“Deep within every one of us lies a natural understanding of good and evil. That is why one man can tell the truth convincingly…but it takes the entire apparatus of the state to peddle a lie, and propagate that lie to new generations.”…Gandhi
While the world watches to see when and how the ‘punishment attack’ will be launched on Syria, I read reports all day trying to see if anyone would lay out what really has been going on. They did not.
The US and its allies, to their eternal shame, have already used WMD on the Syrian people, but initially in a non traditional form. They changed their game plan for future regime changes to avoid using their own troops and as little cash as possible. How?
They went rogue. They went over to terrorism. They went over to al-Qaeda, that’s how. Using the Gulf State proxies has fooled no one here.
They dusted off Ziggy Brzezinski’sold destabilization plan for starting Muslim holy wars against the Russians in the Caucasus. The strategy was to keep them tied up in the tried and true, ‘death by a thousand cuts’ insurgent wars.
Ziggy has no regrets over the 150,000 dead in the Chechen war. His justification was “Would you have rather seen them marching into Europe?” There was a little problem with that. They never could have marched into Europe as both ‘assured mutual destruction’ and tactical nuclear weapons served as an effective bear trap.
We move on now to how earlier in Afghanistan where Saudi money and CIA logistics cranked up the first major ‘use the locals for cannon fodder’ war in that region. And yes, the Madrasa schools to indoctrinate children to be an endless supply of holy warriors…yes…we and the Saudis did that.
The newly disclosed information includes individual agency budgets along with program area line items, as well as details regarding the size and structure of the intelligence workforce. So one learns, for example, that the proposed budget for covert action in FY2013 was approximately $2.6 billion, while the total for open source intelligence was $387 million.
Some of the information only confirms what was already understood to be true. The budget for the National Security Agency was estimated to be about $10 billion, according to a recent story in CNN Money (“What the NSA Costs Taxpayers” by Jeanne Sahadi, June 7, 2013). The actual NSA budget figure, the Post reported, is $10.8 billion.
And the involuntary disclosure of classified intelligence budget information, while rare, is not unprecedented. In 1994, the House Appropriations Committee inadvertently published budget data for national and military intelligence, the size of the CIA budget, and other details. (“$28 Billion Spying Budget is Made Public by Mistake” by Tim Weiner, New York Times, November 5, 1994)
But the current disclosure of intelligence budget information dwarfs all previous releases and provides unmatched depth and detail of spending over a course of several years, based on original documents. The disclosure is doubly remarkable because the Post chastely refrained from releasing about 90% of the Congressional Budget Justification Book that it obtained. “Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online,” Post reporters Gellman and Miller wrote.
This is not a whistleblower disclosure; it does not reveal any illegality or obvious wrongdoing. On the contrary, the underlying budget document is a formal request to Congress to authorize and appropriate funding for intelligence.
But the disclosure seems likely to be welcomed in many quarters (while scorned in others) both because of a generalized loss of confidence in the integrity of the classification system, and because of a more specific belief that the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy today requires increased public accountability.
Though it has never been embraced as official policy, the notion of public disclosure of individual intelligence agency budgets (above and beyond the release of aggregate totals) has an honorable pedigree.
In 1976, the U.S. Senate Church Committee advocated publication of the total intelligence budget and recommended that “any successor committees study the effects of publishing more detailed information on the budgets of the intelligence agencies.”
In a 1996 hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then-Chair Sen. Arlen Specter badgered DCI John Deutch about the need for intelligence budget secrecy.
“I think that you and the Intelligence Community and this committee have got to do a much better job in coming to grips with the hard reasons for this [budget secrecy], if they exist. And if they exist, I'm prepared to help you defend them. But I don't see that they exist. I don't think that they have been articulated or explained,” the late Sen. Specter said then.
Committee Vice Chair Sen. Bob Kerrey added: “I would concur in much of what the Chairman has just said. I do, myself, believe not only the top line, but several of the other lines of the budget, not only could but should, for the purpose of giving taxpayer-citizens confidence that their money is being well spent.”
In 2004, the 9/11 Commission itself recommended disclosure of intelligence agency budgets: “Finally, to combat the secrecy and complexity we have described, the overall amounts of money being appropriated for national intelligence and to its component agencies should no longer be kept secret” (at page 416, emphasis added).
