Georgia Update August 24, 7:30 PM, PDT

LOOK AT THIS MAP!

It explains everything. Look at all the regions that border Georgia. Look at Chechnya.

Now to go Wikipedia and enter Beslan. See what city it happened in.

Never were the Russians going to allow any part of this region get out of control; not with Chechnya bordering Georgia and Chechnya also onlyabout 30 km away from North Ossetia. That's about the distance between East Los Angeles and Venice Beach. In 2004, in the North Ossetian City of Beslan, Russian army and police forces recaptured a school that had been taken by a large force of Chechen rebels. After three days of increasing tension and unwillingness to give on both sides, an assault took place in which more than 300 Russian hostages (out of around1,100) were killed. More than half of those who died were children. This is the price that Russia will pay to keep its ethnic"near-abroad" family bound to itself.

Next go back and remember that Russia has fought two recent wars in Chechnya. Remember also that in "Rubicon" I talked in several places about Chechnya; about the presence and involvement there before and after 9/11 of Halliburton and the CIA; about how CIA operations connected to Chechen leader Shamil Basayef also linked to a 9/11hijacker by FBI documents warning of the attacks. The CIA has been allover Chechnya and the region for a long time, securing it for the BTC pipeline and other oil operations -- trying to cut Russia out. Knowing how hard the Chechens fought and how ruthlessly they were put down, could the Russians have ever permiited the U.S. and Europe to pry Georgia away? Had the Russians allowed Georgian progress towards NATO entry and economic alliance with the west, it would have begged another revolt in Chechnya.

It is simmering down but, as I said, Russia is leaving behind acripple. In combat infrantry fighting it has long been a doctrine thatit is better to wound enemy soldiers than to kill them. Each WIA requires two or three other soldiers to care for him. A crippled Georgia, on life support and in intensive care is something which the west must pay for -- and cannot allow to die or it will lose face. More strain on the money. It will also be a place from which no attack against Russia of any kind can or ever will be mounted again.

Game and set, Russia.

-- MCR
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Gates Wants to Shift $1.2 Billion to DOD Intelligence

From Global Corp which presages the article above by several years.

Michael C. Ruppert

I recently had a conversation with someone who spent 17 years in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Thinking of the purge and power shift that has - over the course of the last nine months - decimated the Central Intelligence Agency (long my Bête Noir) and shifted much of its power to the Pentagon, I asked the following question.

"Look, the agency does many things in many roles from raw intelligence gathering, to economic warfare, to satellite recon, to paramilitary operations requiring cover and deniability, to drug smuggling. But since its inception it was always focused in large part on medium and long-term intelligence gathering and covert operations through the costly, patient, expensive means of placing NOCs (non-official covers) or assets in missions where it might take five, ten or fifteen years to bear fruit. These programs were always centered on "what if" contingencies which inherently implied that multiple outcomes were possible; that there were alternative futures to be influenced and shaped.

"Battlefield intelligence is a different critter. It presupposes that there is nothing more important than the battle that has been joined at this moment. If the battle is not won, there are no future choices. Hence nothing matters other than the war that is being fought today. No Yaltas or Potsdams; no future deep cover moles will be needed.

"Every country in the world is betting everything it has on this one hand knowing that after 2007 or 2008 the game ends. The map of the future after that is unknowable and, to large extent, irrelevant. That's why Rumsfeld has won the battle to control American intelligence operations and why the new National Intelligence Director John Negroponte is getting the job.

"Is that right?"

Without the slightest hesitation the former CIA employee answered, "Yes."

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----JO