Communities of Practice – Page 882 – Public Intelligence Blog

Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research

By Dr. John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

Thank you for your participation in the We the People platform. The Obama Administration agrees that citizens deserve easy access to the results of research their tax dollars have paid for. As you may know, the Office of Science and Technology Policy has been looking into this issue for some time and has reached out to the public on two occasions for input on the question of how best to achieve this goal of democratizing the results of federally-funded research. Your petition has been important to our discussions of this issue.

The logic behind enhanced public access is plain. We know that scientific research supported by the Federal Government spurs scientific breakthroughs and economic advances when research results are made available to innovators. Policies that mobilize these intellectual assets for re-use through broader access can accelerate scientific breakthroughs, increase innovation, and promote economic growth. That’s why the Obama Administration is committed to ensuring that the results of federally-funded scientific research are made available to and useful for the public, industry, and the scientific community.

Moreover, this research was funded by taxpayer dollars. Americans should have easy access to the results of research they help support.

To that end, I have issued a memorandum today (.pdf) to Federal agencies that directs those with more than $100 million in research and development expenditures to develop plans to make the results of federally-funded research publically available free of charge within 12 months after original publication. As you pointed out, the public access policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health has been a great success. And while this new policy call does not insist that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, it does ensure that similar policies will appear across government.

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2013/02/22

Berto Jongman: The Terror Courts – An Inside Look at Rough Justice, Torture — and the Military Prosecutor Who Refused Illegal Orders — at Guantanamo, Cuba

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military

“The Terror Courts”: An Inside Look at Rough Justice, Torture at Guantánamo Bay

Wall Street Journal journalist Jess Bravin reports on the controversial military commissions at Guantánamo. Describing it as “the most important legal story in decades,” Bravin uncovers how the Bush administration quickly drew up an alternative legal system to try men captured abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. Soon evidence obtained by torture was being used to prosecute prisoners, but some military officers refused to take part. We speak to Jess Bravin, author of The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, and to Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a former Guantánamo prosecutor featured in the book. [includes rush transcript]

Headline Links to Video. Book Links to Amazon.

Soon after the September 11 attacks in 2001, the United States captured hundreds of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and around the world. By the following January the first of these prisoners arrived at the U.S. military’s prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they were subject to President George W. Bush’s executive order authorizing their trial by military commissions. Jess Bravin, the Wall Street Journal’s Supreme Court correspondent, was there within days of the prison’s opening, and has continued ever since to cover the U.S. effort to create a parallel justice system for enemy aliens. A maze of legal, political, and moral issues has stood in the way of justice—issues often raised by military prosecutors who found themselves torn between duty to the chain of command and their commitment to fundamental American values.

While much has been written about Guantanamo and brutal detention practices following 9/11, Bravin is the first to go inside the Pentagon’s prosecution team to expose the real-world legal consequences of those policies. Bravin describes cases undermined by inadmissible evidence obtained through torture, clashes between military lawyers and administration appointees, and political interference in criminal prosecutions that would be shocking within the traditional civilian and military justice systems. With the Obama administration planning to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators at Guantanamo—and vindicate the legal experiment the Bush administration could barely get off the ground—The Terror Courts could not be more timely.

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2013/02/222013/02/22

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

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

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.

Read full article.

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2013/02/222013/02/22

John Maguire: An Evolving Systems Analysis of Sandy Hook

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement

An Evolving Systems Analysis of Sandy Hook

Sandy Hook in a New Light:

Lately I find myself attempting to fit both personal experience and global events into a General Systems framework. General Systems Theory is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry pioneered by biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy. It seeks to expound principles that are applicable to a whole variety of systems, including social systems.

So what, if anything, can Systems Analysis reveal to us about an event such as the Sandy Hook Massacre? What good could possibly come out of such a disorienting debacle? Is it just another sign of how rotten the world is, or can we take a step back and somehow tease out a silver-lining?

We have to approach these sorts of questions with a non-linear brand of logic. It is necessary to leave our dogmatic assumptions at the door. In doing so, we are able to accept that notions of direct causality and random occurrences are illusory within the context of complex, chaotic systems. There are no isolated, meaningless accidents in an open and interconnected world. The collective inertia of human culture is being drawn to what might be called a strange attractor; a destination point.

