Hmmmm. Can you spell unethical idiocy? AT BEST, the Iranian Liberation Nut-Jobs. AT WORST, another Israeli false flag operation. In the middle, the usual out-of-control lunatic covert action wanna-bees.
Robert Steele adds: if and when this becomes fully exposed, it will qualify as a “precipitant” of revolution, showing the public with stark immediacy the degree to which the US government lacks integrity as well as intelligence.
Fedor Dostoevsky:A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.
Carl Jung: The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community.
Daniel Ellsberg speaking to Henry Kissinger: The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].
Security researchers have detected a new Trojan, scarily similar to the infamous Stuxnet worm, which could disrupt computers controlling power plants, oil refineries and other critical infrastructure networks.
The Trojan, dubbed “Duqu” by the security firm Symantec, appears, based on its code, to have been written by the same authors as the Stuxnet worm, which last July was used to cripple an Iranian nuclear-fuel processing plant.
“Stuxnet source code is not out there,” wrote F-Secure cybersecurity expert Mikko Hyppönen on his firm's blog. “Only the original authors have it. So, this new backdoor was created by the same party that created Stuxnet.”
. . . . . . .
This new entry into the Stuxnet family comes just after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a bulletin warning that the notorious hacking group Anonymous may soon start looking to bring down or disrupt industrial control facilities. Posted yesterday (Oct. 18) to publicintelligence.net, the unclassified bulletin assesses Anonymous' ability to compromise SCADA systems that run power plants, chemical plants, oil refineries and other industrial facilities.
Government officials did not blame Anonymous for any such hacks, and the bulletin says that based on available information, Anonymous has “a limited ability to conduct attacks” on industrial control systems.
The group's agenda could change, however. The DHS document cites several recent actions, including Anonymous' cyberattack on the websites and servers of biotech seed company Monsanto, as proof that Anonymous could “develop capabilities to gain access and trespass on control system networks very quickly.”
Phi Beta Iota: We realize DHS will not be held responsible for being stupid or dishonest or both, but for the record:
1. Stuxnet is said to be an Israeli/US operation against Iran. If it is out within the USA, there are two possibilities, both equally viable; a) the Israelis are doing their usual mayhem against the US which they consider like a Christian girl, as in “shicksas don't count;” and b) it got away from NSA/Cyber-Command or NSA/Cyber-Command is setting the stage for a false flag attack to increase or protect its grossly excessive budget.
2. Anonymous is not after critical infrastructures–Anonymous, like Wikileaks and OccupyWallStreet (OWS) is after institutionalized secular corruption, in which context Monsanto makes perfect sense….along with the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
3. Robert Steele, Bill Caelli, Winn Schwartau, and Jim Anderson all told Marty Harris at the National Information Infrastructure (NII), in writing, in 1994, what needed to be done, and were ignored. The fact that the US Government has been both ignorant and dishonest all these years about the total vulnerability of all SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acqusition) systems is not something that can be blamed on Anonymous.
Want to understand why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have broken the bank?
Then I suggest you carefully read the attached report in the current issue of Harpers, written by my very good friend Andrew Cockburn. The subject of this brilliant and very important report is the Pentagon's battle against land mines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Land mines are one of the oldest and most effective forms of warfare [see my essay, Why Mines Warfare is Good for Protracted War, in Counterpunch, 12 January 2011]. They are weapons of choice for the weak, guerrillas in particular, something we certainly should have learned from Vietnam.
Nevertheless, the high tech Pentagon was caught flatfooted by land mines and booby traps in Afghanistan in Iraq. The surprise was so complete that “planners” found it necessary to spend $60 billion since 2001 to counter what they euphemistically call Improvised Explosive Devices, as if booby traps constructed by guerrillas were a new and unexpected thing. Notwithstanding this huge expenditure on technology, a cornucopia for defense contractors much greater in fact than the Manhattan Project, even if one removes the effects of inflation, Cockburn lays out a splendid micro history of what really worked — guts, brains, and most importantly, what the Germans used to call fingerspitzengefühl*; and what has not worked — high-cost, high-tech boondoggles produced by contractors, employing gobs of retired military to help them cash in on the golden cornucopia unleashed by the dogs of war.
Yesterday, the Nieman Watchdog journalism group at Harvard asked me to evaluate how well the press is scrutinizing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Basically, it's not; instead, Panetta seems to be free of informed, skeptical questioning; he must be absolutely delighted with the treatment he is receiving.
The defense secretary likens budget-cutters to Nazis and makes assertions that simply aren't true — but the media don't seem to care, writes Winslow Wheeler.
The silence in the press about the overheated rhetoric and dubious myths from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta makes for a very unhappy comparison of today’s defense journalism compared to previous eras when, for example, SecDef Casper Weinberger was the subject of serious critical analysis.
Phi Beta Iota: Leon Panetta, like Bob Gates before him, is a posturing pimp for the military-industrial complex that pays 5% bribes to get 95% discounts on the taxpayers treasure. He could not stand up to fifteen minutes on the same stage with any one of us–Chuck Spinney, Winslow Wheeler, Ralph Peters, Bob Scales, etcetera.
“The US secret intelligence community is long overdue for a draconian reduction of its budget from the $80-90 billion a year today that it wastes on contractors producing vaporware, to something closer to the $20 billion a year that Jim Woolsey is on record as saying would be sufficient, and for once I agree with him.”
“General Tony Zinni is on record as saying that when he was in charge of the US Central Command, the secret intelligence community provided, ‘at best' 4% of what he needed to know. The fact is that the secret world is primarily a means of transferring wealth from taxpayers to corporations and banks–it not only lacks intelligence, it lacks integrity.”
Below is a very interesting essay analyzing the evolution of culture, economics, and politics in United States. Other authors have done similar types of analyses, but this one has some interesting twists. It is a synopsis of a book just written by the author that blends together aspects of cultural, geographic and even religious anthropology, with history, politics, and political economy in a way that illustrates obvious synthetic potential of using GIS (computerized Geographic Information Systems) in efforts to evolve our understanding of history, political economy, anthropology and patterns of cultural evolution in general. The author ends on a shallow political note, laying out a counter-Tea Party strategy, but don't let that crassness turn you off from the larger intellectual possibilities implicit in this kind of work.
Even as the movement’s grip tightens on the GOP, its influence is melting away across vast swaths of America, thanks to centuries-old regional traditions that few of us understand.
By Colin Woodard, Washington Monthly,November/December 2011
Before Tuesday this week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had been sprinkling Washington D.C. with words like “doomsday mechanism,” “catastrophic,” and “shooting ourselves in the head” to describe any cuts in the Pentagon's budget beyond the $450 billion over 10 years (overall a 4 percent reduction) he and President Obama have already committed to. Panetta had set a new standard for overheated rhetoric to defend the Pentagon's budget.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta, like Gates and others before him, is a political toad incable of telling the truth or pursuing the public interest. He is telling two major lies in all of his speeches: 1) that cutting the defense budget will weaken national security; and 2) that what we pay $1 trillion a year (in borrowed money) for is “the finest fighting force in the world.” Not so less the infantry, which is 4% of the force, takes 80% of the casualties, and receives 1% of the budget. In an honest government, Panetta would be impeached–and all his senior generals and senior executive sychopants retired.
