[DoD] Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
KABUL, Afghanistan — Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.
It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.
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Justice, CIA clash over probe of interrogator IDs
The CIA and Justice Department are fighting over a secret investigation into a controversial program by legal supporters of Islamist terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay that involved photographing CIA interrogators and showing the pictures to prisoners, an effort CIA officials say threatens the officers' lives.
The Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax is rapidly gathering momentum thanks to a bid by British Labour Party MPs to save themselves from looming defeat at the hands of the Tories by playing this great economic populist card. If the Labour Party succeeds with this gambit, it will tend to transform the situation in the US as well, with desperate Democrats embracing the Tobin tax as a means of getting some populist credibility. The Republicans, by contrast, will be forced to line up in defense of their Wall Street backers, stripping away all their Tea Party camouflage. Obama-Summers-Geithner will also be put into a bind. I have been campaigning for the Tobin tax for a number of years, and it is an idea whose time has come.
If a sales tax on financial transactions (Tobin tax, trading tax, securities transfer tax, Robin Hood tax) can bring the British Labour Party back from the dead, it can defeat Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Wall Street, and the reactionary Republicans here in the US. It is time to make this a world-wide campaign to force the bankers to pay for the world economic depression they have created.
Webster Tarpley
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A tiny tax on bankers that would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change, here and abroad.
This tax on banks – not you or I – has the power to raise hundreds of billions every year. It could give a vital boost to the NHS, our schools, and the fight against child poverty in the UK – as well as tackling poverty and climate change around the world.
Not complicated. Just brilliant.
Phi Beta Iota: We support the elimination of the Federal income tax as being unconstitutional in the Unted STATES of America. Individuals should pay taxes to localities; businesses should pay taxes to all states where they do business; and federal operations should be based on the Tobin tax and strictly limited to the narrow administrative services of common concern that are consistently authorized and approved by Congress acting on behalf of the STATES.
In his new book The Watchers, (Penguin Press, 2010), Shane Harris chronicles what he calls “the rise of America's surveillance state,” a process he's been following since he was a reporter and technology editor at Government Executive from 2001 to 2005.
It's a story with all the elements of a spy thriller: political intrigue, shadowy federal organizations and a compelling cast of characters desperately seeking to prevent the next Sept. 11. At the center is the enigmatic John Poindexter, former national security adviser and architect of the ill-fated Total Information Awareness data collection and analysis effort.
. . . . . . .
What I discovered was that it really was the Beirut attack that shocked the intelligence system in a very similar way to 9/11. You have the Marines in Beirut, ostensibly on this international peacekeeping mission. They're hunkered down at the airport. For various political reasons, they're not allowed to go out very much in public. They are sort of sitting ducks. What happens is in the aftermath of the bombing, the intelligence community finds out there were all these warnings that something bad was about to happen to the Marines at the airport. So you had, in the spring of 1983, more than 100 individual warnings about car bombings fielded by the intelligence community.
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The Marines were blind, deaf and dumb sitting at the base. And the golden nugget of it all is that NSA intercepted, in the days before the attack, this phone conversation going from a minister in Iran to presumably one of these organizing terrorist groups–directing this group to go and take this spectacular action against the Marines. You add all these up and it looks a lot like 9/11. There's all this information sitting there and it's like, how come nobody's putting it together? And Poindexter is the guy who looks at this and says, “This shouldn't happen and we can take steps to make sure it doesn't happen. There has to be a way to logically approach this problem, systematize the whole process and connect those dots.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Intelligence Community is badly managed, grotesquely over-funded, and incapable of changing its culture for the simple reason that instead of finding and empowering leaders with new ideas and open minds, we continue to give more money to old leaders, like pouring gasoline on a fire. We still cannot process 90% of what we collect; we still cannot speak foreign languages; and we still do not play well with others. The IC is managed by people who know nothing of intelligence–they are essentially staffers who went through the motions of moving money around–and their only real accomplishment is that they have not burned any bridges. Unfortunately, they have been so busy not burning bridges they have not built anything worthwhile. The IC is a shell game–move money, move the harem around, repeat the same testimony over and over to Congress again–ultimately the IC is a $75 billion a year tragic farce.