These are clearly minority views. They could have been adopted at any time — as disclosure of the aggregate total was — but they haven't been. (And even these voices did not call for release of the more detailed budget line items that are now public.) And yet they are not totally outlandish either.
The initial response of the executive branch to the Washington Post story will be to hunker down, to decline explicit comment, and to prohibit government employees from viewing classified budget documents that are in the public domain. Damage assessments will be performed, and remedial security measures will be imposed. These are understandable reflex responses.
But in a lucid moment, officials should ponder other questions.
How can public confidence in national security secrecy be bolstered? Is it possible to imagine a national security secrecy system that the public would plausibly view not with suspicion but with support, much as the strict secrecy of IRS tax returns is broadly understood and supported? What steps could be taken to reduce national security secrecy to the bare minimum?
Looking further ahead, is it possible to devise an information security policy that is based on “resilience” to the foreseeable disclosure of secrets rather than on the fervently pursued prevention of such disclosure?
Usually when we get information about black programs it's the result of two or more errors on the part of Congressmen. One will give a budget for a certain area, another will describe black ops as a percentage of that number, and then we get the actual figure. This time thanks to Edward Snowden we get a 178 page report that ended up in the hands of the Washington Post.
That figure of $52.6 billion is eye catching, since it's roughly equal to that of the State Department's whole operating budget. Also interesting that it's doubled in the last eight years, while Congress forced an 18% cut on the State Department in 2011. This has been widely viewed as a method to sabotage Hillary Clinton's presidential chances in 2016, no matter what the cost to the U.S. might be in the mean time.
I've written about the State Department Witch Hunt over Benghazi, which we recently learned to be an effort by the far right fringe to disrupt and discredit the Obama administration, again without regard to what harm they might be doing to overall U.S. interests.
The executive branch faces a crapflood of, well … crap and our emaciated State Department faces an intractable problem in the Mideast, but the inability to get on top of issues has left the whole region sliding towards chaos. If you're an end of days nut that might seem like a good thing, but most Americans would prefer that we not get dragged into another quagmire.
I am disheartened by what I see. Winning elections matters little when a disloyal fringe abuse any gap they find in our government's checks and balances, dragging us one step closer to collapse with each passing day. Our isolationist tendencies are finally starting to kick in and that ought to be followed by some attention to economic development here at home, but if we end up with some regional conflagration in the Mideast we'll be forced to do something on the basis of longstanding alliances. This will be a triple down on the misadventures of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's being made to happen against the will of the majority of the American people.
This is at once fascinating and, at the same time, yet another example of how science is far outpacing the ethics as to how that science should be used.
The US/Israel, Britain, France and Their Arab Puppets Reach “Consensus” on Syria Invasion
Western and Arab military leaders have reached a “consensus” on military intervention in Syria over accusations that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons, a Jordanian security official told German news agency, DPA.
“It was decided that should the international community be forced to act in Syria, the most responsible and sustainable response would be limited missile strikes,” the official said on condition of anonymity on Tuesday following a meeting held in the Jordanian capital, Amman.
The military leaders led by Chairman of US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey agreed to prepare for the strike as early as this week, the official added.
Meanwhile, the British Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman said UK armed forces are devising contingency plans for military action against the Arab country over the alleged use of chemical weapons.
The UK has been reportedly sending warplanes and military transporters to its airbase in Cyprus, situated near Syria.
US defense officials also say several navy destroyers have been deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean to be used against Syria upon an order of President Barack Obama.
Ansar al-Sharia running training camps in Benghazi and Darnah
U.S. intelligence agencies earlier this month uncovered new evidence that al Qaeda-linked terrorists in Benghazi are training foreign jihadists to fight with Syria’s Islamist rebels, according to U.S. officials.
Ansar al-Sharia, the al Qaeda-affiliated militia that U.S. officials say orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound and a CIA facility in Benghazi, is running several training camps for jihadists in Benghazi and nearby Darnah, another port city further east, said officials who discussed some details of the camps on condition of anonymity.
The officials said the terror training camps have been in operation since at least May and are part of a network that funnels foreign fighters to Syrian rebel groups, including the Al-Nusra Front, the most organized of the Islamist rebel groups fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime in Damascus.
