Corruption – Page 641 – Public Intelligence Blog

steele smiling final — Robert David STEELE Vivas
Click on Image for Bio Page

Open Season on CIA? – Are The Days of Living Immunity Instead of Cover Over?

I had occasion to reflect today on the past twenty years, recollecting how easily in 1992 a new path could have been taken, one that reconnected the US intelligence community to “ground truth” using open sources and methods, as well as “full spectrum” HUMINT, a term I coined. It gives me pause to recollect that 1993 was also the year in which CIA was attacked by a lone gunman at its front gate, killing two and wounding three others., an attack inspired by and stemming directly from CIA operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Although I have been an intelligence reformer since first realizing how little CIA actually knows about the business of intelligence (for example, writing the first ever Standard Operating Procedures for a (Clandestine) Field Station in 1985, along with the first ever Guide to Managing the Support Account, I have never sought to harm CIA, nor have I wished for harm to befall those that work for CIA.

Today, in the aftermath of Benghazi, a quick tour of the horizon suggests to me that CIA's days of living immunity instead of cover are over. Although my first book, ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000) addressed the urgency of getting serious about cover — official “cover” as practiced by CIA is a global joke — and I had a foreword from Senator David Boren (D-OK), past Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) — CIA has chosen to ignore all the signals of its looming demise as a global intelligence service.

In recent times, I have been struck by the lack of professionalism and lack of integrity that has characterized CIA's rush into renditions and torture in secret prisons, to the point that CIA officers alive and well in the USA today have been convicted in an Italian court and the way is now open for a formal extradition request. Even if they are not extradited, I would certainly recommend to those officers a complete change of name, location, and even profession. It is a certainty that one day, some angry Italian is going to be moved to hunt them down and kill them and their families–I hope without success. Other countries, other relatives, are going to start coming after CIA, not only from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from the many other countries where CIA has been both amatuerish and cavalier in its covert operations.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Post-Benghazi — Open Season on CIA?”

2012/11/11

Yoda: Data Producing Intelligence — But Not in the “Intelligence” Community

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency

yoda with light saber — Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Intelligence, this is.

Predicting presidents, storms and life by computer

Associated Press, Saturday, November 10, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forget political pundits, gut instincts, and psychics. The mightier-than-ever silicon chip seems to reveal the future.

In just two weeks this fall, computers models displayed an impressive prediction prowess.

It started when the first computer model alerted meteorologists to the pre-Halloween disaster headed for the Northeast from a bunch of clouds in the Caribbean. Nearly a week later, that weather system became Hurricane Sandy and grew into a superstorm after taking a once-in-a-century sharp turn into New Jersey.

Then, statistician and blogger Nate Silver correctly forecast on his beat-up laptop how all 50 states would vote for president. He even predicted a tie in Florida and projected it eventually would tip to President Barack Obama, which is the equivalent of predicting a coin landing on its side. He did it by taking polling data, weighing it for past accuracy and running 40,000 computer simulations at a time.

He then gave his forecast in terms of percentages, saying that Obama had a 91 percent chance of being re-elected.

In the case of Sandy, lives were at stake. With the election, reputations were on the line and some pundits were dismissive of the computer modeling. Bets were made. Challenges issued.

The math majors came out on top thanks to better and more accessible data and rapidly increasing computer power.

Continue reading “Yoda: Data Producing Intelligence — But Not in the “Intelligence” Community”

2012/11/11

SchwartzReport: Frank Rich on Fantasyland — A Public Without the Truth Gets a Government Far Removed From the Truth

Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Fantasyland

Denial has poisoned the GOP and threatens the rest of the country too

EXTRACT:

The country has a larger problem-‘intellectual nihilism,” as the writer Noam Scheiber recently labeled it. Since 9/11, often but not always under the right’s aegis, truth has been destabilized in America. The Bush administration’s contempt for what it dismissed as the ‘reality-based community” was vindicated when it successfully ginned up a war by convincing Americans that the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis and that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Our susceptibility to elaborate, beautifully wrought myths remains intact-whether we’re being spun by politicians, captains of finance pumping up a bubble, or sports heroes like Lance Armstrong and Joe Paterno. The news business, which we once counted on to vet hoaxes and fictions, is now so insecure about its existential future that it was cowed to some extent by the Scarboroughs, Noonans, and Roves, with most of the networks, not just Fox, ignoring the ! statistical data of Silver and others and instead predicting a long, nail-biting Election Night. (In reality, the election was called for Obama at 11:12 p.m. EST on NBC, just twelve minutes after it had been in 2008.) Our remaining journalistic institutions have even outsourced what used to be the very core of their craft, fact-checking, to surrogates relegated to gimmicky sidebars (awarding Pinocchios and ‘pants on fire”). The fact-checkers have predictably become partisan targets, only further destabilizing the whole notion of what is meant by ‘news.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be surprised to learn that he is now remembered most for his oft-repeated maxim that ‘everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Yet today most Americans do see themselves as entitled to their own facts, with one of our two major political parties setting a powerful example. For all the hand-wringing about Washington’s chronic dysfunction and lack of bipartisanship, it may be the wholesale denial of reality by the opposition and its fellow travelers that is the biggest obstacle to our country moving forward under a much-empowered Barack Obama in his second term. If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can.

