Category: sea

The Nuclear War by Sea (Revelation 15)

Central Chronicle
China and Pakistan are alarmed at the fast development and deployment of state of art defence missiles and most updated submarines in the defence system. The China has posed a proxy threat that in view of India defence preparedness it would provide missiles and submarines to Pakistan match India’s capability.
The Pakistan has filed a complaint against India with the Missile Technology Control System – a group of 33 nations. India is member of the MTCR while is Pakistan is not there. India recently test fired the updated version of rocket Pinak-2. A Multi-Barrel Rocket launcher can fire launch 12 Pinaks at a time.
The Pinak is a weapon that can target and destroy enemy bunkers in the range of 50 kilometer. India has prepared a submarine Khanderi with French support costing 24 thousand crores of rupees of Scorpion class. It can fire at the sea surface at warships and deep inside can hit enemy submarine.
Two year back in April 2015 India has already inducted Kalbari submarine in the Indian Navy. India has come up in missile system upto the stage that now it will soon supply it to the Vietnam. India is carrying out ‘Bombay High’ type oil exploration in the sea territory of Vietnam. China is facing rough weather on the South China Sea as no nation of the Pacific Ocean accepts claim of China on it.
The nominated Secretary of State Mr.Tillersome of America has said that China would have to dismantle its artificial islands on the Ocean. The Pacific Ocean is having 70 per cent of trade sea-routes of the other nations. The Pacific is International waters. The China has launched a new electronic intelligence naval ship.
The China is expanding its presence in Sri Lanka in building new seaports with Chinese assistance. The former President Mr.APJ Abdul Kalam has started and developed India’s first missile. The Missile programme was approved and launched by the Prime Minister Mrs.Indira Gandhi. India has many series of missiles of Akash, Prithvi, Nag, Pinack etc. India takes into account its mighty presence in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Bush Opened The Seals of Prophecy (Revelation 6)


The Iraq War Made
 
LONDON – With the land of the two rivers, Iraq and Syria, now a wasteland of human suffering and rubble, the Report of the Iraq Inquiry, commonly known as the Chilcot report (after its chairman, Sir John Chilcot), has aimed to help explain how we got here. Now that it has detailed the extent of British culpability in the 2003 American-led invasion of Iraq, those implicated in the report’s findings are using two arguments to refute it.

The first, offered by former Prime Minister Tony Blair, that the world would be much worse today had Iraqi President Saddam Hussein been left in power. The second is that invading Iraq would have succeeded but for a lack of post-invasion planning, which allowed for the mayhem that followed.
Simon Tilford examines how Barry Eichengreen, Joseph Stiglitz, Laura Tyson, and other Project Syndicate contributors address the anti-trade sentiment roiling advanced economies.

The second argument has some truth to it. But the first argument is surely false – a desperate attempt at reputation management by those responsible for a disastrous decision.

To academic observers and others who reported from Iraq at the time, as I did, Saddam was a prototypical regional bully. Domestically, he was a murderous tyrant; but his primary security concern was Iran, with which he waged, with Western support, a pointless war of nearly ten years that cost a million lives and ended in stalemate.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he assumed it was purely a regional squabble about oil and territorial claims. He mistakenly believed that the West had given him a green light.

The Kuwait invasion was reversed by Operation Desert Storm and other events that led the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to impose crippling sanctions and no-fly zones across large swaths of Iraq. With these measures in place, Saddam’s Iraq was weakened almost to breaking point.
In his newly diminished state, Saddam continued to obsess over Iran and hint at his own weapons of mass destruction. Iraq, however, had abandoned its nuclear project in 1991, had no biological weapons, and had only limited chemical-weapons capability. At no stage after being expelled from Kuwait did Saddam’s regime pose a serious threat to the region or the West. He was contained, like a jackal in a cage.

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush’s administration understandably retaliated, by invading Afghanistan, where the Taliban government hosted Al-Qaeda training camps. By December 2001, the Bush administration was considering attacking Iraq, too.

The biggest obstacle for the Bush administration was the absence of an established connection between Saddam’s regime and Islamic extremism, though an effort was made to concoct a meeting between representatives of the two in Prague. Quite the contrary: Saddam’s regime and militant Islam were mortal enemies.

Still, leading administration figures were determined to wage war on Iraq, so they manufactured a justification: the threat of WMDs. In reality, there was no new Iraqi threat or indication that Iraq was in a position to deploy such weapons. And even when Saddam had used chemical weapons years earlier – against Iranian forces in 1988, at the turning point in the war in the Faw Peninsula, and against Iraqi Kurds in 1991 – the international response had entailed, at most, a no-fly zone, not an invasion. (The 1988 incident drew no response at all.)

Moreover, in the 1991 campaign to liberate Kuwait, Western countries threatened to respond with tactical nuclear weapons if Saddam deployed chemical weapons. He didn’t; and during United Nations inspections before the March 2003 invasion, there was no evidence of any additional WMD program.

The plain purpose of the 2003 invasion was regime change. Indeed, Blair has all but admitted as much. Earlier this year, he explained to Parliament’s foreign affairs committee that he had doubts about Western intervention in Libya for fear of repeating events in Iraq.

The damage from regime change in Iraq has been substantial. According to the Chilcot report, at least 150,000 Iraqis (and possibly four times that number) have been killed in the years since the invasion, and an estimated three million people have been displaced from their homes. The security situation is far worse than under Saddam, and the economy is no better.

Meanwhile, as many had warned at the time, Iran, with its largest historical barrier to expansion gone, now enjoys a significant strategic advantage. Through Shia militias and a sympathetic government in Baghdad, Iran is virtually occupying large parts of Iraq. So, too, is the so-called Islamic State, which is largely composed of Saddam’s former Sunni henchmen. They are locked in battle against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s murderous pro-Iranian regime; a few pro-Western fighting groups, supported by American and British air strikes; as well as the Kurds, the Turks, and the Russians. The view that the Syrian civil war had nothing to do with events in Iraq is untenable.
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Bush And Blair Lied And Many Many Died


We Know They Lied about Iraq’s WMDs, but It Gets Worse

Posted: July 13, 2016
Stephen Zunes

Photo of George Bush and Tony Blair at NATO summit in Istanbul. Image via Wikimedia
Sir John Chilcot’s report on Great Britain’s role in the Iraq War confirmed what many have long assumed: the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair—and, by extension, the administration of President George W. Bush—deliberately misled us, exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and Iraq in order to justify the 2003 invasion of that country.

