We have yet to hear from GEN DEMPSEY, current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as to what he thinks should happen to BG SINCLAIR. Chairman was on record yesterday as saying that MG WARD, former CDRUSAFRICOM and charged by DoDIG with a whole litany of offenses, should retire as a four-star general.
Fayetteville (NC) Observer, October 7, 2012, Pg. 1
Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair is being investigated for sexual misconduct and other charges.
By Henry Cuningham and Drew Brooks, Staff Writers
Under military law, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair may be able to ask the secretary of the Army for permission to retire rather than face possible court-martial for forcible sodomy.
Fort Bragg officials declined to discuss whether retirement is a possibility for Sinclair or if he has made such a request.
“It is premature to discuss this,” Ben Abel, a Fort Bragg spokesman, said.
Greg Adams of We The People Foundation posted this video. It’s the first of three videos which that group is releasing. Source.
Phi Beta Iota: The principal witness is William Binney. Jim Bamford and others provide some useful commentary. This is fraud, waste, and abuse, but on balance it is not the widespread violation of privacy rights that alarms the civil libertarians. Our speculative view is that NSA is more about keeping the money moving and growing the pie, than about being effective. If they are running true to form, they are processing less than 5% of what they collect, and since terrorism is a tactic, not a threat, wasting $30 billion a year or more doing things that do not serve the public interest. As others have observed, NSA is providing nothing of value to the DHS “fusion centers” and its primary customers, state and local law enforcement. This is all about money without oversight. Indeed, a proper audit and investigation to this end would be helpful to the President in two ways: in alleviating public concerns; and in identifying tens of billions of dollars in immediately implementable cuts of corporate vaporware with minimalist impact on jobs.
Non-naturally occurring radionuclides from the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant’s triple meltdown last year radioactively contaminated the entire northern hemisphere within days and the US west coast bore a significant brunt of so called hot particles, an independent scientific paper released yesterday claims. Charles Digges, 19/09-2012
US government environmental monitoring agencies have either declared as safe, refused to comment on, or – say several independent researchers – vastly understated what impacts, if any, this could have for America’s western coastal population. Significant omissions in data reporting and hobbling of radioactive monitoring systems, say many, make it seem unlikely that hard government facts will be forthcoming to support evidence presented by independent researchers.
Among the examples of more expensive hardware providing less capability is the Navy's Littoral Combat Ship (LCS). Retired Marine Corps Lt. Col. John Sayen addresses the matter with specifics in a new piece at Time's Batteland blog. John is a friend, colleague and a co-author in the anthology America's Defense Meltdown: Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress.
The Navy's new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is not only staggeringly overpriced and chronically unreliable but – even if it were to work perfectly – cannot match the combat power of similar sized foreign warships costing only a fraction as much. Let's take a deep dive and try to figure out why.
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However the LCS itself may be more vulnerable to these speedboats than the ships it is protecting from them. This is because the ballooning LCS construction costs caused the Navy to try to save money by ordering that future ships be built to commercial standards.
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The surface-warfare chief went on to say that the Navy had yet to settle key LCS issues regarding missions, tactics and the design features to support them. In a sane world, such issues would have been ironed out before any ships were built.
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Taxpayers – and Navy personnel, past and present – may better appreciate the scope of the LCS disaster when reminded that current plans call for these pseudo-warships to comprise more than a third of the Navy's surface combatants by 2020.
Unless the international community demonstrates it is serious abouthuman rights, restitution and disrupting organised crime and criminality, its current policy of stability in place of justice can only continue to fuel both injustice and instability.
On 28 June 1999, Petrija Prljević, a 57 year-old woman in Pristina, was abducted from her apartment by men dressed in KLA uniforms. She was never seen alive again: a year later, her body was exhumed from a cemetery in Kosovo’s capital and positively identified by her son after he recognised items of her clothing. The job of finding out who caused her death was not investigated by the new prosecutors’ office on the basis that she died after the “war” in Kosovo had ended; instead it was investigated by the Eulex Rule of Law Mission. Over ten years later her relatives are still trying to find out what happened to her and who was responsible. Eulex seem no closer to launching an investigation to identify and prosecute her murderers, like the vast majority of the more than 1,000 other cases of murdered Serbs since NATO forces entered Kosovo. Contrast this with the efficient way in which Eulex’s Rule of Law Mission initiated investigations to find the persons responsible for the killing of a member of ROSU in summer 2011. As a recent Amnesty International report made clear, murders continue to be carried out with impunity under the gaze of an international community which seems peculiarly reluctant to investigate them. Indeed, while numerous Yugoslav officials have been tried and convicted for crimes against humanity committed by security forces under their command prior to June 1999, the fact is that of the more than 1,000 Serbs who have been killed since the end of the conflict, almost none have resulted in a prosecution, let alone a conviction. On the contrary, according to the testimony of some international police officials who have worked in Kosovo, there have been active attempts by some elements of the international administration to obstruct investigations, especially when they have threatened to implicate high-ranking Kosovo politicians.
The state and local fusion centers supported by the Department of Homeland Security have produced little intelligence of value and have generated new concerns involving waste and abuse, according to an investigative report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. (NYT, WP)
“It's troubling that the very ‘fusion' centers that were designed to share information in a post-9/11 world have become part of the problem. Instead of strengthening our counterterrorism efforts, they have too often wasted money and stepped on Americans' civil liberties,” said Senator Tom Coburn, the ranking member of the Subcommittee who initiated the investigation.
While it may not be the last word on the subject, the new Subcommittee report is a rare example of congressional oversight in the classical mode. It was performed by professional investigators over a two-year period. It encountered and overcame agency resistance and non-cooperation. And it uncovered — and published — significant new information that demands an executive branch response. That's the way the system is supposed to work.
Imagine having all the downsides of Big Brother and none of the benefits: That's what you get with the Department of Homeland Security's vast network of “fusion” centers, according to a damning new report by the Senate's bipartisan Subcommittee on Investigations.
The fusion centers, described by Janet Napolitano as “one of the centerpieces of our counterterrorism strategy,” allegedly invade the privacy of Americans while producing “shoddy” reports that are typically “irrelevant” and “useless.” It's the sort of report that will find a home on every Ron Paul fan forum and, according to reporters, with good reason: The 77 centers, which have cost an estimated $289 million to $1.4 billion, have a pretty questionable track record. Here are some of the more surprising elements journalists have dug up from the report:
