A Cautionary Tale on the Road to War

by Sean Osborne on Sun, 2007-07-08 15:40. Special Reports
By Sean Osborne, Associate Director, Military Affairs

8 July 2007: On Wednesday, June 6, 2007, the 40th anniversary of the June 1967 Six Day War, the Amman, Jordan daily newspaper al-Dustour concluded a short story on the history of the past 40 years by blaming the still largely existent results of that war upon Israel and the world community of nations at large. The results of that war, which was an overwhelming military victory by the IDF over the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria with additional troops and logistical support from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Algeria. In true Arab Islamist fashion the Jordanian report ignores the root causes of that war and the now widely known intensive efforts of the Soviet Union (Russia) to instigate hostilities between Israel and her neighbors. Yet there is something much more sinister within the Jordanian report as carried by the German national news agency, Deutsche Presse Agentur, the last sentence of which contains a thinly veiled Islamist threat of extremely grave harm to the National Security of the United States:
"Israel, which turns its back to Arab peace overtures, should know that the invincible military power on which it so far depended faltered in last summer's war (in Lebanon) and that its ally (the United States), which it dragged into a war against Iraq, is about to be brought to its knees," the paper said.
The statement boldly asserts a foreknowledge of undetermined origin of some great event which will bring this superpower to its knees. I assess this statement from a Jordanian newspaper to be extraordinary if not unprecedented. Jordan is an Arab ally of the United States; its monarchist government and military receives and has ongoing major defense and Jordanian national security related contracts with us. So why would a major daily newspaper published in the Jordanian capital print such an overt threat, the seriousness of which can not be overlooked or underestimated in a summer where many analysts say is uncanny in resemblance to the summer prior to 9/11?
Let me take this a step further and “flip the script.” Suppose for a moment that that statement had originated in Washington, DC and was attributed to the Washington Post by Deutsche Presse Agentur. And what if that statement had instead been the following:
"Iran, which turns its back to American peace overtures, should know that its much improved Russian, North Korean and Red Chinese-made military power on which it depends faltered in last summer's war (in Lebanon) against Israel, and that its primary military ally (the Russian Federation), which currently is dragging it into a war against America, is about to be brought to its knees," the paper said.
Can you image the furor of such an overt threat to the national security of Russia in world media? Yet, in the real-world a statement from an Arab paper about foreknowledge of a devastating attack against the United States does not even rate so much as a whimper or a peep from so-called Main Stream Media? America, what’s wrong with this picture? You’re smart, you know as well as I do what’s wrong with this picture. Dozens of articles on this Northeast Intelligence Network main page over the past few years have made the issue crystal clear. All forms of media are alive with warnings of some type of event to occur this summer. The entire Middle East is a power keg and tinder box, with Iran threatening to light it all off. Yet there is more, and the implications of the more can provide a certain level of comfort. Apparently that message of foreknowledge above did register with our government. I believe it registered like an 8.0 Richter scale earthquake within our government, particularly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
During the evening of 26 June an extraordinary amount of activity began to occur on the Air Force Global High Frequency System. This communications system is dedicated to maintaining the ready alert status and issuance of strike orders of America’s awesome nuclear deterrent power around the globe. Late that evening I received first indications of the extraordinary communications activity, the next morning I sent out email advisories concerning that activity. This weekend Bill Gertz has posted the same information in his “Inside the Ring” column.
Here is the text of my email:
“Last night there was extraordinary radio traffic on the GHFS (the Air Force Global HF System). The freqs used for this traffic and the "echo" repeats were: 4724, 8992, 11175 and 15016 kHz. The net for these freqs is fixed to the following Air Force Bases: Andrews, Ascension, Elmendorf, Anderson (Guam), Hickam, Lajes, Offutt, Salinas, Thule, Yokota plus a couple of formerly aliased stations (like Diego Garcia and Cyprus). The these freqs were humming with extremely large EAMs (Emergency Action Messages) which are issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to USAF strategic nuclear forces.
A normal EAM consists of plain language phonetic alpha-numeric string of characters which is the message preamble. The preamble is followed by the message text, which normally can be up to 30 alpha-numeric characters. Last nights messages were 174 characters long. According to the amateur radio operators who have followed the GHFS broadcasts for a very long time, a message of this size has not been copied on the system since the Gulf War of 1991.”
What does this mean? It means that the Joint Chiefs of Staff are big-time on the job, and that while they know the nature of the threat (i.e.: ‘American Hiroshima’) we may not know the specific origin or source of that threat. So they cover all bases by issuing an unambiguous advisory in which known enemies are duly advised and have some additional foreknowledge of their own. Here is how I deduce the knowledge provided them.
A.) The SIGINT collection efforts of the various countries around the world - friend and foe alike - heard and recorded that scheduled GHFS broadcast. The Emergency Action Messages are encoded but spoken in plain text, for example: "Sierra November Foxtrot Six Alpha Niner". Even though encoded they are crystal clear reminders of the awesome power we can project globally at a moments notice to any potential adversary. The historical effectiveness of this deterrent is why we are all still here.
B.) The message within the June 26 GHFS broadcast was not “routine”, and its sheer size is indicative of this fact. Moreover it is very likely directly related to an underlying principle and current U.S. defense national policy that we will hold ALL other nuclear state powers, excepting allies such as Israel, the UK, France and India, responsible if the United States is nuked by a rogue or terrorist element. A message of this type confirms that CONPLAN 8022 is alive and well. Interestingly, this “message” was delivered one week prior to the arrival of Russian President Valdimir Putin’s summit with US President George Bush in Maine.
Obviously it is imperative that such a strike against the U.S. be pro-actively prevented from ever occurring, and measures are in place to that end. It is somewhat reassuring to know that states which are known sources of fissionable nuclear material have been advised once again of the immediate and lethal price they will pay if we are hit.