This is a travesty of justice. The thousands of American casualties, trillions of dollars of expenditures, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, and the rise of sectarianism, terrorism, Islamist extremism, and the other negative consequences of the invasion have been disastrous.

But even worse, even if Iraq really did have the proscribed “WMDs”, delivery systems, and weapons programs at the time of the invasion, the war would have still been illegal and unnecessary. Here’s why.

At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq roughly two dozen countries had chemical weapons, biological weapons, or nuclear programs with weapons potential. The mere possession of these programs is not legitimate grounds for invasion. Those who claim that the invasion would have somehow been justifiable if Bush and Blair had been telling the truth about Iraq’s WMDs and related programs are effectively saying the United States somehow has the right to invade dozens of other countries as well.

In fact, since the United States has chemical and nuclear weapons, it would presumably give other nations the right to invade us.

Defenders of the invasion and occupation claim that Iraq was in violation of UN Security Council resolutions regarding its program. But the United Nations determined—and the United States later acknowledged—they were not.

Furthermore, there was no authorization of force by the UN Security Council. The UN Charter—which, as a signed and ratified international treaty, has the force of “supreme law” according to the U.S. Constitution—declares unequivocally in Articles 41 and 42 that the UN Security Council alone has the power to authorize the use of military force against any nation in noncompliance of its resolutions.

The U.N. Security Council alone had the authority to determine what, if any, action to take regarding current or future Iraqi violations. The final pre-war UN resolution (1441) declared that any alleged violations be brought forward by the inspection teams consisting of experts in the field, not by any member state, and that at such a time the Security Council would “convene immediately in order to consider the situation and the need for full compliance.”

Today there are three other countries in violation of UN Security Council resolutions regarding non-conventional weapons (as there were back in 2003). UN Security Council resolution 487 calls on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency. UN Security Council resolution 1172 calls on India and Pakistan to eliminate their nuclear arsenals and long-range missiles.

Not only have successive U.S. administrations blocked the Security Council from enforcing these resolutions, the United States has provided all three countries with nuclear-capable jet fighters and other military assistance and has subsequently signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with India.
To be clear, not only were charges by American and British officials that Iraq was violating the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty false, neither government expressed concern that Israel, India and Pakistan had never signed on. Furthermore, the NPT requires that the nuclear weapons states at the time of its signing make good-faith efforts to pursue complete nuclear disarmament, which the United States and Great Britain (along with France, Russia, and China) have failed to do. As a result, it is these countries, not Iraq, that were and are in material breach of the NPT.

Even if Iraq had WMDs, the threat of massive retaliation by regional forces—such as nuclear-armed Israel—as well as U.S. forces permanently stationed in the region provided a more than sufficient deterrent to Iraq using the weapons beyond its borders.

A costly invasion and extended occupation were completely unnecessary.

While the additional evidence provided by the Chilcot Inquiry of the duplicity by the British and American governments regarding Iraq’s military capabilities certainly merit attention, let’s not pretend that Iraq actually possessing such weapons and weapons programs would have justified the war.

To do so would just open the door for future disastrous military engagements against countries that really might have such capabilities.

Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics and coordinator of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco.

Mission Accomplished: Bush Opens The Prophecy


No, really, George W. Bush lied about WMDs

Updated by Dylan Matthews on July 9, 2016, 10:00 a.m. ET

The best estimates available suggest that more than 250,000 people have died as a result of George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. A newly released investigative report from the UK government suggests that intelligence officials knew ahead of time that the war would cause massive instability and societal collapse and make the problem of terrorism worse — and that Blair and Bush went ahead with the effort anyway.

The correct response to this situation is to despair at the fact that the US and UK governments created such a horrific human tragedy for no good reason at all. However, partisan grudgefests run deep, and some on the right have argued that the UK’s Chilcot report proves the real dastardly actors are liberals who accused Bush and Blair not just of relying on faulty intelligence suggesting Iraq had WMDs but of lying about the intelligence they did have.

To some extent, this is beside the point; even if they had been totally cautious and careful in characterizing the intelligence, the war still would’ve been a catastrophic mistake that took an immense human toll. But the truth also matters, and the truth is that there were numerous occasions when Bush and his advisers made statements that intelligence agencies knew to be false, both about WMDs and about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent links to al-Qaeda. The term commonly used for making statements that one knows to be false is “lying.”

Mother Jones’s David Corn has been excellent about chronicling specific examples over the years.
Here are just a few:

In October 2002, Bush said that Saddam Hussein had a “massive stockpile” of biological weapons. But as CIA Director George Tenet noted in early 2004, the CIA had informed policymakers it had “no specific information on the types or quantities of weapons agent or stockpiles at Baghdad’s disposal.” The “massive stockpile” was just literally made up.

In December 2002, Bush declared, “We do not know whether or not [Iraq] has a nuclear weapon.” That was not what the National Intelligence Estimate said. As Tenet would later testify, “We said that Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon and probably would have been unable to make one until 2007 to 2009.” Bush did know whether or not Iraq had a nuclear weapon — and lied and said he didn’t know to hype the threat.

On CNN in September 2002, Condoleezza Rice claimed that aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.” This was precisely the opposite of what nuclear experts at the Energy Department were saying; they argue that not only was it very possible the tubes were for nonnuclear purposes but that it was very likely they were too. Even more dire assessments about the tubes from other agencies were exaggerated by administration officials — and in any case, the claim that they’re “only really suited” for nuclear weapons is just false.

On numerous occasions, Dick Cheney cited a report that 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. He said this after the CIA and FBI concluded that this meeting never took place.

More generally on the question of Iraq and al-Qaeda, on September 18, 2001, Rice received a memo summarizing intelligence on the relationship, which concluded there was little evidence of links. Nonetheless Bush continued to claim that Hussein was “a threat because he’s dealing with al-Qaeda” more than a year later.

In August 2002, Dick Cheney declared, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” But as Corn notes, at that time there was “no confirmed intelligence at this point establishing that Saddam had revived a major WMD operation.” Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had heard the same intelligence and attended Cheney’s speech, would later say in a documentary, “It was a total shock. I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this, you know? In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD, through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.”

