The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
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Expert Witness Radio with Mike Levine says these are the most important shows he's ever done. Below are the mp3's.
March 30, 2010
The use of unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, to fight the Taliban and al-Qaida has increased sharply.
The State Department's top lawyer, Harold Koh, has issued legal justification for targeted killings using drone strikes. But some civil liberties groups are critical of the decision.
(From March 24-25)
Wayne Madsen Report (WMR) has learned from knowledgeable sources in the Pentagon that the U.S. Special Operations Command has recently been tasked to come up with a covert operation designed to snatch the secret archives complied over five decades by former Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Our sources report that among Castro's archives are documents proving the collaboration of top U.S. Mafia figures, including Mafia financial boss Meyer Lansky, with the CIA in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963. Castro apparently kept track of many of those involved in the assassination of Kennedy because they were also actively involved in anti-Castro plots associated with right-wing Cuban exiles that were organized out of Miami, New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas, cities where the Mafia was extremely active.
WMR has learned that Castro's extensive archives have been secured in a well-protected facility on the Isle of Youth (formerly the Isle of Pines) off the southwest coast of Cuba.
In addition to documents that point to the mob's and CIA's involvement in the Kennedy assassination, including the roles played by the Canadian Bronfman family and their wealthy attorney, the CIA-connected Louis Bloomfield of Montreal, the Castro archives reportedly contain a wealth of information about Cuban support for Angola's government and liberation movements in Africa and Latin America. The archives also have details about the role of the CIA in the Angolan civil war and the coups that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende and other leaders, as well as Henry Kissinger's infamous Operation Condor that “disappeared” thousands of leftist, student, and labor leaders in Latin America.
A Dagger to the CIA
On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage
If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it's tempting to consider that the agency's time has passed. “Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system,” a former senior CIA officer told me. “It's time to close Langley.”
I'm not prepared to go quite that far. The United States still needs a civilian intelligence agency. (The military cannot be trusted to oversee all intelligence-gathering on its own.) But the CIA—and especially the directorate of operations—must be stripped down to its studs and rebuilt with a renewed sense of mission and purpose. It should start by getting the amateurs out of the field. And then it should impose professional standards of training and experience—the kind it upheld with great success in the past. If it doesn't, we're going to see a lot more Khosts.
Phi Beta Iota: Robert Bear, a most-respected colleague, only scratches the surface. While we endorse his condemnation of Clinton and Deutch specifically, Robert misses the deeper history and the broader implications. CIA was “Flawed by Design” as Amy Zegart puts it so well, and has always been a loose-cannon shoot from the hip organization with what Tim Weiner now calls the “Legacy of Ashes”.
Continue reading “Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA”
If the peace settlement does not include relocation assistance (economic), the settlers who want to relocate will be left ruined–at the same time that the government has ruined them, it plans to once again ruin Lebanon. Apart from economic equity for the relocatable settlers, a regional water management treaty that is fully transparent and enforceable through international sanctions against Israel as needed, are essential elements of any sustainable regional peace plan that integrates prosperity for all.
Israel Threatens Lebanon … Again
By CONN HALLINAN, Counterpunch, 30 Mar 2010
When Israeli Minister without Portfolio Yossi Peled said recently that a war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was “just a matter of time” and that such a conflict would include Syria, most observers dismissed the comment as little more than posturing by a right-wing former general. But Peled’s threat has been backed by Israeli military maneuvers near the Lebanese border, violations of Lebanese airspace, and the deployment of an anti-missile system on Israel’s northern border.
The Lebanese are certainly not treating it as Likud bombast.
“We hear a lot of Israeli threats day in and day out, and not only threats,” Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri told the BBC. “We see what is happening on the ground and in our airspace…during the past two months—every day we have Israeli airplanes entering Lebanese airspace.” Hariri added that he considered the situation “really dangerous.”
Benny Raz put up a “For Sale” sign outside his home last year, but he admits there is little hope of finding a buyer. The house itself is a three-bedroom property on a quiet street, with a garden and terrace offering views across rolling hills dotted with olive trees.
The problem is one of location: Mr Raz’s house sits on the outskirts of Karnei Shomron, a Jewish settlement built in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He bought the house 15 years ago for $130,000 (€97,000, £87,000). Today, Mr Raz says, no buyer is willing to pay more than $70,000 for the property – not nearly enough for the family to afford another place inside Israel itself.
Like thousands of so-called “economic settlers”, the 57-year-old moved to the West Bank for the cheap housing, the tax breaks and the promise of a comfortable life. Now, many of them find they are stuck. “The government said: I will help you buy a house in Karnei Shomron, so I went with my family. I came for economic reasons, not ideological reasons. I came because I wanted a cheaper house,” says Mr Raz.
Phi Beta Iota: There is nothing wrong with Israel, or the United States of America, that could not be fixed by restoring informed participatory democracy. Right now both governments are out-of-control and totally corrupt monsters, both cancers encroaching on everything they touch.
Phi Beta Iota: We don't make this stuff up. The Pentagon has no strategy because the U.S. Government has no strategy. The National Security Council is managed by a General who emphasized getting along with the Chief of Naval Operation, never-mind leaving Marines wounded on the battlefield for lack of Naval Gunfire Support (NFS).
Join us in savoring what passes for a strategist and nominal policy making savant with the below headlines.
Below item is full text to avoid inconvenience. It is followed by several linked headlines that make quite clear the shallowness of the Pentagon strategy-policy pool.
Executive Summary: The gentle lady has no idea what the ten high-level threats to humanity are, nor does she care. She's a place-holder for the disappointed John Hamre, and a token female at the top who goes with the flow. She has neither any grasp nor any conceptual framework for actually creating grand strategy, harmonizing Whole of Government policies nor even–this really did surprise us–how many failed states there are in the world.
PBS March 27, 2010
Interview With Michele Flournoy, Under Secretary Of Defense For Policy
Charlie Rose (PBS), 1:00 A.M.
CHARLIE ROSE: The United States military is engaged around the world. It is withdrawing combat troops from Iraq as it builds up troops in Afghanistan. It is partnering with Pakistan in an aggressive counterterrorism campaign including drone attacks in the tribal areas. It’s working with the Yemeni government to counter a resurgent al Qaeda there. And U.S. troops are still in Haiti for the humanitarian relief efforts.
But the military has to do more than respond to the conflicts of the day. It must prepare for future wars, adoptive enemies and a shifting security environment.
The person at the Pentagon who spends the most time working on these issues is Michèle Flournoy. She is under secretary of defense for policy and the highest ranking female official in the Defense Department. I am very pleased to have her with me in the night studio at the Newseum in Washington.
Tell me what it is that you do at the Pentagon, how do you define this responsibility?
Continue reading “Journal: Pentagon Strategy & Policy Oxymoron Squared?”
