Military – Page 150 – Public Intelligence Blog

Author works on new 9/11 book, winds up dead in the desert

Open Salon, 27 February 2013

The author of a recent book that questions the official story of 9/11 was found dead earlier this month–along with his teen-age son and daughter and the family dog–at their home in the desert community of Murphys, California.

Authorities concluded that Phillip Marshall and the other victims died on February 2 from a murder-suicide. But a prominent investigative journalist recently visited Calaveras County, spoke to many of Marshall's neighbors and friends, and found powerful reasons to doubt the official finding.

Marshall published The Big Bamboozle: 9/11 and the War on Terror in 2012. But Wayne Madsen, based in Washington, D.C., reports that Marshall was working on a new 9/11 book that might have contributed to his death.

Madsen's full three-part series is available via subscription at Wayne Madsen Reports (WMR). We have received permission to quote from the report. At a post titled “A Black Ops Hit Made to Appear as a Suicide,” Madsen writes:

Philip Marshall, the retired United Airlines pilot, 9/11 analysis author, and one-time Iran-contra era associate of CIA/DEA informant Barry Seal, did not shoot his two teen-age children and himself. That is the conclusion of everyone who knew Marshall after he moved to the Sierra Nevadas community of Murphys ten years ago after he sold his home in Santa Barbara. Friends said Marshall was looking for more seclusion.

Marshall, who believed that the Bush family, allied with Saudi and neo-conservative interests, pulled off the 9/11 attack to engineer a government coup d'etat, was working on a fourth book that promised to reveal some new blockbuster information.

The Santa Barbara View apparently was first to raise questions about Marshall's death. From a February 6 piece titled “Phillip Marshal Wrote About Conspiracies; Was He the Victim of One?”

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Murder of 9/11 Author & Former Pilot — and Kids, and Dog”

2013/03/05

Berto Jongman: Peace on Earth? The Future of Armed Conflict

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Peace on Earth? The future of internal armed conflict

Warfare seems endemic to mankind. Nations around the world are driven by conflict. But is the impetus to war decreasing? Håvard Hegre finds statistical grounds for hope.

In my view, perhaps the most evident shortcoming is that our predictions ignore the importance of political systems – the institutions that regulate how leaders are recruited and how they make decisions. We leave this out since we have no credible forecasts for changes to political systems over the next 40 years, but it is evident that many internal armed conflicts are fought over the nature of the political system, in particular in non-democratic middle-income countries.

Read full article (PDF 5 Pages)

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Peace on Earth? The Future of Armed Conflict”

2013/03/052013/03/05

Winslow Wheeler: DoD’s Own F-35 Test Report Contains Useful Truths

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Winslow Wheeler

When DOD's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation released its annual report to Congress on the performance of US weapons in operational (battlefield) testing, an object of some attention was the section on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The report itself (at http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2012/) made difficult and cryptic reading, and the news reporting covered whatever highlights harried journalists could readily use in short articles. Little of it probed, in technical terms or otherwise, the meaning and implications.

Lee Gaillard has been writing about aviation, weapons and national security for decades and took it upon himself to analize the F-35 using the DOT&E report as the starting point. His analysis makes important and informative reading for anyone wishing to have more than a superficial understanding of the F-35 and its problems–rooted deeply in the DNA of the aircraft's insanely complex design and its disengenuous (bait and switch) acquisition plan.

This highly informative essay-length analysis is available at Counterpunch at and below.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: DoD's Own F-35 Test Report Contains Useful Truths”

2013/03/042013/03/04

Ho Ho Ho: Unhappy Neighbors — South China Sea as Flash Point, Indonesia and Viet-Nam Seek Solutions — China’s U-Shaped Line and String of Pearls

02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 03 India, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Energy, 08 Wild Cards, Government, Military

Unhappy Neighbors

Ngo Vinh Long

The Cairo Review of Foreign Affairs, February 10, 2013

Speaking to diplomats, businessmen and journalists at the British Foreign Office in November, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia emphasized the need for “norms and principles” in resolving disputes in the South China Sea. Why did President Yudhoyono, who was spending a week in London at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II as the first leader to visit Britain during the year of her Diamond Jubilee, feel that he had to bring up the South China Sea disputes at such a time?

After a member of the audience asked what Indonesia, the leading nation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) could do if China did not share his views, President Yudhoyono recalled what he had said to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at a summit conference in Bali and again to Chinese President Hu Jintao at a meeting in Beijing: without forward movement on a Code of Conduct (CoC) for the South China Sea, the whole region could “easily become a flashpoint.” He added that the two Chinese leaders had concurred with his assessment.