The Bush administration on numerous occasions exaggerated or outright fabricated conclusions from intelligence in its public statements. Bush really did lie, and people really did die as a result of the war those lies were meant to build a case for. Those are the facts.

The failure of Iraq was not merely a case of well-meaning but incompetent policymakers rushing into what they should’ve known would be a disaster. It’s the story of those policymakers repeatedly misleading the public about why, exactly, the war started.

The Beast of the Sea: Bush, Cheney, RUMSFELD (Revelation 13:10)

The document reveals gaps of intelligence on WMD. Why didn’t Pentagon chief share it?
By John Walcott
1/24/2016
What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn’t Know 
On September 9, 2002, as the George W. Bush administration was launching its campaign to invade Iraq, a classified report landed on the desk of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it carried an ominous note.
“Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD,” Rumsfeld wrote to Air Force General Richard Myers. “It is big.”
The report was an inventory of what U.S. intelligence knew—or more importantly didn’t know—about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Its assessment was blunt: “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns. … We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program.”
Myers already knew about the report. The Joint Staff’s director for intelligence had prepared it, but Rumsfeld’s urgent tone said a great deal about how seriously the head of the Defense Department viewed the report’s potential to undermine the Bush administration’s case for war. But he never shared the eight-page report with key members of the administration such as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell or top officials at the CIA, according to multiple sources at the State Department, White House and CIA who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Instead, the report disappeared, and with it a potentially powerful counter-narrative to the administration’s argument that Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons posed a grave threat to the U.S. and its allies, which was beginning to gain traction in major news outlets, led by the New York Times.
While the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iraq was at the heart of the administration’s case for war, the JCS report conceded: “Our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely—perhaps 90%—on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”
The rationale for the invasion has long since been discredited, but the JCS report, now declassified, which a former Bush administration official forwarded in December, nevertheless has implications for both sides in the 2016 presidential race, in particular the GOP candidates who are relying for foreign policy advice on some of the architects of the war, and the Democratic front-runner, who once again is coming under fire from her primary opponent for supporting the invasion.
Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose military assistant was on the short list of people copied on the JCS report, is one of Jeb Bush’s foreign policy experts. Other supporters of the war, though they do not appear to have been aware of the JCS report, are involved in the various advisory roles in the 2016 campaign. John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is advising Ted Cruz; and Elliott Abrams and William Kristol are supporting Marco Rubio, whom Reuters reported is also briefed regularly by former Cheney adviser Eric Edelman.
The rise of ISIL and recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have given Democrat Bernie Sanders the ability to draw a straight line from the current Middle East chaos straight back to Clinton’s vote in favor of what he calls “one of the worst foreign policy blunders in the modern history of the United States,” a conflict that has claimed the lives of 4,500 Americans and some 165,000 Iraqis.
Rumsfeld was not under any legal or administrative obligation to circulate an internal DoD report, but not doing so raises questions about whether the administration withheld key information that could have undermined its case for war. Time and again, in the fall of 2002 and into early 2003, members of the administration spoke forcefully and without qualification about the threats they said Saddam Hussein posed. The JCS report undercut their assertions, and if it had been shared more widely within the administration, the debate would have been very different.
***
The report originated with a question from the man whose obsession with “known unknowns” became a rhetorical trademark. On August 16, 2002, Rumsfeld asked Air Force Maj. Gen. Glen Shaffer, head of the Joint Staff’s intelligence directorate, “what we don’t know (in a percentage) about the Iraqi WMD program,” according to a Sept. 5 memo from Shaffer to Myers and three other senior military officials.
On September 5, Shaffer sent Myers his findings, titled “Iraq: Status of WMD Programs.” In a note to his boss, he revealed: “We don’t know with any precision how much we don’t know.”
And while the report said intelligence officials “assess Iraq is making significant progress in WMD programs,” it conceded that “large parts” of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs were concealed. As a result, “Our assessments rely heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment rather than hard evidence. The evidentiary base is particularly sparse for Iraqi nuclear programs.”
What Myers said when he received the report is not known, but by September 9, it had made its way across Rumsfeld’s desk, where it elicited his terse, typed summation: “This is big.”
But it wasn’t big enough to share with Powell, who in five months would be asked to make the U.S. case for war to the United Nations. Nor was it shared with other members of the National Security Council, according to former NSC staff. An intelligence official who was close to CIA Director George Tenet said he has no recollection of the report and said he would have remembered something that important.
Did President Bush see it? Or Vice President Dick Cheney? If they did, it didn’t temper what they said in public. Cheney had already kicked off the administration’s campaign in Nashville on August 27, saying, “The Iraqi regime has in fact been very busy enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents. And they continue to pursue the nuclear program they began so many years ago.”
“Many of us,” he added, “are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.”
This was the beginning of what White House chief of staff Andrew Card later called a campaign to “educate the public” about the threat from Iraq.
Rather than heed the JCS’s early warning — as well as similar doubts expressed by some CIA, State Department and Defense Intelligence Agency officers — and seek more reliable intelligence, Rumsfeld and Cheney turned to a parallel intelligence apparatus they created that relied largely on information from Iraqi defectors and a network of exiles led by the late Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress.
“Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war,” the Times wrote. The piece repeatedly cited anonymous senior Bush administration officials and Iraqi defectors.
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice cited the Times story on talk shows that Sunday morning. Rice repeated a sentiment, credited in the Times story that “The first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ … may be a mushroom cloud.”
Chalabi later described himself and his supporters as “heroes in error.” One of the people relying on those errors was President Bush himself.
A month after Rumsfeld’s note to Myers, on October 7, Bush appeared at a VFW hall in Cincinnati, where he declared without reservation: Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons.”
Asked whether Rumsfeld had sent the cautionary intelligence report to the president, one senior member of the Joint Staff who was copied on it said he wasn’t certain, but added, “That’s the last place they would have sent it.”
The threat of Iraqi nuclear weapons was central to the administration’s effort to drum up public and political support for an invasion. “Mushroom clouds” were a leitmotif of speeches from Cheney and Rice. But the JCS report reveals the extent of the intelligence experts’ doubt and confusion on that subject:
“We think they possess a viable weapon design,” the report says, but qualified it repeatedly. “We do not know the status of enrichment capabilities”, it says, and: “We do not know with confidence the location of any nuclear-weapon-related facilities.”
No matter what aspect of Saddam’s WMD program was being discussed, the ambivalence in the report was the same. Was Iraq secretly reconstituting its biological weapons program, as Cheney had asserted in Nashville? The report’s answer: “We cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi facilities that produce, test, fill, or store biological weapons.”
As for administration officials’ repeated claims that Iraq had mobile bioweapons plants, which in one especially colorful version were disguised as milk and yogurt trucks, the report says: “We believe Iraq has 7 mobile BW agent production plants but cannot locate them.” It summarizes the knowledge of Saddam’s germ warfare programs by saying: “Our knowledge of what biological weapons the Iraqis are able to produce is nearly complete our knowledge of how and where they are produced is nearly 90% incomplete.”
United States’ knowledge of Iraq’s chemical weapons, according to the JCS intelligence report was just as sketchy. “Our overall knowledge of the Iraqi CW program is primarily limited to infrastructure doctrine. The specific agent and facility knowledge is 60-70 percent incomplete.”
“We do not know if all the processes required to produce a weapon are in place,” the report says, adding that the Iraqis “lack the precursors for sustained nerve agent production” and “we cannot confirm the identity of any Iraqi sites that produce final chemical agent.”
This did not prevent the president from telling his audience at the Cincinnati VFW hall in October, “We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents,including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas.” He added: “And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons.”
The JCS report, however, says U.S. intelligence was unable to “confirm the identity of any Iraqi sites that produce, test, fill or store biological weapons.”
Finally, while advocates of an invasion also claimed that Iraq was developing longer range ballistic missiles capable of hitting Israel with weapons of mass destruction — Bush had made the claim before the U.N. General Assembly three days after Rumsfeld sent the report to Myers — the report says: “We doubt all processes are in place to produce longer range missiles.”
In February 2003, Powell appeared before the same body of foreign dignitaries to make the administration’s case, with CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind him:
“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What were giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.”
Though it is easy to conclude the report was buried because it contained inconvenient truths, the precise reason it wasn’t circulated remains unclear. It was partially declassified (eight of nine pages) in January 2011, more than eight years after it was written. Efforts to reach Rumsfeld, directly and through an intermediary, were unsuccessful. Wolfowitz, his former deputy and a major advocate of toppling Saddam Hussein according to the 9/11 Commission report, did not return calls for comment. Myers, who knew as well as anyone the significance of the report, did not distribute it beyond his immediate military colleagues and civilian boss, which a former aide said was consistent with the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The report could have been divulged in a briefing by his staff to members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but it wasn’t, probably because none of them was aware of its existence, according to former members of that committee.
Instead, on October 1, 2002, less than a month after the JCS report, the intelligence community produced a 92-page National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, on Iraq’s WMD programs that made no mention of the report and instead claimed in its “Key Judgments” that: “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon within this decade.”
Later, the NIE, an unclassified summary of which was made available to reporters two days after the Top Secret report was circulated, says: “We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin GF (cyclosarin), and VX . . . .” It adds: “We judge that all key aspects — R&D, production, and weaponization — of Iraq’s offensive BW program are active and that most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war. Baghdad has mobile facilities for producing bacterial and toxin BW agents.” The NIE’s red flags and dissents, and it had a number, were subtle or tucked into footnotes.
Paul Pillar, at the time the national intelligence officer for the Near East who was involved in producing the NIE, said in a phone interview that he had never seen Shaffer’s September 5 Pentagon report. When it was read to him, he called it an excellent summary of the limits of the U.S. intelligence community’s knowledge about Saddam’s WMD programs.
But just because the JCS report wasn’t seen by key officials who might have benefited from its more lcautious tone, doesn’t mean it wasn’t available for inspection. Its middling “Secret” classification meant that, in theory, nothing would have prevented sharing the report’s contents had any member of Congress requested a briefing from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For Clinton, then the junior senator from New York and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the new evidence of early doubts raises a different question: How might her vote have changed if she and other lawmakers had known of the report’s existence? Would she have taken it into account? The depth of her inquiry into the evidence has been called into question before. According to Her Way, a biography by New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr., Clinton never read the classified NIE. Clinton has never disputed that account, but she was not alone.
The Washington Post reported on April 27, 2004, after the invasion had begun going sour, that in the fall of 2002, before the vote on whether to invade Iraq, no more than six senators and few House members had logged into the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility where they had to go to read the Top Secret estimate.

