Month: February 2010

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Search: steele climate confusion phibetaiota

Searches

Greetings.  Never, ever search for Steele, he is “ever-present” and had to be taken off of the author tags otherwise it would be Steele and then a tiny small dot representing everyone else.

<Climate Confusion> by itself brings up two hits:

Journal: ClimateGate 19 December 2009 Morning

Journal: UN IPCC, Al Gore, & Big Doubts

“ClimateGate” is your hint–that is how we handle both the reality of climate change, and the fraud that characterizes Al Gore, Maurice Strong, and all those associated with the IPCC and the fraudulent carbon marketplace–they are the Enron of the environmental movement.  Searching for ClimateGate bring up the master list with all links:

Reference: ClimateGate Rolling Update

Climate Change is real–it is also 100 years away and a tiny fraction of Environmental Degradaton, which the vastly more responsible High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change put at #3 for the simple reason that poverty does more environmental degradation than all the corporations on the planet, and infectious disease (#2) further reduces diversity and impact on the environment.  Carbon is also a small part of climate change–paving over the wetlands, the HAARP Project, sulfer, mercury, all the toxins in our foods, all of these add up to climate change impacts–they just cannot be fraudlently traded the way the carbon market scam has been devised.

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Journal: US War Policy Enters the Rubber Room

Uncategorized
Chuck Spinney

Afghan War Topples Dutch Govt (AntiWar.com)

More important than the toppling of the Dutch government, and the prospect of new elections, is NATO’s actions which led up to it. Generally speaking, NATO has not made a habit of pressuring for action against the will of that nation’s ruling coalition, and many saw Rasmussen’s request as a sign that the Dutch coalition’s leadership had already signed off on the move. If NATO’s eternal quest for more troops to throw at Afghanistan has seen it now moving unilaterally against the elected governments of member nations, Rasmussen’s comment that “Afghanistan is only the beginning” may soon need to be revised to “the Netherlands is only the beginning.”

Gates Calls European Mood a Danger to Peace (New York Times)

“The demilitarization of Europe — where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it — has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st,” he told NATO officers and officials in a speech at the National Defense University, the Defense Department-financed graduate school for military officers and diplomats.

Make War, Not Love

Gates: European Aversion to War a Danger to Peace

(AntiWar.com)

Speaking today at the National Defense University, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates condemned European nations in general for their refusal to contribute larger portions of their population to NATO.

Gates warned that Europe’s aversion to war was doing serious harm to assorted US military operations with NATO backing, and was therefore “an impediment” to the lasting peace he envisions those wars eventually creating.

Gates’ comments appeared to be directed in part at the Netherlands, who saw its government collapse this weekend after NATO pressure to continue its commitment to the Afghan War led antiwar members of the government to withdraw.

He said that the “demilitarization of Europe” was a long-term, systemic problem for NATO, and that the European members of NATO needed to increase their military spending to NATO mandated levels.

Continue reading “Journal: US War Policy Enters the Rubber Room”

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NIGHTWATCH on Afghanistan Open Source Video

08 Wild Cards

PBS Taliban Program Home Page

Afghanistan:  Special note. Lessons from the PBS show, Frontline, titled Behind Taliban Lines.

The first-hand video by Najibullah Quraishi is worth viewing on the PBS home page where it was posted today. Quraishi accepted an invitation by a Hizbe Islami Gulbuddin (HIG) commander to live with a HIG anti-government fighting unit in Baghlan Province.  Until the arrival of two men from Pakistan on his tenth day, he had unrestricted permission to video record the fighters.

During his ten days with the fighters, they attacked once. Their primary task was to detonate two homemade bombs on an improved road and destroy “enemy” vehicles.

A few points are worth noting.

Identification of the force. First, this video is the first open source medium to identify the affiliation of the fighters in Baghlan Province, a northern province south of Konduz that has experienced a rise in fighting in the past two years. They are not Taliban, but they are Pashtuns. They called themselves the Central Group, in the sense of the leadership or coordinating group, though no significant coordination with other groups took place in the ten days.

Leadership. The video confirmed that the Central Group is led by a local man and at least some of its members were locals. They were protected or given refuge by villagers who formed for the camera at least a part time militia that claim to support the Central Group.

Walk to work. It also showed that the men walk to their attack sites, sometimes six to ten kilometers.  Vehicles in this video were for courier duties or for travel to meetings, to get guns and so on. The HIG are bureaucratic and decentralized.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH on Afghanistan Open Source Video”

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Review (Guest): THE WATCHERS–The Rise of America’s Surveillance State

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)
Amazon Page

FIVE STARS The People We Pay to Look Over Our Shoulders

By Shane Harris

At this very moment analysts at the National Security Agency some 30 miles north of the White House are monitoring countless flashpoints of data — cellphone calls to “hot” numbers, an e-mail message on a suspicious server, an oddly worded tweet — as they carom around the globe like pinballs in cyberspace.

The snippets of information could conceivably lead them to Anwar al-Awlaki, a fugitive cleric in Yemen whose fiery sermons have inspired violent jihadists. Or to the next would-be underwear bomber. Or, much more likely in the needle-in-a-haystack world of cyber detection, it might lead to nothing at all — at least nothing of any consequence in determining Al Qaeda’s next target.

This is the world of modern eavesdropping, or signals intelligence, as its adherents call it, and for many years it operated in the shadows. “The Puzzle Palace,” the 1983 best seller by James Bamford that remains the benchmark study of the N.S.A., first pulled back the curtain to provide a glint of unwanted sunlight on the place. And the years after the Sept. 11 attacks — a period in which the surveillance agencies’ muscular new role would lead to secret wiretapping programs inside the United States, expansive data-mining operations and more — gave rise to public scrutiny that made the place a veritable greenhouse of exposure.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): THE WATCHERS–The Rise of America’s Surveillance State”

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Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence
Marcus Aurelius

Hurdles Stymie Counterterrorism Center

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)

Full Story Online

WASHINGTON — The nation's main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.

The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department.

. . . . . . .

Continue reading “Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL”

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Journal: Individual Dignity & Collective Defense

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, Civil Society, Law Enforcement, Mobile, Tools

Full Story Online

Google execs convicted in Italy for Down syndrome video

MILAN (Reuters) – A Milan court convicted three Google Inc executives on Wednesday for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with Down's syndrome by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006.

Phi Beta Iota: The Italians made a mistake.  Instead of using the video to aggressively convict the bullies of the Down's syndrome boy, they are shooting the messenger.  This is just as ignorant and ill-advised as the police trying to criminalize Twitter  texts and cell phone video of police brutality.  The right of the people to bear witness cannot be undermined by the courts, IOHO.

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Worth a Look: War-Evolution Blog (Mostly in French)

Worth A Look
Home Page

We've held off on inserting multi-lingual access to this web site, still under development, but since it and other sites can be easily translated using Google Translate among others, that has not been a priority.

This recommended website is mostly in French, and comes recommended by a past director of the French national policy planning staff, the youngest person to ever hold the position and one of the most brilliant scholar-practitioners of knowledge as an economic good (or bad) we've ever met.