Category: Military

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DefDog: Newly Unclassified Records Show Reagan Administration Promoted Genocide in Guatemala

05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Military
DefDog
DefDog

One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

How Reagan Promoted Genocide

Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan's national security team agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but their “civilian support mechanisms,” according to a newly disclosed document from the National Archives.

Over the next several years, the military assistance from the Reagan administration assisted the Guatemalan army in doing just that, engaging in the slaughter of some 100,000 people, including what a truth commission deemed genocide against the Mayan Indians in the northern highlands.

The recently discovered documents at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, also reveal that Reagan's White House was reaching out to Israel in a scheme to circumvent congressional restrictions on military equipment for the Guatemalan military.In 1983, national security aide Oliver North (who later became a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal) reported in a memo that Reagan's Deputy National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane (another key Iran-Contra figure) was approaching Israel over how to deliver 10 UH-1H helicopters to Guatemala to give the army greater mobility in its counterinsurgency war.

According to these documents that I found at the Reagan library — and other records declassified in the late 1990s — it's also clear that Reagan and his administration were well aware of the butchery underway in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America.

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Chuck Spinney: In Face of Sequestration, SecDef Allows USAF to Slip Lockheed $6.9 Billion More — At Point Does Malfeasance Become Treason?

Corruption, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

You really have to love these contract terms, “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity,” especially in a time of austerity economics.

Nation.Time.com, February 21, 2013

Military Spending

Sequestration is for Sissies: $6.9 Billion More for the F-22

By Mark Thompson

Pentagon officials took to PBS and the Pentagon press room to warn Wednesday about the impending sequester’s impact on military spending.

“We’re really trying to keep on protecting the country and delivering the defense under these circumstances,” Deputy Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on the PBS NewsHour Wednesday evening. “In some cases, that’s not going to be possible.” On March 1, assuming no White-House-congressional deal on a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction package over the coming decade, more than $500 billion in Pentagon cuts will kick in automatically, including a $46 billion cut between March 1 and October 1.

“Two-thirds of the Army active combat brigade teams, other than those that are currently deployed, would be at below acceptable levels of readiness,” Pentagon money chief Robert Hale said. “It could affect their ability to deploy to a new contingency, if one occurred, or if this goes on long enough, even to Afghanistan.”

Yet slightly more than an hour before Carter appeared on television, the Air Force slipped Lockheed Martin a little something extra to keep their fleet of F-22s flying:

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Dolphin: Skull and Bones Welcomes Interrogation Facility and Medical Experiments on Immigrants at Yale — Been There, Done That…

07 Other Atrocities, Academia, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military
YARC YARC
YARC YARC

An Interrogation Center at Yale? Proposed Pentagon Special Ops Training Facility Sparks Protests

43 minute video plus full transcript

EXTRACT:

Students and alumni at Yale University are organizing against a proposed campus center to train special operations forces in interview techniques. The center would be funded by a $1.8 million grant from the Pentagon and could open as early as April. Dubbed an “interrogation center” by critics, the facility would be housed at the Yale School of Medicine and led by Charles Morgan, a professor of psychiatry who previously conducted research on how to tell whether Arab and Muslim men are lying. We speak to two students at Yale who co-authored an editorial titled “DoD Plans are Shortsighted, Unethical,” and with Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences at Boston University School of Public Health and a 1990 graduate of the Yale School of Medicine. “Yale has now crossed a line,” Siegel says. “Using the practice of medicine and medical research to help design advanced interrogation techniques, or even just regular civilian intelligence-gathering techniques, interviewing techniques, is not an appropriate use of medicine. The practice of medicine was designed to improve people’s health. And the school of medicine should not be taking part in either training or research that is primarily designed to enhance military objectives.” [includes rush transcript]

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DefDog: “Big Data” poses big problem for Pentagon

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military
DefDog
DefDog

Deja vu — couldn't handle it in the 1980's and 1990's either….and those were baby loads.

‘Big data’ poses big problem for Pentagon

by Mike Hoffman

Defense Tech, February 20, 2013

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Data scientists are the most in demand job for the military, according to Reggie Brothers, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Research.

The military has a problem with “big data” — the problem being that it collects too much of it. The infatuation with unmanned vehicles and the sensors mounted onto them has spurred a wave of data collected on the battlefield.

Using that data has caused military leaders headaches. Brothers said here at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Winter Symposium on Wednesday that the Army and the other services have placed their focus on PED, or processing, exploitation, and dissemination.

He used the ARGUS-IS as an example of the major advances being made in the world of intelligence sensors. The ARGUS-IS can stream up to a million terabytes of data and record 5,000 hours of high definition footage per day. It can do this with the 1.8 gigapixel camera and 368 different sensors all housed in the ARGUS-IS sensor that can fly on an MQ-9 Reaper.

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Reference: Top-Notch Report on Chinese Exploitation of US Idiocy & Incompetence

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

2013 Mandiant_PRC Cyber APT1_Report

Phi Beta Iota:  The naive and the unscrupulous emphasis external threats and internal vulnerabilities while glossing over the FACT that this threat was clearly articulated by Winn Schwartau, among others, in 1990, and clearly articulated, in a letter delivered in 1994 to Marty Harris at the National Information Infratructure (NII) reporting to Al Gore, that put together in one place the best possible starting point for securing the entire US cyber-infrastructure with a starting budget of $1 billion a year.

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Marcus Aurelius: Washington Times NAILS the Pentagon for Lack of Integrity — a Total Government Shut-Down for 22 Days, with Documented Cause & Effect Might Shock & Awe

Corruption, Idiocy, Military
Marcus Aurelius
Marcus Aurelius

(1) I don't know whether this article's headline is accurate or not; I'd like to think it is.

(2) IMHO, root causes of sequestration issue lie with POTUS who suggested concept, Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction which failed to do their job, and both parties of both houses of Congress who have failed to pass a budget.
(3) DoD, particularly SECDEF, CJCS, and Service Chiefs, IMHO has/have credibility problems because early in the process, they were all shouting [****], probably politically directed, that DoD should be a participant in deficit reduction.
(4) Lack of planning, while mandated by OMB, is inexcusable.  Secret planning and wargaming goes on in DoD all the time.  This could have been handled with a few people working in a vault with an offline computer.  That would have postured DoD to issue the statutory furlough notices to DoD employees several weeks ago.
(5) While I know some DoD employees will disagree with me from a personal cash flow perspective, I think that now that sequestration is upon the USG, if not resolved by 01 March, the best thing to do would be to shut down the government on that date for 22 days while documenting and aggressively publicizing in graphic detail the effects.  And there would be effects — people would die, air traffic system  would probably shut down, criminals would run rampant, important things would not happen, bills would go unpaid, and the list would go on and on.   That ((MIGHT)) seer into public and officeholder minds the inadvisibility of every doing this kind of thing again).

By Rowan Scarborough

The Washington Times, Sunday, February 17, 2013

The Obama administration is putting attention-getting Pentagon projects on the chopping block in a bid to pressure Congress into making a deal that avoids $46 billion in military budget cuts March 1, analysts and congressional officials say.

They use terms such as “gold watches,” “hot button” and “Washington Monumenting” to describe the cuts outlined over the past two weeks by the chiefs of the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and National Guard in briefings and hearings.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Washington Times NAILS the Pentagon for Lack of Integrity — a Total Government Shut-Down for 22 Days, with Documented Cause & Effect Might Shock & Awe”