President Yudhoyono added, however, that he had become quite concerned after ASEAN foreign ministers failed to reach a CoC agreement at a meeting in Cambodia in July 2012. He did not mention the role played by China in getting the Cambodian government to sabotage the pact. He only said that since then, Indonesia has done its utmost to bring about a consensus among ASEAN nations on the issue. He also did not mention the fact that at an international conference on “Peace and Stability in the South China Sea and the Asia Pacific Region” held in Jakarta in September, most of the participants expressed pessimism as long as China continued to exert military and economic power in area within the U-shape line demarcating its self-declared zone of sovereignty.

Continue reading “Ho Ho Ho: Unhappy Neighbors — South China Sea as Flash Point, Indonesia and Viet-Nam Seek Solutions — China's U-Shaped Line and String of Pearls”

2013/03/042013/03/04

Chuck Spinney: Buy Before You Fly … How to Suck Money During Sequestration […Legalized Treason?]

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

The joint-service F-35 strike fighter is the Pentagon's largest program. In fact, it is the most expensive procurement program in the Pentagon's history. It is also an unfolding disaster that is well documented, but of almost unimaginable proportions. And yet, the F-35 is impervious to budget cutbacks in sequesterland. Not surprisingly, among the cognoscenti of gold-plated boondoggles, the F-35 is not only a source of cynical humor, it is rapidly becoming the mother of all case studies of the pathologies that fuel the Pentagon's gold-plated boondoggles.

Perhaps the most egregious of these pathologies is the practice of concurrent engineering and production, a practice from which all bad things flow.

Concurrency refers to the practice of placing a complex hi-tech weapon system into production, before it is completely designed. Known in the Pentagon as “buy before you fly.” It is the opposite of commonsens engineering, yet concurrency has been business as usual in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex for many years, the problem-plagued F-111 and C-5 in the 60s, and more recently the V-22 tilt rotor and the F-22 fighter being cases in point.

Why do we repeat a madness that both robs the taxpayer and puts defective weapons in the hands of soldiers year after year?

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Buy Before You Fly … How to Suck Money During Sequestration […Legalized Treason?]”

2013/03/042013/03/04

Berto Jongman: DARPA Wants a Searchable Databasie of All Voice Conversations

Corruption, IO Deeds of War, Military

DARPA Wants a Searchable Database of All Your Conversations

The ultimate privacy killer

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
March 4, 2013

DARPA is working on an embryonic project that would store your every verbal conversation on an Internet server, creating a searchable chat database that would represent the ultimate privacy killer.

Having failed to establish its infamous Total Information Awareness system, although the project was continued under numerous different guises, DARPA is attempting to create a world in which your every utterance is stored in perpetuity.

But don’t worry, the servers on which your conversations are stored will be owned by the individual or their employer, and the government promises to never access the information using their vast new $2 billion dollar spying hub in the middle of the Utah desert. Honest.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: DARPA Wants a Searchable Databasie of All Voice Conversations”

2013/03/022013/03/02

Chuck Spinney: Kelly Vlahos on the Militarization of Yale Neuroscience

Academia, Military

.. Or Escalating the Old Boot On Campus Game

Below is an important, excellent and scary report by Kelley Vlahos. But the MICC's infiltration of elite campus's is even worse that Ms. Vlahos says, because it builds on deep historical roots and tradition.

Yale, a main focus of her report, has a long history of its alumae being being linked to espionage operations by the US government, dating back to the mists of the Revolutionary War.

Or, consider this entry in the wikipedia from former CIA director Richard Helms‘ bio. It refers to a 1956 report written for President Eisenhower that criticized the out-of-control covert operations by the CIA, especially wrt to its overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mosasdegh in 1953:

The report “sharply denounc[ed] ‘King Making' by the CIA. It warned that all those bright young men being recruited by the CIA out of Yale were becoming freewheeling, well-financed buccaneers. Lovett and Bruce cautioned Eisenhower that the agency was out of control, that it needed formal oversight… .”^[138]

Kelley makes it quite clear that new and even more dangerous skills are being added to the old boots-on-campus game. Too bad James Jesus Angleton, is not around to remind us of where this kind of inbred secret coziness leads.

Boots on Campus

Kelley B. Vlahos – Antiwar – 25/02/13

Have American university campuses become so inured to the militarization of policy, culture – our thought – that they can’t see the Trojan horse sitting in the quad, its occupants pouring out and passing out sweets and credits to all the Ivy Leaguers passing by with goggled eyes and open arms?

A caricature for sure, but is it so off base? How else does one explain the muted response to news that the Department of Defense may have been funding the “U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience,” at the Yale Medical School in New Haven? The proposed program, according to a report by ABC News last week, would teach special operations personnel the art of “conversational,” and “cross cultural” intelligence gathering, and pay volunteers from the community’s vast immigrant population (mainly poor Hispanics, Moroccans and Iraqis) to serve as the guinea pigs test subjects.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Kelly Vlahos on the Militarization of Yale Neuroscience”