Paying For Bush & Cheney’s Sins (Revelation 13:10)

The back story to America’s disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq and what lessons they teach us today
December 28, 2015
In these early days of the current US Presidential election nominee campaign there is much tough talk and saber rattling underway among the candidates, the Chicken Hawk set in Washington, talk show pundits and various elected officials.
That, as well as a never ending stream of talk and opinion on TV’s Fox News and right-wing radio shows about “getting boots on the ground” and “getting tough” in the middle east (again) without much careful thought or public discourse (again, it seems) about the proven numerous and dire consequences to the US of those first American boots on middle east ground.
In fact, a new CNN poll says Americans are more likely to say that terrorists are “winning the war against the United States” than they have been at any point since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Thus the current saber rattling talk is being met by a public “broadly unhappy with the nation’s progress, with nearly three-quarters of Americans saying they are not satisfied with how the war on terror is proceeding.”
That figure, following terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California this fall, is well above the previous high of 61% who said they were dissatisfied in August 2007, according to CNN.
But those who forget the hard lessons that history teaches often are doomed to repeat them.
The public premise given to the American people for the calamitous invasion was that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” — a claim that turned out to be untrue and based on manipulated (and often faulty) US. intelligence data that was gathered to support the then already decided upon invasion decision.
Americans were told they could face a “mushroom cloud,” if the US military did not act to change the regime in Iraq. Scare tactics. Make Americans fearful in order to garner their support for an invasion of a country on the US national credit card.
Sound at all familiar to anything happening in the US today in 2015?
In Baghdad, Iraq today, “Bombs go off on average every 12 hours (and) the awful routine that follows each bomb looks hauntingly familiar to Americans who watched the Iraq war play out on television,” CNN reported over the weekend.
Today, many politicians and would be Presidents want to send American troops back into Iraq and Syria as well. Will another American “intervention” in the middle east be any more successful than the disaster that Iraq turned out to be?
That is why, according to a CNN report Sunday, it is crucial Americans understand how the Iraq war went so terribly wrong.
THE MAN WHO PREDICTED AN AMERICAN QUAGMIRE IN IRAQ
What if there had been someone in 2002-2003 that could have warned us what would happen if the US. invaded Iraq?
It turns out there was one man who did that and it was long before 2003. Listen to this:
“Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government in Iraq you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off. It’s a quagmire.”
That is the voice of Dick Cheney in 1994 after he served as US. Secretary of Defense, predicting that Iraq would become a “quagmire” for the US should this country intervene militarily there.
But move ahead to 2003 when Dick Cheney is then Vice President in the George W. Bush administration.
Now listen to the words of Cheney as he made the rounds of the Sunday morning political talk shows on the TV networks. This is what Cheney said on the “Meet The Press” TV show:
“From the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is that we will be treated is liberators,” if America invades Iraq.
He was asked by host Tim Russert, if Cheney’s assumption was wrong and American troops were viewed as conquerors, “Do you think Americans are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle?”
So what flipped by 180 degrees Cheney’s opinion about intervening in Iraq and why was George W. Bush so determined to go to war with Iraq?
THE LONG ROAD TO HELL
On October 26 of this year, CNN broadcast a special news program called “The Long Road To Hell” examining this very question. On Sunday, Dec. 27, CNN re-broadcast the program.
And the answer to the question of why President Bush, Dick Cheney and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were hell bent on invading Iraq may surprise you.
Here is the back story.
The reason had nothing to do with the imaginary “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq
That story was simply fodder to soften America up, to get American citizens eager to support an invasion of Iraq, according to the CNN program broadcast Sunday.
The 9/11 attack on America was the key to understanding why America invaded Iraq.
The decision to invade Iraq was really made on Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks in the US that brought down the World Trade Center Towers and set part of the Pentagon building on fire when a terrorist flown jet crashed into it.
That is the catalyst that changed President Bush and Dick Cheney into two people hell bent on becoming invaders in the middle east.
“911 pushed him (Bush) and Cheney into a very dark place….I think it meant for George W. Bush “I have to prove that we’re a tough guy”…I have to prove we can reshape the middle east, otherwise the rest of my administration various terrorist groups and tin pot dictators are going to take advantage of me.”
Those are the words of Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counter-terrorism in the White House on 9/11/01, as broadcast on CNN’s report Sunday.
President Bush wanted to be perceived by the world as a tough guy. Someone who could not be pushed around. Sound like any posturing that might be going on today?
Clarke says it was that very night, the night of the 9/11 attacks, when the Iraq war really began.
Clarke’s words again:
“On the night of 9/11 we all meet in the situation room in the east wing, in the bunker and Rumsfeld is there straight from the Pentagon which is still on fire at the time, and the President is there and in that conversation Rumsfeld starts talking about invading Iraq…while the Pentagon is still burning.” (Italics ours)
This is long before the United States had any inkling of who was behind the 9/11attacks. At that point it could have been anyone or any group or any nation that staged the attacks, up to and including the Crips or the Bloods, two L.A. street gangs.
Clarke again:
So while the Pentagon was still burning, “One of the most disastrous chapters in the history of American intelligence began. Building a case to go to war against Saddam Hussein,” said the CNN report.
Building a case to get “American boots on the ground” in the middle east — even though Hussein had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks.
“When you want to believe something, and you say to the world “give me intelligence that says this,” they will give you intelligence that says that,” said Clarke. “9/11 changed everything.”
CNN reported that information was gathered very fast, so fast that many Iraqi intelligence sources were “barely vetted.”
A WAVE OF PATRIOTISM, FEW IN POWER ARE SKEPTICAL OF THE BUSH WHITE HOUSE