Full article with many links.

2012/11/102012/11/10

SchwartzReport: Texas Republican Talks Secession

Civil Society, Corruption, Ethics, Government

TPMMuckraker

Texas Republican Wants State To Leave U.S. Over Obama Wins

A Republican official in Texas called for his state to separate from the United States and the “maggots” who reelected President Barack Obama in a newsletter he sent out this week.

Peter Morrison, who serves as treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party, wrote in his post-election newsletter that there was a clear solution to the problem of Obama’s re-election.

“We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity,” Morrison wrote. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.”

Read full article.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Texas Republican Talks Secession”

2012/11/092012/11/09

Yoda: Research Fraud Has Exploded in Past Decade — Pattern of Fraud in Education, Intelligence, & Research

Academia, Commerce, Corruption, IO Impotency

Sad, this is.

Research fraud exploded over the last decade

And retractions don't always mention when data's fraudulent (43% of the time, in fact).

A number of studies have spotted a worrisome trend: although the number of scientific journals and articles published is increasing each year, the rate of papers being retracted as invalid is increasing even faster. Some of these are being retracted due to obvious ethical lapses—fraudulent data or plagiarism—but some past studies have suggested errors and technical problems were the cause of the majority of problems. (…) The authors find that, since 1975, the rate of retracted articles as a percent of total publications has increased nearly tenfold. Duplicate publications and plagiarism, which didn't use to be a significant problem, have boomed since 2005. And while retractions due to errors have increased, those due to fraud have increased much faster.

. . . . . . . .

Patterns of deceit

When it comes to fraud, the traditional research powers are leading the way. The US has the largest number of cases, followed by Germany and Japan. But things like plagiarism and duplicating publications are quite different, with China being a major player, and India having a large presence. These sorts of copying problems are rare in high-profile journals like Nature and Science. Instead, there was a strong correlation between the incidence of fraud and the prominence of the journal, as measured by its impact factor.

Continue reading “Yoda: Research Fraud Has Exploded in Past Decade — Pattern of Fraud in Education, Intelligence, & Research”

2012/11/082012/11/08

Penguin: Election Theater, 50 Companies “Own” All

Commerce, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government, Politics

To set the stage, here is a quote from a top Reagan era economist.

“Paul Craig Roberts: “As readers know, I don’t think that either candidate is a good choice or that either offers a choice. Washington is controlled by powerful interest groups, not by elections. What the two parties fight over is not alternative political visions and different legislative agendas, but which party gets to be the whore for Wall Street, the military-security complex, Israel Lobby, agribusiness, and energy, mining, and timber interests.”

Now imagine a populist revolt that eliminates absentee owners and declares local to global debt jubilees, much as the IMF is (rather radically) considering in The Chicago Plan Revisted (August 2012), while the local, state, and federal government also agree on the Automated Payment Transaction Tax or the Tobin Tax (two different ideas that can be implemented separately or together).

No Conspiracy Theory — A Small Group of Companies Have Enormous Power Over the World

October 31, 2012 |

In October of 2011, New Scientist reported that a scientific study on the global financial system was undertaken by three complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. The conclusion of the study revealed what many theorists and observers have noted for years, decades, and indeed, even centuries: “An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.” As one of the researchers stated, “Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market… Our analysis is reality-based.” Using a database which listed 37 million companies and investors worldwide, the researchers studied all 43,060 trans-national corporations (TNCs), including the share ownerships linking them.[1~footnotes at the end of the article]

Read full AlterNet article and notes.

Continue reading “Penguin: Election Theater, 50 Companies “Own” All”

2012/11/082012/12/03

Eagle: Department of Justice Defendes Controversial Unlimited Military Detention

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military, Officers Call

DOJ Defends Controversial Military Detention Provision

As presidential election returns rolled in Tuesday night, the U.S. Justice Department filed its opening brief defending a controversial military detention provision that a trial judge in Manhattan declared unconstitutional earlier this year.

The suit, filed in Manhattan federal district court by a group of journalists and activists, challenges a section of the National Defense Authorization Act that DOJ lawyers said reaffirms presidential detention authority under the Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF. That authorization was passed in response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Government lawyers said in the papers filed last night in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that the plaintiffs “are in no danger whatsoever of being subject to capture and detention by the U.S. military.” The provision in question allows the detention of people who “substantially supported” al-Qaeda or “associated forces.”

“The district court nonetheless issued an extraordinary and sweeping injunction at their behest,” DOJ lawyer August Flentje of the Civil Division said in the brief filed last night. Flentje said the trial judge, Katherine Forrest of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, “entered a sweeping and permanent injunction against the president.”

Continue reading “Eagle: Department of Justice Defendes Controversial Unlimited Military Detention”