Sunday, March 17, 2013

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Edit - 3/21

Gaza militants fire at Israel during Obama visit.    (4 or 5 rockets have been reported fired) 

By IAN DEITCH | Associated Press – 7 hrs 
JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinian militants in Gaza fired two rockets on Thursday at southern Israel, on the second day of President Barack Obama's visit to the region, Israeli police said.
One of the rockets exploded in the courtyard of a house in the border town of Sderot early in the morning, causing damage but no injuries, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. The other landed in an open field.
Obama was miles away in Jerusalem at the time, preparing to visit the Israel Museum. Later in the day he is due to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah.



I had this dream yesterday, and it was kind of hard to figure out, but my thought after doing some research ... (below)

Tombstone NCIS and the Damm

UNREAD_POSTby Gus Who on Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:17 am.   (To the untrained eye, dreams talk in a different language and it takes years to study) 
I find myself facing in one direction with a tall and wide shadow of what feels like a palm tree at my back as footballs are landing to the side of me... Like someone is tossing me bombs :? Dream skips into some sort of NCIS ... But like in LA ... as good and bad guys are going at each other... A wall with 3 Items like "Plaques" that had been hanging for a while and were all dirty that they blend into the wall, someone found one and took it off... (Good guy side) ... Forgot what it was

The other two items was a gold bar and a picture of tickets/ cards ... The bad guys knew where they were and but some water on them and took them down... The gold bar was worth about 2 million... Dream skips ... Find myself in a box getting flooded full of water like a Damm breaking (yesterday dream)

look at what is coming up this week...
and the palms could mean desert area ...
football means bombs...  (Chemical Weapons?? or )
what I think the 3 plaques were as gold was the middle plaque and the other plaque was "tickets" (as I recall- pictures like stubs, that could of been cards) ...
got me thinking that it was the old deck of cards "Most-wanted Iraqi playing cards" ...
The other side has to have there cards too.. so I was thinking that the bad guys are washing off the gold bar and the posters ... as the card game ... "war" is still on and President is going to be in the area... I would not doubt if something is about to go down...

Iran-North Korea’s ‘axis of evil’ revived by new nuclear ties 


Araminta Wordsworth | 13/03/14 | Last Updated: 13/03/15 12:22 PM ET
More from Araminta Wordsworth
Partners in crime: Kim Yong-nam (left) and Ahmadinejad
KEN AREATTA / AFP / GettyImagesPartners in crime: Kim Yong-nam (left) and Ahmadinejad
Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today:  The axis of evil is alive and well, but few people have been paying attention.
Instead, Libya, the Arab Spring and the uprising in Syria hogged the spotlight. But out of the headlines, rogue nuclear powers North Korea and Iran have been cozying up and strengthening their ties.
Their shadowy relationship came into clearer focus last year during the Non-Aligned Movement summit (its irony-free motto: “Lasting peace through joint global governance”), held in Tehran. While many of those in attendance were Iranian stooges, the meeting was given superficial credibility by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, and U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, and North Korea’s No. 2 official, Kim Yong-nam, seized the opportunity to agree to an exchange of science technology and education. It sounds anodyne, but experts say it’s code for nuclear work.
They point out North Korea is rich in raw uranium and other natural resources necessary for building nuclear weapons.  It also has the scientific know-how and centrifuge technology to share with its partner Iran.
The latest deal also has alarming echoes of a Syria-North Korea pact, which led to the building of a clandestine copy of the North’s Yongbyon reactor. This could have produced plutonium, the fuel used in atomic weapons, but was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike before start-up.
Officials in Washington are sounding the alarm over the new nuclear axis, writes Lori Lowenthal Marcus in the Jewish Press.
Two of the world’s most brutal regimes, Iran and North Korea, each hell-bent on intimidating any country which dares to challenge it, signed an agreement in September to cooperate on science technology and education. In other words, North Korea is officially helping Iran move forward on its path to nuclear weaponization …
[F]ormer State Department official David Asher, who testified at a congressional hearing on North Korea before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs last week, described it as very much like the agreement entered into by North Korea and Syria in 2002. Asher warned that the 2002 agreement was the “keystone for the commencement of covert nuclear cooperation between North Korea and Syria, which ultimately resulted in the construction of a nuclear reactor complex.”
The Wall Street Journal‘s Jay Solomon at looks at the Syrian connection.
Kim Yong Nam also led a delegation to Syria in 2002 to sign an agreement for scientific cooperation with President Bashar al-Assad’s government, according to Syrian state media. The pact also called for the “exchange of expertise” and the “joint use of scientific research equipment.”
The U.S. and the International Attomic Energy Agency believe that in the months after this agreement was signed Pyongyang stepped up efforts to assist Mr. Assad’s government in building a nuclear reactor on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria. The facility, near the city of Dair Alzour, was seen as a replica of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor, which the North has used to extract the plutonium used in its atomic weapons.
U.S. officials said the Syrian reactor was nearly operational when Israeli jets bombed the facility in 2007. A number of North Korean engineers were believed to have been killed at the reactor site.
At Forbes magazine, Claudia Rosett says Iranian nuclear officials are known to have made frequent visits  to North Korea.
The real, deadly serious business of North Korea can better be discerned by focusing on its dealings with its fellow rogue state and longtime partner in proliferation, Iran …
Following North Korea’s latest nuclear test, a spate of international press reports claimed that Iranian officials had traveled to North Korea to witness the test. To date, there has been no official confirmation from any quarter of these accounts, which were sourced to unnamed intelligence or diplomatic personnel. But are they credible? Yes, in spades. Experts on North Korean proliferation, such as former defence intelligence analyst Bruce Bechtol, say that Iranians have been present at every previous major North Korean missile and nuclear test.
Fox News’ Van D. Hipp , a former deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Army, details some of the ways in which Tehran and Pyongyang are cooperating.
North Korea and Iran are both using the same miniaturized warhead design that can be traced back to the infamous Pakistani scientist, Dr. A.Q. Khan. Iranian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) technicians are continuing to work on the next North Korean missile test. North Korea has obtained proven missile control electronics from Russia and China …
The recent power struggle in China is also spilling over into the North Korean situation. China helped draft the recent UN Security Council Resolution and sanctions. However, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad approved many millions of dollars in payment to North Korea, in conjunction with the February nuclear bomb test, through Beijing’s Bank of Kunlun.
_______________________________________ quote from an article I read