From then on, President Bush was riding a “powerful wave of patriotism,” says CNN. His approval ratings soared. He was John Wayne, Chuck Norris and Duane “The Rock” Johnson all rolled into one man.
How powerful was this wave of patriotism? Even journalists, who are supposed to be both skeptical about government claims and neutral in their positions, were jumping on board this amazing jingoistic juggernaut.
Then CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather – before his disgrace and downfall over a false story CBS News broadcast about President Bush – was seen on the NBC Tonight Show saying, “George Bush is the President. He makes the decisions. And, you know, this is one American…wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.”
Thus it was that Rather and most of the mainstream news media at that time found itself already in the bag and on board for the Bush administration’s reasons to get “boots on the ground” in the middle east.
And three months after 9/11, the US. went to war in Afghanistan against the Taliban.
Despite grim predictions from experts about what the long range consequences of US. boots on the ground in the middle east would be, the Taliban was toppled, “Boosting the Bush administration’s confidence and the nation’s trust in him,” says CNN.
“As the months went on, the rhetoric grew increasingly fightening,” reported CNN.
THE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION THAT NEVER EXISTED
Over and over on TV news programs and TV and radio talk shows, President Bush and others in the administration – and most of all perhaps the pundits and anchors on the right-wing oriented Fox News – kept hammering the same theme over and over: “weapons of mass destruction,” and (implied) we must be fearful of a “mushroom cloud” (e.g., a nuclear attack on the US.) as long as Saddam remains in power.
Fear. Americans must be fearful of what will happen to them unless the US, headed by a strong, tough leader goes after and topples Saddam Hussein.
This is what was sold over and over to the American public with the news media’s help at the time.
Sound familiar to anything that is happening in America today?
“The ensuing war and dismantling of Saddam’s government plunged Iraq into chaos, resulting in years of deadly sectarian violence and the rise of al Qaeda in Iraq, a precursor of ISIS. Tens of thousands of Iraqis, more than 4,000 US. troops and 179 British service members were killed in the lengthy conflict,” reported CNN on October 26, 2015.
In May of this year CNN reported that barring a miracle, “Whoever wins the White House will become the fifth consecutive American president ensnared by a nation that has consumed trillions of US. dollars and thousands of American lives. It has also blighted a string of high-flying political careers. If the last week on the 2016 campaign trail has proved anything, it’s that American politics is still nowhere near purged of the bitter political divides of a war undertaken 12 turbulent years ago, somewhat like the Vietnam War that reverberated through successive presidencies.”
The CNN report noted that America’s “quagmire” with Iraq started under President George H.W. Bush when Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein marched into Kuwait in 1989, and much later erupted into a full-scale invasion under George W. Bush.
“And now under President Barack Obama a quarter of a century later, America’s misadventure in the fractured Middle Eastern nation has transformed into a slog against the bloodthirsty Sunni radicals of ISIS. With no end in sight,” said the CNN report.
A link to the original October 2015 CNN broadcast of the “Long Road To Hell” is below.
BUSH & COMPANY MADE OVER 900 FALSE STATEMENTS
“In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003,” reads a description of the examination, conducted by the Center for Public Integrity and its affiliated group, the Fund for Independence in Journalism.
According to this study, Bush and seven top officials — including Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice — made 935 false statements about Iraq during those two years in a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion…an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
The study was based on a searchable database compiled of primary sources, such as official government transcripts and speeches, and secondary sources such as quotes from major media organizations.
The study says President Bush himself made 232 false statements about Iraq and former leader Saddam Hussein’s possessing weapons of mass destruction, and 28 false statements about Iraq’s links to al Qaeda.
The report also says, “It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to al Qaeda.”
This view is based on multiple government reports, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the 9/11 Commission and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, which reported that Hussein had suspended Iraq’s nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to get it up and running again.
AMERICAN NEWS MEDIA WAS COMPLICIT IN THE RUN UP TO THE IRAQ INVASION
That study also calls the American news media to task, saying most media outlets didn’t do enough to investigate the claims — in other words, they did not do their jobs.
According to the report, “Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical.”
In June of 2014 investigative journalist Charles Lewis published a book that details the many “government falsehoods” that have led us into the current quagmire that is Iraq.
The book is called “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity.”
A video introduction to the book by the author is found here .
ON LIES AND MANIPULATION OF DATA AND THE NEWS MEDIA
According to Lewis his book, “Explores the many ways truth is manipulated by governments and corporations.”
Through examples ranging from the countless lies administrations of both parties have used to justify needless wars to the successful decades-long “corporate suppression of the truth” about tobacco and other dangerous products, Lewis explains the “political, social, and business changes that have increasingly weakened the ability of journalists to play their traditional truth-telling role.”
And he describes the new trends, from the rise of nonprofit reporters to the growing numbers of “citizen journalists,” that give reason to be hopeful about the future of truth.
Lewis was a guest in 2014 on journalist Bill Moyers television program in which he said of the Iraq invasion and war:
“An outrageous thing happened. We lost $2 trillion. More than 100,000 people died. Folks are going to be maimed for life in the tens of thousands… And no one has ever acknowledged that this was a war on a lark. It was a complete war of choice, because a certain little faction wanted to do it and they orchestrated it… Did they make statements that weren’t true? The answer is yes.”
Curiously perhaps, the interview with Lewis begins with a lead-in by Moyers about, “The foresight of the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, who, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, predicted the trap in which the West would fall attempting to interfere in the Middle East.”
According to Lewis and many others, America is still deep, deep within that trap.

