The attached essay by investigative journalist Robert Parry is an excellent — and important — summary of the trashing of the Iranian nuke deal in 2010. CS
Exclusive: Iran is resuming talks over its nuclear program with leading international powers – the United States, Britain, Russia, China, France and Germany – with the prospect of an agreement to swap some enriched uranium for research isotopes. But a similar plan was torpedoed by U.S. neocons in 2010, recalls Robert Parry.
Two years ago, Washington’s influential neoconservatives – both inside and outside government – shot down a possible resolution to the Iranian nuclear dispute because they wanted a confrontation with Tehran that some hoped would lead to their long-held dream of “regime change.”
In the ensuing two years, the cost of that confrontation has been high not just for Iranians, who have faced harsh sanctions, but for the world’s economy. For instance, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent escalation of bomb-Iran rhetoric contributed to the spike in gasoline prices that seems to be choking off the U.S. recovery, just as job growth was starting to accelerate.
This is the famous hearing where Mudge told senators he could K-O the Internet in 30 minutes. It was a wide-ranging discussion, though Mudge's claim is what the media ran with at the time. Watch and ask yourself, as Trustwave's Tom Brennan does on his Facebook page this morning: “14 Years… have we gotten better?”
I think as Tom said, with all the spending, with all the hoopla, we have not achieved any security (as you and Winn noted in the early 90's). For everything that has been said, for the government it has turned into another method to rob the citizen blind…..
A video has surfaced from 1998, showing some well-known members of the hacker community testifying before the United States Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs.
In this video, recorded on May 19, 1998, you will see Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Tan, Space Rogue, Weld Pond, Mudge, and Stefan von Neumann.
This is the famous hearing where Mudge told senators he could K-O the Internet in 30 minutes. It was a wide-ranging discussion, though Mudge's claim is what the media ran with at the time. Watch and ask yourself, as Trustwave's Tom Brennan does on his Facebook page this morning: “14 Years… have we gotten better?”
Phi Beta Iota: Winn Schwartau and Peter Black were among the first to warn all of us in 1990. In 1994 the alarm was sounded with a letter and very specific spending recommendations from Jim Anderson, then a top NSA security consultant, Winn Schwartau, Bill Caelli, and Robert Steele. The letter was ignored. Today, just short of 20 years later, the US Government remains ignorant, unethical, and ineffective in cyberspace.
Starting to see initial indications that at least one part of DoD is gearing up to cut anywhere from 6% to 50% of its workforce within the fairly near term, perhaps beginning as soon as 01 Oct. Drivers could be generic deficit reduction, sequestration, and historic limitations on strength levels in certain types of organizations. Expect it to be ugly — sprung at last minute, execute without finesse.)
We've heard a lot in the past couple of years, pro and con, about escalating CEO compensation, but it seems to me at least one argument in their defense has merit. It is important to pay enough to recruit and retain the best talent available in the highly competitive global marketplace.
What seems strange to me is that those who believe this is true, that you have to pay well to attract the best talent, usually don't accept the same argument when it comes to government employees.
One of the more dangerous consequences of the financial crisis is how governments at all levels are, in effect, cutting off their noses to spite
their faces. In the rush to balance their budgets, some are indiscriminately firing, freezing and cutting pay, and cutting pensions — too often impacting the people who actually make government work.
The speech delivered by CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston at Harvard yesterday is important and illuminating, and I agree with Ken the administration should be commended for it. But wow does it raise some troubling questions about how the CIA understands the legal authority for and constraints on its drone operations. There’s too much to unpack in it for one blog post, and I’d urge those who follow these interests to read it for themselves. Meantime, I’ll start with two issues: (1) the CIA’s understanding of its domestic authority to use force; (2) the CIA’s understanding of whether/how international law constrains its actions.
Domestic authority. Preston correctly explains that the CIA must have some source of authority under domestic U.S. law to carry out “hypothetical” activities involving the use of force abroad. In this inquiry, of course, international law is irrelevant. And I don’t read Preston to suggest that international law can give the U.S. government powers it does not otherwise possess under our own Constitution and laws. So what gives the CIA its authority to carry out drone strikes? Here’s Preston:
The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed.
US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights.
Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law. President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US.
In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article was published, JFK had been assassinated, and Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was dead, a victim of a murder that took place in Washington on October 12, 1964.<
The murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer is the subject of a fascinating and gripping new book by Peter Janney, who was childhood friends with Mary Meyer’s three sons and whose father himself was a high CIA official. Janney’s father and mother socialized in the 1950s with the Meyers and other high-level CIA officials.
Amazon Page
Janney’s book, Mary’s Mosaic, is one of those books that you just can’t put down once you start reading it. It has everything a reader could ever want in a work of nonfiction – politics, love, sex, war, intrigue, history, culture, murder, spies, racism, and perhaps the biggest criminal trial in the history of our nation’s capital.
Just past noon on the day of the murder, Mary Meyer was on her daily walk on the C&O Canal Trail near the Key Bridge in Washington, D.C. Someone grabbed her and shot a .38-caliber bullet into the left side of her head. Meyer continued struggling despite the almost certainly fatal wound, so the murderer shot her again, this time downward through her right shoulder. The second bullet struck directly into her heart, killing her instantly.
A 21-year-old black man named Raymond Crump Jr., who lived in one of the poorest sections of D.C., was arrested near the site of the crime and charged with the murder. Crump denied committing the crime.
There were two eyewitnesses, neither of whom, however, personally identified Crump. One witness, Henry Wiggins Jr., said that he saw a black man standing over the body and that the man wore a beige jacket, a dark cap, dark pants, and dark shoes. Another witness, William L. Mitchell, said that prior to the murder, he had been jogging on the trail when he saw a black man dressed in the same manner following Meyer a short time before she was killed.
The risk of the 30 most systemically important financial institutions (SIFI) in the world has risen over 30% in the last three weeks as the effects of LTRO fade and encumbrance becomes the new reality.
This less-manipulated, government-bank-reacharound-driven bond-market sense of reality has retraced almost 40% of its improvement from its peak last November at 311bps to its best level mid-March at 171bps.
The current 226bps level is extremely elevated and as one would expect is dominated by European and US banks (with US banks on average trading wider than Europeans – which may surprise many but Europeans dominate the worst names – most specifically the Spanish banks).
