New revelations about National Security Agency abuses, which now include everything from industrial espionage to reports that the agency can access most data on our smartphones, seem to put everything we know about how business is done on the Internet in danger.
Click on Image to EnlargeJesus wept. From the Vatican Secret Service via an Opus Dei mentor. These accounts were still held by Lansdale when he became a Major General. So they are not accounts he only had in the 1940s or 1950s. The sums are vast. And these banks are not among those black banks, including BCCI, set up by Paul Helliwell (attorney of Meyer Lansky) who was employed by General Donovan as chief of station for the OSS in Kunming, and went on to have a long career serving the agency and the Mob, simultaneously.
“There are very dark storm clouds gathering around the country and North America as a whole. Things are about to get dark, very dark in just a few short weeks. In just over two months, on November 13-14, 2013, the lights are about to go out. Will the lights come back on? It depends on who you ask. Given the past behavior of those in power, it would behoove all of us to prepare for the fact that we could be living for an extended time with no electricity…The working scenario that has emerged is that World War III is on the horizon. Syria was to be the flash point. However, with American and international sentiment running so high against American involvement in the Syrian conflict, Obama needs a Plan B in order to get America into war, because it does not appear that Congress is going to give him the authorization that he needs to force our way in Syria culminating in a military stand off between the Russians and the Chinese and the United States. Subsequently, if Obama fails to obtain Congressional support to attack Syria, he could very well turn his attention to the take down of the power grid and he could still achieve his goals in under two months.
The Vietnam War ended nearly 40 years ago, but the casualties continue as birth defects plague the country.
There are claims that thousands of children continue to be born with horrific facial deformities due to the 20 million gallons of Agent Orange chemical sprayed by the United States.
The Vietnamese call the disfigured youngsters ‘the children of Agent Orange'.
Da Nang in central Vietnam is thought to have the highest level of congenital deformity in the world.
Inside Out's Mark Jordan joins a team of top London plastic surgeons on their unpaid mission to help these children through the charity Facing the World.
Inside Out is broadcast on Monday, 9 September at 19:30 BST on BBC One London and nationwide on the iPlayer for seven days thereafter.
Below is a thoughtful essay by Ambassador Chas Freeman. He describes how the United States has painted itself into a corner on the Syrian Question. Many see this problem in terms of President Obama's missteps, but Freeman shows it goes far beyond one man's grand-strategic foibles.
While Freeman does not express the evolution of grand strategy wrt Syria Question in the following terms, the core issue is, I believe, the increasingly dysfunctional moral design for grand strategy evolved by the United States since the end of the Cold War. Abstractly, this dysfunction takes the form of a growing web of policy-induced mismatches among (a) the codes of conduct and standards of behaviour the United States professes to uphold and others expect the U.S. to uphold, (b) those standards of behaviour we actually adhere to, as demonstrated by our actions, and (c) the conditions in the world we have to contend with. The hypocrisy implicit in this web of mismatches, in abstract terms, is the moral heart of our growing foreign policy crisis and our state of perpetual war.
The crucial importance of having a moral design for grand strategy is described by the late American strategist Col. John Boyd in his seminal Discourse on Winning and Losing. In fact, this notion is the capstone grand strategic ideal synthesizing the tactical, operational, strategic, and philosophical threads of Boyd's entire Discourse. And while the idea is expressed in highly compressed terms on Slides 54-58 of his briefing Strategic Game of ? and ?, one must study the entire Discourse to appreciate both the elegance of his compression, as well as the central importance of forging a grand strategy that is consistent with his ideal.
Exorcising those mismatches from the body politic can start with Syria, but it goes far beyond Syria to our dealings with Middle East, Iran, Russia, China, and indeed the whole world. Nor will it be be easy; extremely powerful domestic factions in the US are profiting from these mismatches, and their corollary state of perpetual war (as I explained here). Ridding ourselves of these mismatches is now the foreign policy challenge of our generation
Ambassador Freeman's thoughtful assembly of the facts associated with our patterns of post-cold war behaviour is worthy of careful study and comparison with Boyd's ideals, because without intending to, he reveals how far the United States has strayed from these ideas. In effect, Freeman has issued a call for an injection of common sense into American foreign policy, and Syria is the place to start working the problem.
US spies missed signs of Aug. 21 Syrian WMD Strike
By KIMBERLY DOZIER
Associated Press, 4 September 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. intelligence agencies did not detect the Syrian regime readying a massive chemical weapons attack in the days ahead of the strike, only piecing together what had happened after the fact, U.S. officials say.
One of the key pieces of intelligence that Secretary of State John Kerry later used to link the attack to the Syrian government — intercepts of communications telling Syrian military units to prepare for the strikes — was in the hands of U.S. intelligence agencies but had not yet been “processed,” according to senior U.S. officials.