Coincidence? Asymmetrical warfare? How many warning signs are we going to miss?

posted by Bill Arnett @ 11:25 AM Permalink

A few months back I, along with many other pet owners, suffered the loss of my favorite dog to poisonous dog food polluted with a chemical that should not have been present. The pet food industry, last I checked (it's probably more now), is at least a $4-billion dollar a year industry in America. That segment of commerce took a severe beating from the recall of millions of cans of dog food consisting of over one hundred brands, loss of confidence in their products, and it caused a great deal of personal suffering for those losing pets to the tainted food. I can only imagine what the final tab came to on this, but I would guess it involved millions of dollars in losses and simultaneously demonstrated how easy it is and would be still to poison vast amounts of food causing thousands of deaths, perhaps of people next time, as the distribution systems for dog food are essentially the same as that for foods consumed by humans and there are apparently no safeguards in place to prevent it.

The poisons in the food came from China.

Remember when everyone laughed at Tommy Thompson when he wondered how the U.S. had been lucky enough to avoid an attack on our food supply? But wait, there's more!

It is "suddenly" discovered that around 17-million toys contaminated with lead paint, a banned substance in paint in America as heavy metal poisoning of children can have catastrophic effects on their health, causing, according to our government:

Lead-based paint is a major source of lead poisoning for children and can also affect adults. In children, lead poisoning can cause irreversible brain damage and can impair mental functioning. It can retard mental and physical development and reduce attention span. It can also retard fetal development even at extremely low levels of lead. In adults, it can cause irritability, poor muscle coordination, and nerve damage to the sense organs and nerves controlling the body. Lead poisoning may also cause problems with reproduction (such as a decreased sperm count). It may also increase blood pressure. Thus, young children, fetuses, infants, and adults with high blood pressure are the most vulnerable to the effects of lead.

Obviously our government knows well the dangers of lead paint, but somehow allowed over 17-million lead-based painted toys find their way into virtually every store in America that sells toys. How many children were harmed before this was discovered? How long did the problem exist before being discovered?

The poisonous toys were made in China.

And, once again, the American economy took another multi-billion dollar hit and is still suffering as the toys are recalled, and all parents everywhere must wonder whether they, their children, and their reproductive systems have been harmed by lead poisoning. But wait, there's still more!

See this article from the Huffington Post that details an alleged "cracking and hacking" attack on our Pentagon's computers:

China on Tuesday denied a report that its military had hacked into Pentagon computers, saying the allegations were "groundless" and that Beijing was opposed to cybercrime.

The Financial Times, citing unnamed officials, reported Monday that the People's Liberation Army hacked into a computer system in the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates in June. The attack forced officials to take down the network for more than a week, the report said.[…]

The Financial Times report said the Pentagon was still investigating how much information was stolen, but cited an unnamed person as saying that most of it was probably unclassified.

It was the second time in two weeks that China was accused of hacking into a foreign government's computers. On the eve of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit to Beijing last week, the weekly Der Spiegel said computers at the Chancellery and three ministries had been infected with so-called Trojans, or spy programs.

The report, which did not specify its sources, said Germany's domestic intelligence agency believed a group of hackers associated with the People's Liberation Army might have been behind the alleged hacking.

At the time, Premier Wen Jiabao called the reported hacking a "matter of grave concern" and said China would take "firm and effective action" to prevent such crimes.

The Pentagon warned earlier this year that China's army is emphasizing hacking as an offensive weapon. It cited Chinese military exercises in 2005 that included hacking "primarily in first strikes against enemy networks."

Unlike American leaders who are unable to see past tomorrow's polling report, China is a thousands of years-old civilization that believes in true long term planning, i.e., leasing Hong Kong to the Brits for 99-years, allowing the Brits to build and service one of the most beautiful and valuable deep water ports in the world, build thriving enterprises, and make billions of dollars in investments. Then, at the end of the lease, Hong Kong went right back to Chinese control.

I point this out because I believe we may be missing signs of asymmetrical warfare attacks by the Chinese, different in form but not in substance.

Short-term planning: See if it is possible to attack and poison an extensive food network, starting with something that would not immediately start a war, but that would demonstrate how easy, far, and wide the distribution of poisoned dog food would get before being discovered. In this case, several months passed before the discovery of the tainted food. How extensive the damage if that food had been intended for human consumption and gotten that kind of nationwide distribution?

Longer-term planning: Use American shipping networks to distribute lead-based painted toys by the millions, knowing that the subsequent poisoning of our children could lead to a whole raft of immediate and long term detrimental effects on their health, weakening America from the ground up, so to speak. How long has this been going on, and can there be any guarantees or assurances that all the toys will be recovered and disposed of or that thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of our children, have not already been harmed?

Plans already set: The hacking and cracking of some of our most sensitive computer systems with the potential to immediately disrupt operations at the Pentagon in the event of war. And, although it isn't commented upon in the above post, China recently built a new "stealth" submarine that could park many nuclear weapons off our shores without being detected, and China and Russia are war-gaming together as never before. Between them they possess thousands of nuclear missiles that can target Europe and the U.S. while the U.S. touts a missile protection system that does not now, nor has it ever worked, but that operates to lull the American people into complacency with the actions of their government while acting as provocation to the Chinese and Russians.

China and Russia have stated they will not ever allow America to become the sole superpower in the world and continue its imperial ambitions to control the world, or at least those portions of the world where there is oil in quantity.

bush/cheney, the worst leaders in world history, are so intent on stealing all the oil they can instead of purchasing it through honest commerce that they have blinded themselves to the very real possibility of a first strike by China-Russia the very instant bush decides to pull the nuclear trigger on Iran or any other country.

And where and how are we going to obtain all those weapons of war to defend ourselves when our bankers, the Chinese, decide to terminate our credit, dump the dollar in favor of more stable currencies, and start a run on the dollar that will cause the immediate bankruptcy of America?

I believe American security is being tested, that we have failed those tests and allowed contaminated and outright poisonous food stuffs and toys to be imported freely and apparently without regard for the safety of the public. High security computers being hacked and cracked, and American leaders are either too short-sighted or ignorant to recognize they have glaringly failed to keep America safe and have instead tremendously increased the dangers to all Americans.

Labels: Bush, cheney, China, foreign policy, military, Oil, rant