The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Mos Def undergoes Guantánamo Bay force-feeding procedure
In a disturbing video, the rapper sheds light on the inhumane practices being used at the facility VIDEO
By Prachi Gupta
Salon, 8 July 2013
Al Jazeera exclusive: The investigation into the death of al-Qaeda's leader blames top leaders for ‘gross incompetence'.
EXTRACT:
The Commission’s 336-page report is scathing, holding both politicians and the military responsible for “gross incompetence”, leading to “collective failures” that allowed Bin Laden to escape detection, and the United States to perpetrate “an act of war”.
Read full article with multiple features.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Pakistan's Bin Laden Dossier & Commission Report on Abbottabad”
This Real News Network report discusses two human rights violations against Palestinian children that were first publicized by an Israeli organization and have since been investigated by the UN: abusive confinement and prosecution, and using them as human shields.
Phi Beta Iota: The US Media may well be the most corrupt in the world — apart from not being honest about war crimes, the mere fact that Bloomberg Business Week reports without question the false economic and employment statistics of the US Government should alarm all who hold the illusion that the US Media is worth anything at all.
This seems like a relatively simple question. For different reasons, both POTUS and Congress apaprently seek to break the military. POTUS' view, arguably rooted in anticolonialism, focuses on reducing the US, to include the military, to the status of the Third World, while in Congressional (read: Tea Party) minds, the military is the principal cash cow and thus acceptable/desirable collateral damage in the pell-mell races for (1) “deficit reduction” and (2) some strange version of a “peace dividend” to reallocate dollars from “makers” to “takers.” Sooner or later, the chickens will come home to roost, another Task Force Smith will occur, etc.
Aviation Week & Space Technology, July 7, 2013 , Pg. 14
By Joseph Anselmo
Documents: Sweden Wiretapping Russia’s International Traffic For The NSA
Privacy: Earlier documents put in context with recent revelations show that Sweden has been systematically wiretapping Russia on behalf of the United States. This is clear after putting a number of previous questionable agreements and developments in context today. The question that remains is what Sweden gets in return.
EXTRACT:
Putting it all together, Sweden is wiretapping Russia for the NSA, and has been doing so since the FRA law took effect in Sweden. The FRA agency is continuously wiretapping Russia based on the agreement signed in April, 2007, and sharing the data with the NSA.
In this context, it is no coincidence that Sweden and the UK, as the only two European countries, recently chose to block EU investigations into U.S. wiretapping of European officials and industries.
Domestic lessons learned from foreign wars
A new book reveals that intelligence tactics devised for use abroad are employed against America's own citizens
Henry Porter
The Observer, Saturday 6 July 2013
Out of the blue, and right from the heart of the American military establishment – the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, no less – comes a coup of analysis that has a really important message for the British and American public. It is that the counterinsurgency wars of the past decade have not only been a bloody failure, but that the tactics, methods and hardware of these wars have inevitably ended up being used against the public at home. Think of mass surveillance, of drones, secret courts, the militarisation of the police, detention without trial.
Hannah Arendt identified “the boomerang effect of imperialism on the homeland” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, but the academic Douglas Porch has used the history of Britain, France and America to demonstrate that all the rhetoric about bringing, respectively, Britishness, liberté and freedom and democracy to the “little brown people who have no lights” is so much nonsense and that these brutal adventures almost never work and degrade the democracies that spawned them in the first place.
We always vaguely knew that there must be link between what our forces were doing abroad and what was going on at home – did we not? But what Porch does so crisply in Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War is to underwrite Arendt's insight with scholarship that goes back two-and-a-half centuries, taking in numerous forgotten conflicts. For example, he shows how intelligence techniques, devised by the US army in the Philippines war, were used on US unions and even suspected “reds” in Hollywood.
