a. BLUF: 11 days, 1 day per week, starting 08 Jul and continuing through end FY13.
b. Appeared to waffle by providing non-answer to employee's question as to whether mandated savings could be obtained by cutting contractors rather than direct-hire civil servants.
c. Never pinned blame where it belongs: catastrophic failure of 535 Members of Congress and POTUS to do their jobs.
Promises of millions, a new face and detailed instructions on a double-agent conspiracy in Moscow. Bearing the hallmarks of a Cold War spy thriller, Russia’s counterintelligence agency says it nabbed a CIA officer trying to flip a Russian operative.
The Federal Security Service (FSB) Public Relations Center has announced that the person detained is Ryan Christopher Fogle, a career diplomat working as the third secretary of the Political Section of the American embassy in Moscow.
The agency stressed that Christopher had special technical equipment, printed instructions for the Russian citizen being recruited, a large sum of money and means to change the person’s appearance.
The detainee was delivered to the FSB receiving office where he has been questioned and after all the necessary procedures he has been handed over to representatives of the US embassy in Moscow.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The website of the American embassy in Russia informs that its Political Section is engaged in “bringing to the attention of the Russian government the US position on the issues of foreign policy and security.” The section’s other task is to “inform Washington about the main provisions of the foreign and defense policy of Russia,” as well as Russian domestic political life.
“If this is genuine, then it'll be seen to be appallingly bad tradecraft – being caught with a `How-to-be-a-Spy 101′ guide and a wig. He would have had to have been pretty stupid,” said Mark Galeotti, a professor at New York University who studies the Russian security services.
U.S. officials did not dispute that Fogle was a CIA employee, and they sought to play down the potential for any diplomatic fallout.
Public records indicate that Fogle is a native of Missouri and a graduate of Colgate University in New York. A woman who answered the phone at his parents’ residence in St. Louis declined to comment.
This email builds on the information in my 8 May email entitled, The Real Scare in Syria Is Not Chemical Weapons.” Attached below is a post from Joshua Landis’s Syria Comment blog. Landis is a professor at the University of Oklahoma and a specialist on Syria — his blog often provides useful, insightful information.
Particularly important, IMO, are Landis’ comments relating the conflict in this region to its spillover effects into Turkey (for more background see also: “Will Syria’s Revolt Disrupt the Turkish Borderlands?.”
Spillover is a very serious issue, because the Turkish province just north of the map below, Hatay Province, used to be part of Syria — it was in effect ceded to Turkey by France (and the UK and the League of Nation) in the late 1939s as part of a subtle deal to elicit Turkey’s neutral if they became involved in a war with Germany (WWII) — a promise Turkey kept.
The map herewith shows where Hatay is located:
Landis' comments, among other things, highlights some of the forces sucking Turkey may further into the Syrian quagmire. Note text marked in red below are my comments. The first half of this essay is a summary of Landis’ personal views on the situation in Levantine Syria, the second half is a series of essays outlining reasons why the US should not intervene militarily.
In a remarkably ignorant statement, the Swedish National Prosecutor has appealed a culture-sharing sentence to the Supreme Court with the motivation that sharing culture and knowledge “funds terrorism”. This follows a verdict from the Appeals Court that would have put an end to the witch-hunt of people sharing culture in Sweden, as it had handed out a sentence that was effectively too low to justify further persecution. In appealing to the Supreme Court, Kerstin Skarp of the Swedish National Prosecutor’s Office has shown every conceivable bit of ivory-tower ignorance.
Here is another potential game changer in the transition to non-carbon energy. More and more breakthroughs are popping up. One can only wonder what it would have been like if we had put the trillions we have spent on war into eliminating carbon energy, and transitioning to energy technologies that were non-polluting.
“Does a compelling description of a terrorist attack, replete with ‘eyewitness accounts’ of the terrifying scene, and official pronouncements, constitute an actual event?” – Florida Atlantic University professor James Tracy.
By Sheila Casey (Special to Truth and Shadows)
The mainstream media story of the Boston Marathon bombing is of Chechen terrorists who unleashed weapons of mass destruction, killing four and wounding 264 in an unthinkable scene of “bodies flying into the street”, “so many people without legs” and “blood everywhere.”
For the vast majority of the American population, this is the truth and they feel no need to look further. Yet those who are willing to question the narrative we’ve been sold and take a hard look behind the curtain may be in for a surprise. Based on the video and photo record, it seems clear that the lead actor in this production—the most grievously wounded, as well as the man who fingered Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as the bomber—was faking his injuries, as were most of those allegedly hurt by the first bomb. We were told his name is Jeff Bauman, but since that can’t be verified and his survival is unbelievable to the point of being miraculous, we’ll simply call him Miracle Man.
