Corruption – Page 626 – Public Intelligence Blog

Huh?

Medea Benjamin

Huffington Post, 01/08/2013

In October 2011, 16-year-old Tariq Aziz attended a gathering in Islamabad where he was taught how to use a video camera so he could document the drones that were constantly circling over his Pakistani village, terrorizing and killing his family and neighbors. Two days later, when Aziz was driving with his 12-year-old cousin to a village near his home in Waziristan to pick up his aunt, his car was struck by a Hellfire missile. With the push of a button by a pilot at a US base thousands of miles away, both boys were instantly vaporized — only a few chunks of flesh remained.

Afterwards, the US government refused to acknowledge the boys' deaths or explain why they were targeted. Why should they? This is a covert program where no one is held accountable for their actions.

The main architect of this drone policy that has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of innocents, including 176 children in Pakistan alone, is President Obama's counterterrorism chief and his pick for the next director of the CIA: John Brennan.

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Continue reading “Mini-Me: John Brennan, Drones, Killing Children + Drone Meta-RECAP”

2013/01/082013/01/08

Winslow Wheeler: Will Chuck Hagel Stand Up to Drone Lobby?

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

Everyone has an opinion and the speculation is almost entirely based on what former Senator Hagel has said, rather than his actions–or lack of them–which speak a lot louder. Take an acutely political career that seems to have valued words above everything and match it with Pentagon myths about defense systems, and you get a somewhat different picture of what to expect from Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel. It is not at all encouraging. This commentary about the all embracing mythology of drones and Chuck Hagel was published at Foreign Policy last evening.

Foreign Policy

THE SPENDAGON

Will Chuck Hagel Stand Up to the Drone Lobby?

Or will he be yet another victim of Pentagon operators?

WINSLOW WHEELER | JANUARY 7, 2013

U.S. Central Command has released some interesting numbers on the performance of modern air systems in Afghanistan; the data do not auger well for our defenses in the next decade, nor for the suitability of the man who appears likely to be the next secretary of defense, former Senator Chuck Hagel — his admirable iconoclasm toward some national security dogmas notwithstanding.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Will Chuck Hagel Stand Up to Drone Lobby?”

2013/01/072013/01/07

Chuck Spinney: The Real Challenges Facing the Next Secretary of Defense, Robert Steele Comments

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Military

No Guts, No Glory

The Real Challenges Facing the Next Secretary of Defense

FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY,
This essay appeared in Counterpunch (12 Dec 2012) and Time's Battleland (3 Jan 2013)

EXTRACT:

The problem is not just a strategic one of extracting our forces with dignity; nor is it a political one of fingering who is to blame, although there is plenty of blame to go around. It stems from deep institutional roots that reveal a need for reform in our military bureaucracies and particularly our leadership selection policies.

That is because the next Secretary of Defense must deal with the consequences of a strategic oversight that was made by and approved at the highest professional levels of the American military establishment — a plan which it then imposed on its weak and insecure political leaders. This suggests a question: Will the new defense secretary succumb to business as usual by sweeping the dysfunctional institutional causes of the Afghan debacle under the rug or have the courage and wisdom to use this sorry affair as a reason to clean out the Pentagon’s Augean Stables?

. . . . . . . . .

A far more significant challenge will be posed by the need to sort out the programmatic chaos in the Pentagon’s hugely bloated defense budget, which, while not unrelated to the Afghan debacle, is caused primarily by out-of-control institutional prerogatives and bureaucratic game playing. Notwithstanding its bloat, the current defense budget plan cannot modernize the military’s weapons inventories on a timely basis; nor can it insure our shrinking, aging equipment will be maintained in a state of combat readiness, while providing sufficient funds for training troops. Most importantly, the Pentagon’s accounting systems are a shambles. The Pentagon’s budget and program planning books can not even pass the most basic constitutional requirements for accountability, much less provide the management information needed to fix the aforementioned modernization, force structure, and readiness problems.

As I explained here and here, these dysfunctional problems are connected and have deep behavioral roots. Fixing these problems will require harmonizing and reining in the disparate factions making up the dysfunctional political-economy of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex — a heretofore intractable problem President Eisenhower first warned America about in his farewell address in January 1961 (note: the reference to Congress was included in the first draft of his speech but subsequently dropped).

What I find depressing is that not one of these pressing issues has been the subject of speculations about the choice of a new defense secretary. Au contraire, the press has been obsessed with the lobbying concerns of the discredited neocons on the right who helped to create Afghan and Iraqi messes, proponents of continuing American empire in the middle (who are now promoting our intervention in Syria and the budget busting pivot to the Pacific), and gender balancers on the left.