As fractured constituents of the whole, it is understandably difficult for us to comprehend this larger picture. Regardless, the natural trajectory of ecological systems including our own is toward ever-increasing efficiency, cooperation, and adaptability. Hidden order is nature’s rule, not some special case.

As we continue to develop, mistakes and contentiousness should be expected and thought of as necessities for progress. They are not unpleasant experiences to be avoided. They exist within models of complex systems because they serve as positive feedback mechanisms; they help regulate interdependent ecologies like ours. Over the long term, the dialectic process serves to increase the system’s integrity and stability.

I think most of us understand that we learn and grow wise through both direct experience and peer-to-peer interaction. Sometimes the experience is painful, or uncomfortable, but it is not without merit. With this in mind, we can come to comprehend tragedies such as Sandy Hook and the rabid debates surrounding them on a deeper level. These types of events are in fact turbulent fluctuations that, in time, add up to the constructive reordering of society as we know it. They serve to lead us into a new maturity as a species.

We are witnessing this primordial process play itself out via the flurry of online, wildcat journalism revolving around the Sandy Hook story. We have seen an unprecedented cascade of bi-directional information flow. Abundant dialogue and grassroots intelligence-gathering is emerging from all sides of the issue.

Because our social order is an embedded part of the planet’s ecology, we are unwittingly subject to its flows and processes. This is not to say we are deterministic slaves. Rather, we have the choice to act in accordance with the ebbs and flows of nature or we can choose to vainly struggle against them. We can either co-create or self-destruct.

But before I get too far ahead of myself, let me first dissect the evidence surrounding the December 14th shooting. Since mid-December, it has morphed into a truly surreal and polarizing storyline that has yet to produce a completely coherent narrative or body of evidence. A plethora of logical and evidentiary inconsistencies have cropped up all over the place. These clear patterns of contradiction should give us serious pause; enough so to demand a careful reconsideration of the official story.

Dissecting the Event:

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2013/02/22

Berto Jongman: Lessons from the Failed War on Drugs

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Government, Law Enforcement

Our Right to Poison: Lessons from the Failed War on Drugs

By Jochen-Martin Gutsch and Juan Moreno

SpiegelOnline. 22 February 2013

The global war on drugs has cost billions and taken countless lives — but achieved little. The scant results finally have politicians and experts joining calls for legalization. Following the journey of cocaine from a farm in Colombia to a user in Berlin sheds light on why.

EXTRACT

Popeye is a pale, 50-year-old man with a shrill voice — a psychopath who doesn't count his kills.

The longer Popeye talks — about his murders, the drug war and the havoc he and Escobar wreaked and that is currently being repeated in Mexico — the less important my prepared questions about this war become. I realize that I might as well throw away my notepad, because it all boils down to one question: How can we stop people like you, Popeye?

He pauses for a moment before saying: “People like me can't be stopped. It's a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you'll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don't know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I've been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to me made. Never.”

I'm sitting face to face with a killer: Popeye, an evil product of hell. And I'm afraid that the killer could be right.

The drug war is the longest war in recent history, underway for more than 40 years. It is a never-ending struggle against a $500 billion (€378 billion) industry.

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2013/02/22

Berto Jongman: Four Questions About Mumbai Attack US Government Will Not Answer

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government

Pakistan’s Terror Connections

Four Disturbing Questions About the Mumbai Terror Attack

Analysis by Sebastian Rotella, ProPublica, Feb. 22, 2013, 8:46 a.m.

The 35-year prison sentence imposed on David Coleman Headley, a terrorist scout and Pakistani spy convicted in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, has closed the U.S. chapter of a case with explosive international implications.

But justice remains elusive. Neither the U.S. nor Pakistani governments have fully answered critical questions about the case — including why most of the accused masterminds remain at large in Pakistan despite evidence implicating them.

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2013/02/22

SchwartzReport: Faux Educational Charities That do PR for the Rightwing Ultra-rich

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Non-Governmental

This is how our country is being taken away from us, and we are financing it through a perversion the non-profit tax laws.

The Educational Charities That do PR for the Rightwing Ultra-rich
GEORGE MONBIOT – The Guardian (U.K.)

Billionaires control the political conversation by staying hidden and paying others to promote their brutal agendas

Conspiracies against the public don't get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change. While inflicting untold suffering on the world's people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.

The two organisations – the Donors' Trust and the Donors' Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression of many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama's cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they're seeking to prevent the US president from trying again.

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