The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Two especially intelligent pieces.
Mutually Assured Cyberdestruction?
David Sanger in New York Times
Cyberspace The Fragile Frontier
Robert O'Harrow Jr. in Washington Post
Phi Beta Iota: What is so pathetic about all this is that governments have learned nothing in the quarter century since Winn Schwartau, Bill Caelli, Jim Anderson, Robert Steele, and a handful of others sounded the alarm. 25 years of dereliction of duty.
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An animated graphic from the University of Hawaii’s International Pacific Research Center shows the projected dispersion of debris from Japan:
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From beginning, have not felt Petraeus as D/CIA was optimal for either man or institution. I see it as politically-driven POTUS strategic move to sideline potential political opponent who, right now, should be serving as Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff.
By David Ignatius
Washington Post, June 3, 2012, Pg. 21
CIA Director David Petraeus spoke first at an April 19 memorial dinner for agency officers killed in action. He delivered well-scripted remarks and an evocation of the agency’s heroes. Then came Leon Panetta, his predecessor at the CIA and the evening’s main honoree, who delivered a stem-winding emotional speech to fervent applause.
The freewheeling Panetta, now secretary of defense, has been a tough act to follow at the CIA, especially for a former four-star Army general who thrived in the disciplined, resource-rich world of the military. And in his first year at the agency, Petraeus’s transition has sometimes been bumpy, as the CIA’s finicky workforce struggled to adapt to its new director.
“I hear the rumblings” from mid-level CIA officers, says one senior administration official. But he says Petraeus gets high marks from the White House, which took the unusual step of naming the prominent general to the post.
Read full article.
Phi Beta Iota: Reading between the lines, Patraeus has accepted being sidelined, is making changes on the margins, not within the base, and may or may not emerge from this a wiser man. The clandestine service remains unrepentant and impotent–official cover, liaison hand-outs, legal traveler debriefings in the USA–while the analytic service remains childish, scatter-brained, and largely useless. Such “triumphs” as he achieves will handed to him by selected foreign services including the Israeli's with their broad false flag menu, or be in the science & technology arena, at great cost for marginally useful innovations. Nothing of import will be done on human intelligence, open source intelligence, all-source processing, whole of government decision support, or multinational clandestine, covert, and analytic operations.
In Occupied Tibetan Monastery, a Reason for Fiery Deaths
DHARAMSALA, India — One young Tibetan monk walked down a street kicking Chinese military vehicles, then left a suicide note condemning an official ban on a religious ceremony. Another smiled often, and preferred to talk about Buddhism rather than politics. A third man, a former monk, liked herding animals with nomads.
All had worn the crimson robes of Kirti Monastery, a venerable institution of learning ringed by mountains on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. All set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule. Two died.
At least 38 Tibetans have set fire to themselves since 2009, and 29 have died, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group in Washington. The 2,000 or so monks of Kirti Monastery in Sichuan Province have been at the center of the movement, one of the biggest waves of self-immolations in modern history. The acts evoke the self-immolations in the early 1960s by Buddhist monks in South Vietnam to protest the corrupt government in Saigon.
Twenty-five of the self-immolators came from Ngaba, the county that includes Kirti; 15 were young monks or former monks from Kirti, and two were nuns from Mame Dechen Chokorling Nunnery.
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Huh?
EXTRACT
Charlie has always insisted that he never filled out the loan document — his mortgage broker did it, and he was actually a victim of mortgage fraud. (The broker later pleaded guilty to another mortgage fraud.) Indeed, according to a recent court filing by Charlie’s lawyer, the government failed to turn over exculpatory evidence that could have helped Charlie prove his innocence. For whatever inexplicable reason, prosecutors really wanted to nail Charlie Engle. And they did.
Second, though, it seemed incredible to me that with all the fraud that took place during the housing bubble, the Justice Department was focusing not on the banks that had issued the fraudulent loans, but rather on those who had taken out the loans, which invariably went sour when housing prices fell.
As I would later learn, Charlie Engle was no aberration. The current meme — argued most recently by Charles Ferguson, in his new book “Predator Nation” — is that not a single top executive at any of the firms that nearly brought down the financial system has spent so much as a day in jail. And that is true enough.
But what is also true, and which is every bit as corrosive to our belief in the rule of law, is that the Justice Department has instead taken after the smallest of small fry — and then trumpeted those prosecutions as proof of how tough it is on mortgage fraud. It is a shameful way for the government to act.
Phi Beta Iota: We have learned that the technical term for an out of control government in league with white collar criminals at the top of Wall Street and Main Street is “control fraud.” The Department of Justice has always been lax on white collar criminals, but under the Obama Administration it has become their de facto protector to the point of treason against the public interest.
Pentagon: sabotaging U.S. computers is an actor of war against U.S.
Homeland Security Newswire, 1 June 2012
The Pentagon has concluded that the act of sabotaging U.S. computers by another country may constitute an act of war against the United States. This conclusion opens the door for the United States to respond to such cyber sabotage by using traditional military force. The Pentagon’s first formal cyber strategy, unclassified portions of which will become public next month, is an early attempt to come to terms with a changing world in which hackers could pose as significant a threat to U.S. nuclear reactors, electric grid, or pipelines as a hostile country’s military.
Source: Pentagon: sabotaging U.S. computers is an actor of war against U.S.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from the fact that Stuxnet was an Israeli production (quote from the 1990's: “When the Israeli's catch a hacker, they give them a job; when the US catches a hacker they throw them in jail”), the insanity of the White House taking credit for Stuxnet becomes all the more outrageous in light of the certain sensibility of the Pentagon statement. Sadly, the brainpower at the top of the US pyramid of power seems to be both very limited and very myopic–these people cannot think holistically or strategically, or they would realize that cyberspace has no borders, and irresponsibility with respect to cyber-soundness has consequences.
Thank you, Tom, for that introduction. It was almost exactly a year ago today that my former boss, Secretary Gates, spoke to you on the eve of his departure as Secretary of Defense. In looking back on his tenure as Secretary, he chose to highlight two major themes. The first was his effort to turn the tide in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He spoke to you about his laser-like focus on delivering urgent battlefield needs to the warfighter in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Secretary Gates first hired me in 2009, he told me that the “country’s at war, Ash, but the Pentagon is not.” My job, he explained, was to help him get the Pentagon onto a war footing, especially in acquisition technology and logistics, the part that I was about to take over.
And that has been my focus as well as his, first as AT&L and now as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Under his leadership, we set up a fast lane to get urgent requirements onto the battlefield unhindered by the bureaucracy. We needed better persistent ISR, he said, as did General Petraeus, General Mattis, General McChrystal, General Austin, General Allen. So we worked hard to deliver capabilities like Aerostats with wide-area lenses, and more UAVs, including small UAVs that could be operated by a patrol along their line of march.
Read full transcript including Q&A.
Phi Beta Iota: We do not make this stuff up. The gap between the party line as set forth in this speech, and reality, could not be greater.
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