Corruption – Page 560 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/06/20

SchwartzReport: Bank of America Deep Crimes, Treason & Trade, Spanking for Jesus — the Criminally Insane Rule

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy

The Bank of America should by all that is fair and reasonable be penalized by being broken up, and a number of senior officials being indicted and prosecuted in court. I doubt very much that any of that will happen. We have a Justice Department that clearly takes the position that big banks are above the law — they wouldn't say that, of course, but that is effectively their position. No major figure has been prosecuted at the Federal level for 2008,! so what do you think will happen in 2013?

Checks, Lies and Bankster Red Tape
THOM HARTMANN – Truthout

The trend of a few Non-geographical corporate states, and their vassal governments, helping them to take over control of food and water worldwide is gathering momentum.

Secret Trade Agreements Threaten Food Safety, Subvert Democracy
KATHERINE PAUL and RONNIE CUMMINS – Reader Supported News

I follow the Theocratic Right closely, because I consider fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or anything else as one of the most pernicious socially toxic forces in society — any society. One of the universals of fundamentalism is a strong sexual dysfunctionality, with an emphasis on male dominance. Just how weird this movement is becoming in the U.S.! is seen in this story. I want to point out that Theocratic Right women are fully complicit in this.

‘Spanking for Jesus’ Movement Combines Christian Fundamentalism and Sadomasochism
ERIC W. DOLAN – The Raw Story

2013/06/202013/06/20

NIGHTWATCH: Karzai Refuses US-Taliban Talks, US Clueless & Still Shutting Pakistan Out

02 China, 03 India, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

Afghanistan: President Karzai's spokesman said Wednesday that Afghanistan has suspended Bilateral Security Agreement talks with the US and that Afghanistan will not pursue peace talks with the Taliban unless the United States steps out of the negotiations.

The spokesman explained President Karzai took the action because of a contradiction between what the US says and does.

Comment: The Afghan government judges it has been betrayed by the US in agreeing to talks with the Islamic Emirate. Afghanistan said no such entity exists. It was told the Doha office was only for negotiations.

Qatar said the Taliban betrayed their promise to open only a political office of the Taliban. Qatari authorities were persuaded to force the Taliban to take down their flag and their Islamic Emirate plaque. The US said the Afghan government had been kept fully informed.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Karzai Refuses US-Taliban Talks, US Clueless & Still Shutting Pakistan Out”

2013/06/192013/06/19

Chuck Spinney: Imperial Idiocy Wrecks Middle East (Fruits of Treason) — End of Sykes-Picot Betrayal, Five Inter-Mixed Conflicts, Return of the Tribes

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

Patrick Cockburn has written a very important essay on Syria in the London Review of Books (attached below). The essay is aptly titled but has only a few oblique, albeit important, references to Sykes – Picot Agreement, a document some readers may not familiar with. Let's begin with a little background.

The Sykes-Picot agreement (it was a secret agreement concocted by two bureaucrats) is one of the most cynical documents in the creation of the modern Middle East.

The Encylopaedia Britannica describes it accurately as follows:

It was a … “secret convention made during World War I (1916) between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Imperial Idiocy Wrecks Middle East (Fruits of Treason) — End of Sykes-Picot Betrayal, Five Inter-Mixed Conflicts, Return of the Tribes”

2013/06/18

Berto Jongman: TWA Flight 800 Whistle-Blowers — Flight Shot Down?

Corruption, Government, Media

TWA Flight 800 investigators break silence in new documentary, claim original conclusion about cause of crash is wrong

A group of whistleblowers, including a number of aviation experts, have come forward in a new documentary to claim that the official explanation for the crash of TWA Flight 800 was wrong and a gas tank explosion did not bring down the flight off the coast of Long Island 17 years ago.

However, the six whistleblowers, all part of the original investigation team, stopped short of saying the plane was shot down.

Flight 800, a Boeing 747, had just taken off from JFK airport with 230 people aboard on July 17, 1996 enroute to Paris when it exploded and crashed off the coast of nearby East Moriches, Long Island, killing everyone on the plane.

“..This team of investigators who actually handled the wreckage and victims’ bodies, prove that the officially proposed fuel-air explosion did not cause the crash,” reads a statement by the producers of the film, which will debut on cable network EPIX next month. “They also provide radar and forensic evidence proving that one or more ordinance explosions outside the aircraft caused the crash.” However, the statement said they did not speculate about the source or sources of any ordinance explosions.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: TWA Flight 800 Whistle-Blowers — Flight Shot Down?”

2013/06/182013/06/18

John Robb: Iran, Cyberwar, and the Perils of Lazy (or Corrupt) Thinking

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

Iran, Cyberwar, and the Perils of Lazy Thinking

For those of you that don't know, the US doesn't spend much time/energy/effort on military strategy and theory. They do spend money on political scientists and engineers to provide a substitute. Regardless, this deficit means the US continually falls victim to strategic errors due to stale military theory.