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Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: The Real Challenges Facing the Next Secretary of Defense, Robert Steele Comments”

2013/01/072013/01/07

Matt Taibbi: Lies of the Bailout — US Government Ponzi Scheme

Commerce, Corruption, Government

Secret and Lies of the Bailout

The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come

Matt Taibbi

Rolling Stone, 17 January 2013

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

CONCLUSION:

Continue reading “Matt Taibbi: Lies of the Bailout — US Government Ponzi Scheme”

2013/01/072013/01/07

David Isenberg: Iran – Nuclear Dog That Cannot Bark

05 Iran, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Media, Military

Iran: the Nuclear Dog that can’t Bark

By David Isenberg

LobeLog Foreign Policy, 7 January 2012

Apart from death and taxes, one other thing has also appeared inevitable, at least for the past two decades: Iran will acquire a nuclear weapons capability.

Yet, despite all the near frantic demands for sanctions, clandestine action, sabotage, and outright military strikes to prevent Iran’s presumed inexorable march towards that capability, one thing keeps getting overlooked: Iran has not managed to develop a nuclear weapon.

How is that possible? As states go, Iran has a reasonably well-developed scientific and industrial infrastructure, an educated workforce capable of working with advanced technologies, and lots of money. If Pakistan, starting from a much lower level, could develop nuclear weapons, why hasn’t Iran?

That overlooked question was the subject of an important but largely ignored past article, “Botching the Bomb: Why Nuclear Weapons Programs Often Fail on Their Own — and Why Iran’s Might, Too” in Foreign Affairs journal.

In the May/June 2012 issue, Jacques E. C. Hymans, an International Relations Associate Professor at the University of Southern California and author of the book Achieving Nuclear Ambitions: Scientists, Politicians, and Proliferation (from which his article was adapted) wrote:

Dolphin: Time Warner Blocks Al Jazeera — For Now

Corruption, Media

Will Americans ever get to see Al Jazeera?

by Danny Schechter

Why does our media system attract so many uninformed and unbrave people who are locked into such predictable and parochial attitudes? Do they have an agenda that the public is unaware of?

Take Time Warner. Remember how it initially would not run the then new red white and blue Fox News on its platform in New York City, forcing it to cough up a high “per-subscriber fee” to get on the air? That was a clear commercial dispute with a bit of extortion thrown in, an attempt to protect their news channel, CNN, from being challenged.

Now that Al Jazeera has bought Current TV, a channel shown on Time Warner cable, the Time Warner megacorp became the first system operator out of the box to say it would not carry the new news channel that the Qatar-based network wants to launch in America, in much the same way that BBC set up BBC America to offer its programming to US viewers.

Even as Time Warner carries Russia Today, CCTV out of China and other foreign-owned channels, it is excluding this channel before they even know what it will offer. This could be a ploy to jack up licence fees – a la Fox News – but there is probably more to it.

SchwartzReport: 2012 Summary of Mainstream Media Malpractice and Self-Censorship

Corruption, Media

2012: Another Year in Mainstream Media Malpractice

amerigus Monday December 31, 2012

As we ring in 2013, it’s time to recognize how the major media buries the issues most important to Americans. With newsrooms focusing so much right now on the fiscal cliff and gun rights, it’s instructive to see nobody looking at the heart of either issue.

But even bigger issues face us, now in the fifth year of prolonged recession and the second decade of a debt-fueled war on terror. It’s more evident each year how “professional” journalists are unable or unwilling to report on reality-based news, making them ever more feeble.

The major media is not useless to you just because of billionaire ownership, it’s also the non-disclosure clauses in contracts that prevent anchors or reporters from telling the story behind the story. Final editorial control over what goes out over the air causes major behind-the-scenes conflict. Even when marquee names try to blow the whistle, the contractual gags always hold in the end.

List Only (Commentary for Each in Article):
The Fiscal Cliff
Gun Control
Obama's Non-Prosecution of Fraud
Industry Ads Trump Science in Hydrofracking Debate
FCC Unaware of Federal Communications Law
Top Media Covers Up for the “ACORN Pimp”
Ignoring the Bigger Picture: Our Constitution Under Attack
The Sixth Amendment
The First Amendment
The Fourth Amendment
“Sons of Citizens United” Creeping in Every Direction

I Said It Last Year And I’ll Say It Again This Year
I’m not sure what you saw, read or wrote that was under-reported in media this year, but feel free to share it in the comments below.

I’ll bet however, that regardless what your foremost burning issue is, whether it’s war, income disparity, health care, energy, the environment, education, civil liberties, corporate personhood, food safety, human rights, LGBT equality or anything else, I guarantee the problem stems from the bigger issue of money in politics and cannot be fixed until our elections are fixed first.

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