China Nuclear Horn Controls The Sea (Dan 7)

Pentagon confirms patrols of Chinese nuclear missile submarines

QINGDAO, CHINA - APRIL 22: Chinese navy officers stand next to the entrance of Great Wall - 218 of Navy Submarine at Qingdao Port on April 22, 2009 in Qingdao of Shandong Province, China. The submrine will attend an international fleet review to be held on April 23 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Liberation Army Navy. (Photo by Guang Niu/Pool/Getty Images)

QINGDAO, CHINA – APRIL 22: Chinese navy officers stand next to the entrance of Great Wall – 218 of Navy Submarine at Qingdao Port on April 22, 2009 in Qingdao of Shandong Province, China. The submrine will attend an international fleet review to be held on April 23 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army Navy. (Photo by Guang Niu/Pool/Getty Images)

By Bill Gertz –
Wednesday, December 9, 2015

China has begun patrols with nuclear missile submarines for the first time, giving Beijing a new strategic nuclear strike capability, according to the U.S. Strategic Command and Defense Intelligence Agency.

U.S. intelligence and strategic nuclear officials, however, remain uncertain whether China’s four Jin-class missile submarine patrols are being carried out with nuclear-tipped JL-2 missiles on board.
DIA and Strategic Command representatives said this week that there were no changes to DIA’s assessment earlier this year that China would begin the nuclear missile submarine patrols this year.
The problem for officials in declaring the Jin-class submarines a new Chinese strategic nuclear threat is a lack of certainty that Chinese Communist Party leaders have agreed to the unprecedented step of trusting operational submarine commanders with control over the launching of nuclear missiles.
Navy Capt. Pamela S. Kunze, Strategic Command spokeswoman, elaborated on comments by Adm. Cecil Haney, the Strategic Command commander, and confirmed that the nuclear submarine patrols were taking place.

She told Inside the Ring: “Given China’s known capabilities and their efforts to develop a sea-based deterrent, in absence of indicators to the contrary, it is prudent to assume that patrols are occurring.”
Adm. Haney said in October that he was not waiting for China to announce its first nuclear missile patrols because, as with most other issues related to Chinese nuclear forces, the capabilities of the submarines remain hidden by military secrecy.

“The Chinese have had these submarines at sea this year, so I have to look at it as operational capability today,” the four-star admiral said. “And [I] can’t think that when those submarines are at sea that they aren’t on patrol.”

The real question, the Stratcom leader said, is: “Have they put the missile we’ve seen them test, the JL-2, in for a package that is doing strategic deterrent patrols? I have to consider them today that they are on strategic patrol,” he said, meaning the submarines were equipped with nuclear missiles.
For the U.S., that means “there’s another capability that’s out there having nuclear capability of ranges that can strike the United States of America,” the admiral said.

The patrols mark a significant turning point for the Chinese. In the past, Beijing stored all nuclear warheads separately from its missiles, in part to demonstrate what China calls its policy of “no first use” — that it would not be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict and would use them only in retaliation for hostile nuclear attacks.

Another reason warheads are kept separate is the Communist Party’s near-paranoid obsession with political control. Separating warheads from missiles allows for a greater centralized control over the nuclear arsenal, which is estimated to be 300 warheads but is likely far larger.

Chinese authorities fear giving a submarine commander control over the launch of nuclear missiles and worry that one of the military’s hawks could ignore the party’s nuclear chain of command and order a nuclear strike on his own.

Patrols by Jin-class submarines with nuclear-armed JL-2s, if confirmed, mark a new stage in Communist Party trust with the People’s Liberation Army.