The big one we recently fell victim to?

The US unilaterally launched an arms race in autonomous weapons (for more on this read my article; Pandora Smiled).

NOTE: In fact, in all of the work I've done for the national security system (CIA, NSA, DoD, JCS, DNI, etc.), I've never run across a true military theorist. They don't exist in the 2 m plus person bureaucracy, despite trillions in spending based on those theories. Go figure?!? It's like building a Large Hadron Collidor without a physicist.

Well, that arms race is starting to bite us back, but not in the way our lazy national security strategists expected. There's a pretty good article in Vanity Fair about cyberwarfare and Iran by Michael Joseph Gross that details how.

It starts with a nice kick at the start, like Brave New War (on its fifth printing), but for cyberware:

The data on three-quarters of the machines on the main computer network of Saudi aramco had been destroyed. Hackers who identified themselves as Islamic and called themselves the Cutting Sword of Justice executed a full wipe of the hard drives of 30,000 aramco personal computers. For good measure, as a kind of calling card, the hackers lit up the screen of each machine they wiped with a single image, of an American flag on fire.

As you can see, if you like my stuff, it's worth the click to read the entire thing. Here's one of the payoffs:

In the U.S., the escalating bug-and-exploit trade has created a strange relationship between government and industry. The U.S. government now spends significant amounts of time and money developing or acquiring the ability to exploit weaknesses in the products of some of America’s own leading technology companies, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In other words: to sabotage American enemies, the U.S. is, in a sense, sabotaging its own companies.

Here's another one from a bug developer:

“You don’t have to be a nation-state to do this,” he says. “You just have to be really smart.”

BTW: the lead graphic is close to an article I did for Wired in 2007, When Bots Attack. From the Vanity Fair article:

It reminded me of this graphic from my Wired article that I thought you would enjoy:

2013/06/162014/04/08

Michael Scherer: The Geeks Who Leak — Robert Steele Comments

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement, Military

The Geeks Who Leak

The President calls them a threat to national security. the Internet calls them heroes. A new wave of hacktivists is changing the way we handle secrets.

By Michael Scherer

Time, June 24, 2013, Pg. 22

The 21st century mole demands no payments for his secrets. He sees himself instead as an idealist, a believer in individual sovereignty and freedom from tyranny. Chinese and Russian spooks will not tempt him. Rather, it's the bits and bytes of an online political philosophy that attract his imagination, a hacker mentality founded on message boards in the 1980s, honed in chat rooms in the '90s and matured in recent online neighborhoods like Reddit and 4chan. He believes above all that information wants to be free, that privacy is sacred and that he has a responsibility to defend both ideas.

Continue reading “Michael Scherer: The Geeks Who Leak — Robert Steele Comments”

2013/06/162013/06/16

Neal Rauhauser: Israel Has No Claim on Litani Waters [But Stealing Water — Lots Of It — from Aquifers]

08 Wild Cards, 12 Water, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War

Israel: No Claim On Litani Waters

Quality information on the Rivers Of The Fertile Cresent tends to be dense and technical, but there are occasional bits of political dynamite, such as this quote. The Fig. 1 mentioned is the above map of the Jordan & Litani river basins.

On the other hand, it is worthy to note that while analyzing the Lebanese part of the Jordan River Basin, no connection between the Litani River Basin and the Jordan River Basin was found in terms of surface flow, even though both basins lie close to each other (Fig. 1). The Litani basin was found to lie entirely in Lebanon. This result removes any ambiguity pertaining to the inclusion of the waters of the Litani River in any future water allocation scheme for the Jordan River Basin. As it was mentioned in the Johnston Plan and the Israeli “Cotton Plan”, some Israeli negotiators wished to include the Litani River in the Jordan River Basin plan (Amery 1998). Today, the inclusion of the Litani River is still present in the opinion of some politicians but these arguments are not credible since hydrological connections between the Litani and Jordan River Basin have not been proven (Medzini and Wolf 2004; Zeitoun et al. 2012).

Water has been a pressing concern for the region, driving the dispute between Arabs and Jews since Israel’s inception. This quote from a 1982 Christian Science monitor article reveals the entanglement of aquifers and state boundaries.

Two aquifers provide almost all of the groundwater for Northern and Central Israel, both arising in the West Bank. The shallower sandstone aquifer is recharged partly from runoff and percolation of rainwater falling on the former Jordanian lands. The deeper and more copious limestone aquifer is recharged largely or, possibly, entirely by rainwater from the West Bank.

The Litani River of Lebanon from 1993 is the best overview I have found regarding this situation and it notes interest in transferring a portion of the flow of the Litani to the south has existed for over a century. The web page looks to be the sort of thing that might vanish, so I preserved a copy of the content in Scribd.

Continue reading “Neal Rauhauser: Israel Has No Claim on Litani Waters [But Stealing Water — Lots Of It — from Aquifers]”