The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Remarks and Q&A by the Director of National Intelligence Mr. Dennis C. Blair
Bipartisan Policy Center – State of Intelligence Reform Conference
Willard InterContinental Washington
Washington, DC
April 6, 2010
and
Remarks and Q&A by Mr. David R. Shedd, Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Policy, Plans, and Requirements
Bipartisan Policy Center – State of Intelligence Reform Conference
Willard InterContinental Washington
Washington, DC
April 6, 2010
by Kalev Leetaru
For nearly 70 years, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) monitored the world’s airwaves and other news outlets, transcribing and translating selected content into English and in the process creating a multi-million-page historical archive of the global news media. Yet, FBIS material has not been widely utilized in the academic content analysis community, perhaps because relatively little is known about the scope of the content that is digitally available to researchers in this field. This article, researched and written by a specialist in the field, contains a brief overview of the service—reestablished as the Open Source Center in 2004—and a statistical examination of the unclassified FBIS material produced from July 1993 through July2004—a period during which FBIS produced and distributed CDs of its selected material. Examined are language preferences, distribution of monitored sources, and topical and geographic emphases. The author examines the output of a similar service provided by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), known as the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB). Its digital files permit the tracing of coverage trends from January1979 through December 2008 and invite comparison with FBIS efforts.
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WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.
. . . . . .
The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.
The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Intelligence Community is totally out of control and stupid as well. Keith Alexander,[1] like Mike Hayden [2] before him, is an administrative piss-ant with zero ethics–he means well, but he simply does not have the strategic brain-power to be honorable in the sense that every US citizen has a right to expect. Across the board, US intelligence is being administered rather than led, and the time has come for the President–if he wishes to retain a semblance of credibility with the US public as well as the international community–to bring in a wrecking crew. Not likely, but eminently necessary.
[1] On very ignorant legal advice, while administering the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), Alexander destroyed ABLE DANGER and destroyed the early warning on two of the hijackers that ABLE DANGER produced, rather than hand over the information to the FBI as he was supposed to.
[2] While administering NSA, Mike Hayden was the first to violate the Constitution and the law with warrantless wiretapping, and then went on to pioneer rendition and torture at CIA. He is the epitomy of well-intentioned generals who sacrifice their ethics and their integrity in favor of loyalty to a political chain of command that is abjectly corrupt irrespective of which of the two-party tyranny wings holds the White House.
AGM Countdown: In the run up to Amnesty International’s Annual General Meeting in New Orleans this weekend, the Science for Human Rights program will be posting a new blog entry every day this week. All of the projects presented this week—and many more—will be at display in New Orleans.
In its most extensive study of secret detention practices to date, the UN released a 222-page report on the practice of secret detention in dozens of countries. The report was to be presented to the Human Rights Council in March but the Council has agreed to postpone the discussion until June. The detailed study conducted by four independent UN human rights experts accuses the Bush administration of utilizing practices in severe violation of international law.
WikiLeaks has released a classified US military video depicting the indiscriminate slaying of over a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad — including two Reuters news staff.
Reuters has been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act, without success since the time of the attack. The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-site, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.
(2003- 2009: 139 journalists killed)
Related
Congressional Research Service Report: Iraqi Civilian Deaths Estimates (August 2008)
In my last blaster (here), I raised a question of whether the Israelis were trying to hijack the Green Lobby or whether they were ready for the rubber room. This was made in response to a report by Jonathan Cook that contended Israel was greenwashing war on terror. It turns out that I may have phrased this question in naive, simplistic terms, if my good friend Pierre Sprey (a justifiably well known weapons analyst, mathematician, and recording entrepreneur) is correct, Israel's motives for trying to hijack the Green Lobby can be viewed in a larger, longer range context. Below is his most interesting analysis of Israel's motives for greenwashing the war on terror: Chuck
—–[Comment by Pierre Sprey]—–
I totally agree that the currently faddish alternate energy sources are ludicrously uneconomical and, for the most part, environmentally harmful. The only alternate source that could almost completely supplant oil and that actually makes economic and environmental sense, natural gas, is currently among the most unfashionable.
Nevertheless, there's an important larger perspective to Israel's dead serious push to raise huge amounts of capital (guess where?) to produce non-oil based energy from trendy green sources in large enough quantities to reduce worldwide oil demand significantly.
That perspective is simple: unbeknownst to most, the absolute highest priority objective of Israeli foreign policy, from 1949 to today, has been to break the Seven Sisters oil cartel's stranglehold on world oil production in order to collapse the world price of oil. From Israel's point of view, that's a perfectly rational strategic objective–and, almost certainly, the only Israeli objective I know of that would be a major benefit to the world.
Continue reading “Journal: Israel, Neo-Cons, Big Oil, Iraq, & Green”
(1) US consciously changed from standard main battle rifles firing “full military cartridges” (ie., M-14/7.62×51 NATO, M-1 Garand/cal. 30 M-1) to assault rifles (AR-15, M-16, Stoner System) in the 1960s as we attempted to optimize for short-range engagements in the constrained mountainous/jungle environments of Southeast Asia. At the time, our primary allies were slight of physical stature;
(2) Concurrently, training and engagement doctrine shifted from carefully aimed individual shots to volume of fire (bursts of various numbers of rounds, the “spray and slay” technique) and various “point and shoot” techniques such as “instinctive aiming,” “quick kill,” etc.;
(3) Ammunition followed suit and emphasis in terminal ballistics shifted from accuracy and kinetic energy to volume of fire and bullet yaw/fragmentation; (4) I attach the SAMS paper by MAJ Ehrhart cited in the article.)
Phi Beta Iota: This one paper is a superb indictment of US DoD leadership from the Secretary of Defense, who claims he does not do “maintenance” but is in fact overseeing “business as usual” for Lockheed et all, to the Undersecretaries (Intelligence does not do intelligence support to acquisitions; Acquisitions could care less about inexpensive individual systems; and Policy simply does not have a clue) to the service leaders responsible for training, equipping, and organizing the forces to be sent into battle by the Combatant Commanders. The Strategic Generalizations developed by the Marine Corps Intelligence Center in 1989 remain valid–and ignored.
Related Media Article:
April 2, 2010
Army Report: GIs Outgunned In Afghanistan
By David Wood
American troops are often outgunned by Afghan insurgents because they lack the precision weapons, deadly rounds, and training needed to kill the enemy in the long-distance firefights common in Afghanistan's rugged terrain, according to an internal Army study.