Sending the Jin submarines on patrol without nuclear missiles or warheads would be viewed as a hollow gesture and undermine the intended message behind the capability to launch stealthy underwater missile attacks.

China is extremely secret about its nuclear forces. However, PLA missile submarines appear to be different. In 2013, state-run Chinese media published details on contingency plans to attack the western United States with submarine-launched missiles, an attack that would kill what the Global Times newspaper estimated would be up to 12 million Americans.

The congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, in its annual report made public last month, said the missile submarine patrols will mark China’s “first credible at-sea second-strike nuclear capability.” The Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao reported in September that the first nuclear submarine patrols had taken place.

The commission report quoted PLA Navy Commander Adm. Wu Shengli as saying: “This is a trump card that makes our motherland proud and our adversaries terrified. It is a strategic force symbolizing our great-power status and supporting national security.”

Recent Chinese military enthusiast websites have posted photographs of suspected Chinese submarine tunnels. One was shown Oct. 7 at a naval base on Shangchuan Island, along the southern Chinese coast near Hong Kong. In May, photos posted online showed the opening of a nuclear missile submarine cave at an undisclosed location.

China Ready For Nuclear War (Daniel 7)


Nuclear War Brews Over South China Sea

@MORNINGNEWSUSA
PUBLISHED: 6:03 PM, NOV 30, 2015 UPDATED: 6:03 PM, NOV 30, 2015

The United States is actively supporting its Asian allies with their territorial claims over the disputed South China Sea. But what the government does not realize is that China has risen to be a major nuclear power, an expert said. The more active the U.S. participate in the conflict over the contested region, the more it risks a nuclear confrontation.

The U.S. is now regularly patrolling the South China Sea with its warships sailing within 12 nautical miles from the vast territory claimed by China. President Barack Obama had also gifted the Philippines with warships, warplanes and had increased its military aid to as much as $79 million.
“China is major nuclear power. When cornered, nuclear-armed states can threaten asymmetric escalation to deter an adversary from harming its key interests,” according to Zhang Baohui, Professor of Political Science and Director of Center for Asian pacific Studies at Mingnan University in Hong Kong.

“When a crisis situation escalates and starts to involve potential nuclear tensions, the US faces the stark choice of either backing down first or facing the prospect of fighting a nuclear-armed China,” Baohui wrote. He noted that China paraded a new generation of tactical missiles during the Sept 3 military parade. The communist country had recently acquired long-range cruise missiles that can carry tactical nuclear warheads. Just recently, it also released photos of JL-2 sea-based nuclear missile launching from the sea. Baohui is the author of China’s Assertive Nuclear Posture: State Security in an Anarchic International Order.

On Nov. 23, China test fired its new hypersonic nuclear attack vehicle, the Free Beacon reported. Last week’s testing of the DF-ZF was the sixth time that the hypersonic glider was tested since 2014.
According to people familiar with the matter, the test fire was tracked by U.S. intelligence agencies. The F-ZF reportedly flew at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 10 or 3, 836 to 7, 680 miles per hour. This means the hypersonic nuclear guided vehicle is five times faster than the speed of sound.
According to Rick Fisher, a senior fellow at the International Assessment and Strategy center, the six tests conducted by China hint that the country is developing weapons similar to U.S. Prompt Global Strike. The analyst suggested for Pentagon to ramp up its own development of the strike vehicle in order to deploy it at any given instance that China does the same.