This is a dynamite op-ed written jointly by my good friend Marshall Auerback and Rob Parenteau.
Chuck
Coming to a Country Near You
Let a Dozen Latvias Bloom?
By MARSHALL AUERBACK and ROB PARENTEAU
The article's bottom line conclusion:
It is now time for the rest of us to follow the Lilliputians of Iceland: to take the rentier juggernaut down before it completes the task. Time to pry the vampire squid off our faces so we can see the light of day again and allow some semblance of humanity to flourish again. Hopefully, Iceland represents the future, not Latvia.
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Phi Beta Iota: Iceland has led the way. It is time to start closing down the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the outrageous misbehavior of Goldman Sachs and the other banks. Nations need to start nationalizing ill-gotten gains, refusing to pay predatory loan interest, and beginning to think for themselves. We certainly encourage judicial activism in confiscating foreign-owned land and structures and in blocking both the privatization of water and other commonwealth resources, while also blocking predatory and often hazardous or poisonous importations. Top-down government has been corrupted and does not work. The only means to achieve resilience is bottom-up “home rule.” We salute Iceland for its intelligence and its integiryt.
Thursday evening's shootout between Pentagon police officers and a gunman apparently motivated by anti-government sentiment was the latest in a spate of attacks on federal employees and facilities and serves as a stark reminder that public servants too often find themselves unexpectedly in harm's way. The following timeline reviews major attacks during the past two decades.
Feb. 18, 2010. A small jet is flown into a building housing a federal tax office in Austin, Texas, injuring 13 and killing two. The pilot, Joseph Andrew Stack, was angry with the Internal Revenue Service.
Nov. 5, 2009. An Army psychiatrist goes on a rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding dozens. The alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was a Muslim who had been in contact with a radical Imam and was about to be deployed overseas.
June 1, 2009. A gunman opens fire on a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., killing one soldier and wounding another. The suspect, a Muslim convert, opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but was not affiliated with a larger terrorist network.
And the brief window we had to fix this country will be gone.
Gone.
Gone, baby, gone.
I don't know what your team has been up to, but they haven't served you well. And Rahm, poor Rahm, has turned into a fighter — not of Republicans, but of the left. He called those of us who want universal health care “f***ing retarded.” Look, I don't know if Rahm is the problem or if it's Gibbs or Axelrod or any of the other great people we owe a debt of thanks to for getting you elected. All I know is that whatever is fueling your White House it's now running on fumes. Time to shake things up!
Phi Beta Iota: The Huffington Post is consistently negative on Rahm Emanuel, and with good reason. Between his partisan ideology and David Axelrods ignoring the 70% of the eligible voters that did not vote for President Barack Obama, the White House is completely out of touch with reality and literally has no intelligence (decision-support) on ANYTHING. The government is BROKEN. Click on the photograph to read the full satirical piece.
Phi Beta Iota: We are detecting a fascinating evolutionary process within the United Nations “system” which is not a system at all, more like an archipelago with a different cat in charge of each island. Information-sharing is coming into vogue, but more importantly, the United Nations, perhaps stimulated by the report of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility, appears to finally be realizing that all threats are connected and that poverty is the foundation for all of the other threats thriving–one cannot defeat transnational crime (threat #10) without first addressing poverty (threat #1).
With the top United Nations anti-drug official urging concerted global action to “break the vicious circle between insecurity and underdevelopment” being increasingly fuelled by criminal networks, drug smugglers and human traffickers, the Security Council today called on the world body’s Member States to increase international and regional cooperation to tackle transnational organized crime.
The Council invited Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who opened today’s meeting, to consider transnational threats as a factor in conflict prevention strategies, conflict analysis, integrated missions’ assessment and planning and to consider including in his reports, as appropriate, analysis on the role played by those threats in situations on the Council’s agenda. [Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis Added.]
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – International criminal gangs and traffickers are exploiting large geographic blind spots where radar, satellite or other surveillance is minimal or nonexistent, the U.N. crime and drugs czar said on Wednesday.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told members of the 15-nation U.N. Security Council that countries must improve their systems of sharing intelligence to reduce these surveillance gaps.
“We need a change in attitude,” Costa told the council. “It is time to regard information sharing as a way of strengthening sovereignty, not surrendering it.”
