from Houston. Good luck.

“I’ve got a degree in being a grandpa, that’s all,” - Pat Campbell

Meanwhile, a federal investigation is underway on the regulators who were hired by the Bush administration and have not been regulating for the past several years. When it was revealed in the last year of George's administration that many of the hires and appointees were trying to burrow in at the departments where they worked, and did not plan on leaving during the transition as is normally done, several pundits warned that only bad things would come of it. The Republican reasoning was that if you couldn't limit or get rid of a department, then hire people to sabotage the way it worked, which was done for every department in the government. So it may be that indirectly we have Karl Rove to thank for all that the regulators didn't do before the spill, and many of the screw-ups that has happened afterwards. The rest we can blame on private industry, for doing their best to find a way around as many safety regulations that they could, making it an unregulated, free for all marketplace.

BP has set up a website, giving their latest news on the oil spill, you can link to it here, at deepwaterhorizonresponse.com

Hotlines have been established 24/7 for the following:

To report oil on the shoreline:   (866) 448 - 5816
To report impacted wildlife:      (866) 557 - 1401
To make spill-related claims:     (800) 440 - 0858