Iraq War Anniversary: 10 Years Later... 

The Bush administration had hoped the war that began with airstrikes before dawn on March 20, 2003 – would quickly rid Iraq of purported weapons of mass destruction, go after extremists and replace a brutal dictatorship with the foundations of a pro-Western democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

Ten years on, Iraq's long-term stability and the strength of its democracy remain open questions. The country is unquestionably freer and more democratic than it was before the "shock and awe" airstrikes began. But instead of a solidly pro-U.S. regime, the Iraqis have a government that is arguably closer to Tehran than to Washington and that struggles to exert full control over the country itself.

Bloody attacks launched by terrorists who thrived in the post-invasion chaos are still frequent – albeit less so than a few years back – and sectarian and ethnic rivalries are again tearing at the fabric of national unity. The top-heavy government is largely paralyzed by graft, chronic political crisis and what critics fear is a new dictatorship in the making. The civil war in neighboring Syria risks sowing further discord in Iraq.

By the time the U.S. military pulled out of Iraq in December 2011, nearly 4,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqis had lost their lives. No active WMDs were ever found. The war cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars and diverted resources from Afghanistan, where the Taliban and al-Qaida rebounded after their pummeling in the 2001 invasion.

In Iraq, the Americans and their allies left behind a broken, deeply traumatized country – a land no longer at war but without peace. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime destroyed not only dictatorship but also the mechanism of law and order, enabling the rise of al-Qaida and the unleashing of sectarian, ethnic and class hatreds long suppressed by a reign of fear.

The invasion transferred power overnight to oppressed Shiites and Kurds but left many Sunni Arabs alienated. It established a system of sectarian-based politics that undermined national unity.

And it helped trigger a vicious insurgency that ruined countless lives without regard for religion or ethnicity.





Obama needs to charm skeptical Israelis in visit

By ARON HELLER | Associated Press – Fri, Mar 15, 2013
JERUSALEM (AP) — Barack Obama's vow to take his message straight to the public during his first presidential visit to Israel will be a tough sell with many Israelis who consider him naive, too soft on the nation's enemies and cool to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Overcoming this perception will require a major charm offensive and an uncompromising U.S. pledge to stand behind Israel, especially when it comes to stopping Iran's suspect nuclear program. Without a major initiative in his pocket for making peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the U.S. president will use his three-day visit, which begins on Wednesday, primarily as a means to convey a close alliance with Israel.
Rather than address Israeli leaders in parliament, as his predecessor George W. Bush did, Obama will deliver his main speech at a Jerusalem auditorium packed with university students. Tickets for Obama's speech on Thursday at a 1,000-seat convention center are much in demand, and students are entering ticket raffles across the country.
"He could have spoken to politicians or tycoons, but instead he chose to speak to us," said Lotem Cazes, a 25-year-old political science student at Ben-Gurion University in the southern city of Beersheba. "It's very moving. Even though he knows that not everyone likes him here he is still coming and trying to help."
In another effort to woo the Israeli public, Obama granted an exclusive interview with Channel 2 TV at the White House.
"What this trip allows me to do is once again to connect to the Israeli people and there is no substitute to that. The bonds between our two countries are so strong, not just shared values but shared families, shared businesses," he said in the interview, which aired Thursday. "And for me to be able to directly speak to the Israeli people and talk about our unshakable commitment to Israel, but also to talk about hopefully a shared vision of a more peaceful and prosperous future during a time when we know there is a lot of tumult in the area, it is a great opportunity for me. I'm really looking forward to it."...

 ... with the info thats been shown (Obama is a target) this is like the showdown at the O.K. Corral ... it looks like Wile E. Coyote going after Beep Beep ... Message

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)