China Willing To Start Nuclear War With Babylon


US Faces Nuclear War Threat Over South China Sea – Chinese Professor

By Polina Tikhonova on November

China is willing to start a nuclear war with the United States over the South China Sea, according to a Chinese professor.
Beijing’s rhetoric after an incident with a U.S. warship sailed to the South China Sea suggests that Chinese decision-makers could resort to more “concrete and forceful measures” to counter the U.S. Navy, according to Zhang Baohui, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.
“If so, a face-off between the two navies becomes inevitable. Even worse, the face-off may trigger an escalation towards military conflicts,” the professor wrote in a piece for RSIS Commentary.
But, according to Baohui, the U.S. military is “oblivious” to this scenario, since Washington decision-makers think America’s conventional military superiority discourages China from responding to such “provocations” in the South China Sea militarily. However, this “U.S. expectation is flawed, as China is a major nuclear power,” the professor wrote.
“When cornered, nuclear-armed states can threaten asymmetric escalation to deter an adversary from harming its key interests,” he added.
Baohui then refers to the military parade in Beijing that took place on Sept. 3 and revealed that China’s new generation of tactical missiles – such as the DF-26 – are capable of being armed with nuclear warheads. Moreover, according to the latest reports, China’s air-launched long-range cruise missiles can also carry tactical nuclear warheads.
U.S. could provoke nuclear war with China
And while the U.S. does not have its core interests in the South China Sea, the disputed islands present China’s strategic interests, which is why this kind of asymmetry in stakes would certainly give Beijing an advantage in “the balance of resolve” over Washington, according to the professor. And if the South China Sea situation escalates and starts spiraling into a nuclear confrontation between the U.S. and China, Washington will face a choice of either backing down first or fighting a nuclear-armed power and the world’s largest military force with a strength of approximately 2.285 million personnel.
“Neither option is attractive and both exact high costs, either in reputation or human lives, for the U.S.,” Baohui wrote.
So it would be unwise for the U.S. to further provoke China in the disputed area, since China’s willingness to defend its interests, reputation and deterrence credibility could easily escalate the conflict into a military confrontation that would ultimately harm U.S. interests, according to the professor.
China will join Russia in nuclear war with NATO
With NATO member state Turkey downing a Russian jet in its airspace, there is already a high risk of military confrontation in the world. And with China being so close and allied with Russia, Beijing decision-makers could see the incident with the Russian warplane as an opportunity to avenge the West for the South China Sea provocations.
The Turkish military said it had shot down a Russian jet on Tuesday, triggering a furious response from Moscow and escalating the already hot tensions in the Syrian conflict. With Russian President Vladimir Putin warning the West of “serious consequences,” analysts believe the Kremlin is willing to unleash a nuclear war over the incident.
Despite the fact that Turkey is backed by NATO’s 5th Article, which states that an attack on one Ally shall be considered an attack on all NATO members, the chances that Putin will start a nuclear war over the incident with the Russian jet are very “likely,” according to Pavel Felgengauer, Russia’s most respected military analyst.
Felgengauer said Turkey wants to protect a zone in northern Syria controlled by the Turkmens, Ankara’s allies, while the downing of the Russian warplane in the region must prompt the Kremlin to either accept the zone or “start a war with Turkey,” which means starting an all-out war with NATO. And the only way Russia could win a war against NATO is by going nuclear, Felgengauer said.
“It is most likely that it will be war,” said Felgenhauer, as reported by Mirror. “In other words, more fights will follow when Russian planes attack Turkish aircraft in order to protect our [Russia’s] bombers. It is possible that there will be fights between the Russian and Turkish navies at sea.”
U.S. provokes China to respond militarily
The U.S. recently asserted its freedom of navigation in the disputed South China Sea. On Oct. 27, the USS Lassen traveled inside the 12-mile nautical zone around Subi Reef in the Spratly Islands archipelago. This reef is one of seven reefs China has artificially built in order to claim its sovereignty over the Spratly Islands and the sea around it.
Even though Beijing did not take immediate action to counter the U.S. vessel, such further “provocations” could seriously destabilize the peace and stability of the whole region, according to Baohui.
“They could touch off an unintended escalation and push the two countries towards military conflict. The logic is quite obvious,” the professor wrote.
The U.S. Navy’s further operations in the South China Sea could thus corner Beijing and force China to respond militarily. After all, China cannot risk its national interests and power reputation, according to the Chinese professor. Shortly after the incident, Vice-Admiral Yi Xiaoguang, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) deputy chief of staff, warned that China “will use all means necessary to defend its sovereignty” if the U.S. conducts similar provocations.
China: we can seize more islands in the South China Sea
China recently said it can use military force to kick out nations illegally to seize more islands in the disputed South China Sea, but China is now showing restraint, as reported by ValueWalk last week.
“The Chinese government has the right and the ability to recover the islands and reefs illegally occupied by neighboring countries,” Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said, speaking about the disputed artificial islands but not naming any particular country.
China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei all have sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. All but Brunei have military fortifications in the disputed area, which raises concerns about a high risk of military confrontation in the region.
“But we haven’t done this [seized the islands]. We have maintained great restraint with the aim to preserve peace and stability in the South China Sea,” Liu said.
If China gains complete control over the Spratly Islands, it gets the key to controlling waters through which $5 trillion in trade passes every year, mostly to and from China.
The professor concluded that reckless actions by one or both parties may well turn mistrust into “bloody military conflicts.” But nobody, especially countries in the region, are interested in such a scenario.
“If the US claims to be the defender of world peace and regional stability, it must do everything to avoid this scenario through unintended escalations,” Baohui wrote.

Russia Will Kill The Ocean Creatures (Revelation 8:9)

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‘Secret’ Russian nuclear torpedo blueprint leaked

Published November 12, 2015

MOSCOW – Details of a new Russian submarine-launched nuclear torpedo have been shown on state-controlled TV, a secret the Kremlin said should never have been aired. Some observers, however, saw it as a deliberate leak.

The airing of the video on television channels under tight Kremlin control raised suspicions that it was done intentionally to scare the West at a time when its ties with Russia are at the lowest point since the Cold War.

NTV and Channel One showed a large document — filmed over a general’s shoulder during a meeting with Putin — with drawings and details of a prospective weapons system called Status-6.
The system developed by St.Petersburg-based Rubin design bureau includes nuclear submarines carrying long-range torpedoes, which could create “extensive zones of radioactive contamination” that would make enemy coastal areas “unsuitable for military, economic, business or other activity for a long time,” the document said.

The channels later removed the footage, which was shot during a meeting on Monday in Sochi.
“It’s true that some secret information was caught by the camera and therefore it was subsequently removed,” Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said late Wednesday. “We hope this will not happen again.”

Independent experts noted, however, that it would be hard to imagine cameramen of state TV stations closing up on any documents on the table during a Kremlin meeting on military issues. Most saw the incident as a deliberate leak intended to warn Washington and its allies that Russia is working on a new devastating weapon that would tip the scales in case of conflict.

“I have a feeling it was shown in order to scare the world,” said Alexander Golts, an independent Moscow-based military analyst. “It’s an attempt to offer an asymmetrical answer to the U.S. missile defense.”

Putin has held four meetings on defense issues in as many days this week, reflecting the close attention he is paying to military modernization at a time of heightened tensions with the United States and Europe over the crisis in Ukraine.

The Russian leader described NATO’s U.S.-led missile defense program as an attempt to break nuclear parity and warned that Moscow would counter it by deploying new strike weapons capable of piercing the shield.

Military experts and commentators traced the nuclear torpedo concept to the 1950s, when it was first offered by Andrei Sakharov, the father of Soviet thermonuclear bomb who later came to defy the Soviet system and won a Nobel Peace Prize. He proposed targeting the U.S. with high-yield nuclear torpedoes that would create huge tsunami waves and high levels of radioactivity to render large coastline areas uninhabitable.

The proposal was rejected, partly because naval technology of the era wouldn’t allow a Soviet submarine to approach the U.S. shore undetected.

The Status-6 appears to be a new reincarnation of the old idea, said Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst.

“The plan is to deliver a 100-megaton nuclear bomb to the U.S. shores,” he said. “It would cause a highly radioactive tsunami.”

The details of the new weapon shown on Russian state TV indicated that the torpedo should have a trans-Ocean range of 5,400 miles, something military experts considered impossible.

But while the torpedo’s real range could be much shorter, its relatively small size, a purported operational depth of 3,280 feet and a speed of 65 miles per hour appear realistic, making it difficult to spot and destroy, some observers said.

“Detecting it could be significantly different from detecting a submarine,”said Pavel Podvig, an independent analyst based in Geneva, where he runs his research project, “Russian Nuclear Forces.”
The government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta alleged that in order to achieve the stated purpose of “extensive radioactive contamination” of coastal areas, the project could envisage using the so-called cobalt bomb, a nuclear weapon designed to produce enhanced amounts of radioactive fallout compared to a regular atomic warhead.

Podvig said the apparent deliberate leak of the Status-6 details looks menacing, irrespective of how realistic the project is from the technological viewpoint.
“The whole thing just strikes me as crazy,” he said.