ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Pepe Escobar There's danger on the edge of town Ride the king's highway, baby Weird scenes inside the gold mine Ride the highway west, baby The Doors, The End The killer awoke before dawn. He put his American desert boots on. He took a knife from the ancient gallery. And he walked on down the hall - bathed in desert sunlight. The killer spoke with a British accent (London's East End?) Father (Saud), I want to kill you. Mother (Langley?) I want to... yeeeaaahh, c'mon! Then the sartorially composed Man in Black beheaded American photojournalist James Foley. This is not the end, beautiful friend. It's just a new beginning in the never-ending Global War on Terror. Now starring Papa Saud's brand new bag - The Caliph and his goons. This is the way Shock and Awe morphs into "Assad must go" morphs into Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, morphs into The Caliph's Black Britannia goon responding to "humanitarian" bombing. I'm my own baby now. ...

Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images / AFP As lawmakers in Washington, DC, consider ways to stem the flow of military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, police lobbies and organizations are firing back at the possibility. In fact, the National Tactical Officers Association (NTOA) – which lobbies for 1,600 different SWAT teams in the United States – has already sent emails to all congressional staffers urging them to keep in place the Pentagon program responsible for sending armored vehicles, body armor, and more to police departments around the country. “The police have to be one step ahead of the criminal element, have to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. You don’t want a community to be taken over by one or many criminals,” NTOA Executive Director Mark Lomax said to the Daily Beast . “We’re definitely for equipping our law enforcement officials out there properly, with proper training and proper policies.” The move comes as protests against police in Ferguson, Missouri,...

Reuters / Lucy Nicholson Close to 200 state and local police departments in the United States have been suspended for losing military-level equipment transferred to them by the Pentagon, a new investigation found. According to the media outlet Fusion , its independent investigation into the Pentagon’s “1033 program,” which equips state and local police departments across the US with excess military equipment, turned up an alarming trend: Not only did many law enforcement agencies fail to comply with the program’s guidelines, they routinely lost dangerous weaponry. Already, the investigation has found that police departments in Arizona, California, Mississippi, Missouri, Georgia, and others have lost or cannot account for various types of weapons. This list includes M14 and M16 assault rifles, .45-caliber pistols, shotguns, and even vehicles. So far, 184 state and local departments have reportedly been suspended in a program that involves the participation of more than 8,000 agencies....

The guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (AFP Photo / US Navy) A US Navy destroyer and a French frigate are expected to enter the waters of the Black Sea next week, a diplomatic and military source said. “Two NATO warships at once will arrive in the Black Sea on September 3. They are US Navy’s destroyer USS Ross and frigate, Commandant Birot, of the naval forces of France,” the unnamed source told RIA-Novosti news agency. There’s currently one NATO ship present in the Black Sea, with French surveillance ship, Dupuy de Lome, expected to remain in the area until September 5. USS Vella Gulf, which was patrolling the black Sea since August 7, recently left for its port of commission. The maintenance of the operational rotational presence of NATO ships does not promote stability in the Black Sea region in any way, the source noted. According to the Montreux Convention of 1936, warships of non-Black Sea states can stay in the Black Sea for no more than 21 days. But, earlier this year, the ...

By Ryan Gallagher " The Intercept " - The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants. ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleb...

By RT Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have been joining forces in secret to carry out air strikes on Libya, anonymous high-ranking US officials told the media. The two countries have reportedly coordinated and launched the attacks twice in the last week. Both Egypt and the UAE launched the strikes without informing the US or seeking its consent, the officials told the New York Times . “We don’t see this as constructive at all,” one of the officials told the newspaper, which reported that diplomats were “livid” about the strikes. Libya is a conflict-torn area with both the UN and Western powers seeking to quell the violence. While Egypt issued an outright denial, the UAE did not comment on having carried out the attacks. Egypt and UAE are solid military allies and are backed by the US. However, NYT sources said that the UAE was the source of pilots, warplanes and aerial refueling planes while Egyptian bases were used to strike Tripoli in both attacks, one of which took place a wee...

This week a Chinese jet conducted a “dangerous” intercept of a P-8 Poseidon aircraft, the Pentagon announced on Friday. “On the 19th of August, an armed Chinese fighter jet conducted a dangerous intercept of a U.S. Navy P-8 Poseidon aircraft, patrol aircraft, that was on a routine mission. The intercept took place about 135 miles east of Hainan Island, in international airspace,” Admiral John Kirby, the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Defense, told reporters at a press conference on Friday. Kirby elaborated on the incident, saying that the Chinese jet: “crossed under the aircraft with one pass having only 50-100 feet separation. The Chinese jet also passed the nose of the P-8 at 90 degrees with its belly toward the P-8 Poseidon, we believe to make a point of showing its weapons load-out. And then they flew directly under and alongside the P-8, bringing their wingtips, as I said, to within 20 feet. And then conducted a roll over the P-8, passing within 45 feet.” The Pentagon sp...

Reuters / Guang Niu Traveling from Shanghai to San Francisco in under two hours may sound like a fantasy, but China believes it’s figured out how to design an underwater vehicle that can make the idea a reality. More worryingly, though, is the possibility that the technology will be used to develop even more dangerous weaponry. According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the super-fast technology was developed by scientists at the Harbin Institute of Technology, and would allow underwater submarines or torpedoes to exceed the equivalent speed of sound under water – about 3,600 miles per hour. The idea is based on the old Soviet concept of supercavitation, which involves creating a large air bubble around an object so that it could avoid facing too much friction and travel through water quickly. Professor Li Fengchen said that when the vessel hits the water, one of its mechanisms continuously sprays a “special liquid membrane” all over the object’s surface. This membrane even...