Fear that sources and methods may have been compromised
By Lisa Ruth – The Washington Times Communities, Saturday, August 3, 2013
In warning about possible al Qaeda attacks against Americans overseas, U.S. officials may have provided too much detail about intercepted chatter and the source of the information, and that may make it more difficult to get such tips next time, former and current intelligence officials say.
. . . . . . .
“Now? We are going to have to start all over again. We are operating blind,” he says.
Following is stunning, coming as it does from the left-wing newspaper we called “Pravda on the Potomac” during the Cold War.)
Two op-eds from mainstream media follow; both discuss need for Legislative and Executive Branches of the USG to get their [sierra] together and serve the national interest.
Washington Post, August 4, 2013, Pg. 18
Defense In Decline
Sequestration cuts at the Pentagon put the nation's safety at risk.
As big data analytics begins picking up steam, we are seeing more and more interesting outlets to learn about different platforms to choose from. Not just catalogs and boastful corporation sites, but insightful criticism. One such recent stop was when we came about the “About” story of Bamboo DIRT.
According to the site:
Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
One look at its tips for analyzing data and we were sold. Here we were turned on to such intriguing companies as 140kit and Dataverse. The user-supported recommendations were the best. About Dataverse, it said: “Researchers and data authors get credit, publishers and distributors get credit, affiliated institutions get credit.” Concise and giving all the needed vitals, this type of crowdsourcing recommendation site could really catch on as the world of big data analytics keeps growing beyond most users’ capacity to keep up.
Almost every day I read stories about Republican actions to subvert the wellbeing of the middle class. It is amazing to me. They just roll in day after day, each one more extreme and hurtful than the one before it. Here is an example. Frankly, and I know this will offend the 14 per cent of my readers who are conservatives, as presently configured ! I do not think is is possible to be an ethical person and to vote Republican. I am sorry, but on the facts, in my view, that is the case.
The retired Marine colonel who cued me to this report opined that, “This is a hell of a lot closer to the mark than any Administration or DoS blathering.” I would be totally unsurprised to find him 100% spot-on. I invite your attention to the final para, highlighted. If that is true, the (in)actions of our government may have rendered us incapable, fiscally and operationally, of effective response. Another Task Force Smith, another Kaserine Pass could be the foreseeable result.
Embassy closures are a signal of the rapidly escalated intervention in the region by the US
There is one thing certain about the publicized threat to our embassies; it is not what it is presented to be. To accept the official explanation of a nebulous threat from al Qaeda as the reason for closing our embassies across the Middle East and North Africa is being dangerously naive and simplistic.
This is much more serious than what we are being told, but not for the reasons we are being given. We are seeing the consequences of a long running “Cold War” on two major fronts of political conflict that could escalate into military engagement with proxy nations of world super powers. The world, and life as we know it, could change in an instant should we awaken one morning to the news of bombs flying across the Middle East. That is a very real possibility, as we are now in a heightened proxy war environment. We are standing in a thick forest of dry tinder, and the smallest of sparks could ignite a conflagration the likes of which we have never before seen.
Hot on the heels of my last blogpost “Israel: The contrarian agenda” comes this. Michael Scheuer – the ex CIA man who is throwing his word around the world on media and at International book festivals as if he is some “guru” of the Intelligence world – which, being ex CIA, I guess he has the right to think so.
EXTRACT:
2. Michael Scheuer is a jesuit
Scheuer was born in Buffalo and graduated from Canisius College in 1974, and went on to earn an M.A. from Niagara University in 1976 and another M.A. from Carleton University in 1982. He also received a Ph.D. in British Empire-U.S.-Canada-U.K. relations from the University of Manitoba in 1986.
Germany canceled a Cold War-era surveillance pact with the United States and Britain on Friday in response to revelations by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden about those countries' alleged electronic eavesdropping operations.
The move appeared largely symbolic, designed to show that the German government was taking action to stop unwarranted surveillance directed against its citizens without actually jeopardizing relations with Washington and London. With weeks to go before national elections, opposition parties had seized on Snowden's claim that Germany was complicit in the NSA's intelligence-gathering operations.
