Twelfth Bough

More Hezbollah in South America, moving closer. Now they are hooking up with Mexican drug cartels (thanks to Switters for the link).  The article references a memo leaked by the LulzSec hackers. The memo comes from the Tuscon, AZ police department.  Article conclusion: Partnerships between Mexican organized crime and Islamic militants are mutually beneficial — and therefore terrifying. The cartels are able to gain smuggling and weapons expertise, as well as access to cheap heroin from Afghanistan and Iran. The terrorists benefit from Mexico's drug war lawlessness and its porous border with their primary target: The United States. Here's the trade: cartels get smuggling and weapons expertise, cheap heroin from Afghanistan and Iran; and "the terrorists" get access to the US in the lawless territory controlled by the cartels. It seems that the cartels already have sufficient access to smuggling, weapons expertise, and cheap heroin, given that the authoriti

"The devil is no fool. He can get people feeling about heaven the way they ought to feel about hell. He can make them fear the means of grace the way they do not fear sin. And he does so, not by light but by obscurity, not be realities but by shadows, not by clarity and substance but by dreams and the creatures of psychosis. And men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from ever finding out the truth about anything."  ~ Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain We learn about the attacks in Norway. Aangirfan summarizes the key points: 1. July 2011 -- Norway will end its involvement in Libya on 8/1/11. 2. March 2011 -- The Socialist Left party in Norway supports military action against Israel if Israel acts against Hamas in Gaza. 3. January 2011 -- Norway's Minister of Foreign Affairs will recognize the Palestinian state once it is set up. "During the coming September and October, there will be a new sit

Southern Pulse (southernpulse.com) tells us about all the ungoverned spaces in the Americas, spaces where transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) operate, also known as "geopolitical black holes" and "stateless zones." straight from Mr. Ed's mouth to your ears http://southernpulse.com/_webapp_3930524/Ungoverned_Spaces_in_the_Americas,_Part_I Southern Pulse should know. You can take this information to the bank, a bank like Wachovia for instance which has laundered billions of dollars of drug money for the Mexican cartels, and paid a whopping big fine of $160 million, or less than 2% of it's $12.3 billion profit in 2009 . Because Southern Pulse has "a network of investigators" operating across the Americas and an advisory board hooked directly into the CFR and RAND. These field agents don't sit behind a computer and read the interwebs, they're out there Operating Across the Americas . Capice? And they can identify all the geopoliti

wn.com swearing in Ambassador Roger Noriega who testified this month before the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism "Noriega was the chief architect of the coup d'etat against Haiti's internationally recognized democratically elected President [Aristide] and all 7,000 elected officials of Haiti. In another display of his lack of professionalism, and again displaying behavior generally begging for anger management training, Roger Noriega threw a temper tantrum going as far as saying he thinks he has worked for the US government long enough! The New York Times today attributed Noriega's abrupt decision to the administration's appointment of Caleb McCarry, a Republican Congressional staffer, to the role of transition coordinator on Cuba, which took "primary responsibility for Cuba...away from him." Noriega, an arch conservative of Mexican descent, worked as a staffer for the Aristide-hating Senator Jessie Helms, who was bent on destroying Aristide, and