Robert Steele: Slate and New America Foundation a Propaganda Front – Taking Money Under the Table?
07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Media, Non-Governmental
Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories
Does Google have a responsibility to help stop the spread of 9/11 denialism, anti-vaccine activism, and other fringe beliefs?
By Evgeny Morozov|Posted Monday, Jan. 23, 2012, at 7:43 AM ET
In its early days, the Web was often imagined as a global clearinghouse—a new type of library, with the sum total of human knowledge always at our fingertips. That much has happened—but with a twist: In addition to borrowing existing items from its vast collections, we, the patrons, could also deposit our own books, pamphlets and other scribbles—with no or little quality control.
Such democratization of information-gathering—when accompanied by smart institutional and technological arrangements—has been tremendously useful, giving us Wikipedia and Twitter. But it has also spawned thousands of sites that undermine scientific consensus, overturn well-established facts, and promote conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the move toward social search may further insulate regular visitors to such sites; discovering even more links found by their equally paranoid friends will hardly enlighten them. Is it time for some kind of a quality control system?
Robert Steele: I am disengaged from Phi Beta Iota most of the time, but this piece was brought to my attention with the observation that it combines a claim to legitimacy involving Stanford University and Foreign Policy (no longer a serious rag, now a sub-set of secrecy & rendition apologist The Washington Post), and that it appears to be an early shot in a new national security propaganda theme aimed as neutralizing the use of the Internet for self-education. When Obama said in the State of the Union that it is known kids do better when they are forced to stay in school until graduation, I was sharply critical–the reality is that the best and the brightest leave school as soon as they can pass the GED, realizing that rote learning of old knowledge from poorly-paid burn-outs is not the way to “jack in.” What we have here is a very troubling indicator that the New America Foundation (wittingly) and Slate (perhaps unwittingly) are now part of the domestic propaganda arm of the military-industrial complex. The idiocy and illegitimacy of this piece should not have to be pointed out, but since Slate, which I thought had educated leadership, evidently saw nothing wrong with this piece, I will just point them to several books that will explain to them why collective intelligence, open source everything, and the three values of clarity, diversity, and integrity, are all essential to resilience and sustainability. Transparency, truth, and trust are the heart of the matter. This article is a disgrace to Slate and to Stanford, and confirms my growing disdain for the New America Foundation and Foreign Policy.
Robert David Steele, The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (Evolver Editions, 2012)
David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (Basic, 2012)
Robert David Steele, Intelligence for Earth: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability (Earth Intelligence Network, 2010)
Mark Tovey (ed.), Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (Earth Intelligence Network, 2008)
David Weinberger, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (Holt, 2008)
and then of course there are all the other books that in the aggregate would suggest to any intelligent reader that Slate has just published the biggest piece of crap in the recent history of digital journalism.
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)
2012-01-28 Berto Jongmanprovides link to:
Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories
Phi Beta Iota: The puported article is totally inept, using students and a very narrow range of information provided to the students to attempt to replicate a much more nuanced and comprehensive range of networks with access to vaster information resources. The article also does not provide for new sources coming into the public domain, with the inevitable result that the truth ultimately comes out, for example, on the JFK and MLK assassinations, the USS Liberty, and increasingly, 9/11 as a mix of let it happen, make it happen, and cover it up.
Lead Author Responds:
Thanks for your interest in the SPPS article. In response to your queries in the linked blog post, we didn't seek to inform people about particular theories in any great detail, to provide a model of the broader communities which advocates conspiracy as an explanation for world events, or to model opinion change as new information is presented. While those are interesting topics and we certainly hope to examine them in some detail in the future, they are beyond the scope of this rather small study, in which we attempted to extend previous work on correlations in beliefs between different conspiracy theories and examine the source of that correlation through multiple regression analysis of some novel data. As such we pass no judgement on the truth or falsity of any of the theories discussed; while the media may attempt to spin the study as “those crazy conspiracy theorists!”, be assured that this wasn't our intention, and in the paper itself we make the point that apparent contradictory belief is probably present in many different contexts, populations, and ideologies, rather than unique to people who hold particular opinions about geopolitics.
Yours,
Michael Wood
Ph.D. Candidate & Associate Lecturer, School of Psychology
Keynes College, University of Kent
Keynes College, University of Kent
Col Morris Davis, USAF (Ret): Understanding Guantanamo Military Commissions
09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, Military
Interview with Col. Morris Davis
The Moderate Voice, Jan 25th, 2012
While most people weren’t looking, America’s controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay turned ten years old a few weeks ago; for some reason, the President didn’t mention this during the State of the Union. I used the occasion of Guantanamo’s birthday party in Washington, D.C. to meet, and to arrange an interview with, retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, once the Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions, and now one of the most outspoken critics of our nation’s entire “indefinite detention” regime. The interview is here (and cross-posted at
the talking dog blog.)
Col. Morris Davis (USAF, Ret.) is a professor at the Howard University School of Law. From 2005 until 2007, Col. Davis was the Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions. He resigned from that post in 2007 in protest of political interference in prosecutorial functions. He retired from active military service in 2008 and became the head of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division in the Congressional Research Service. He served in that post until January 2010, when he was terminated after publishing op-ed articles critical of Guantanamo and war on terror policies.
On January 12, 2012, I had the privilege of interviewing Col. Davis by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected by Col. Davis.
Iran Boogie, Jew on Jew, Jew on Gentile, Hype on Hype . . . .
05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Media
Killing Obama – Andrew Adler in an Emotional Video Apology
Update: Atlanta Jewish Times Editor Andrew Adler – a Victim of Israeli Iran Threat Hype – Classic Game Theory Warfare on Steroids
Jim W. Dean
Veterans Today, 24 January 2012
Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasters got an exclusive interview with Andrew Adler, below. They are a long time non profit broadcast booster to the Atlanta faith community, providing a pooled resource platform. VT is happy to offer you a front row seat to hear his story.
What you are about to view is a classic broken man…with no acting going on. Those of us who have seen this numerous times, you can always tell. So I think now that we have a true blue believer here that got wound up a little too tight. More on that later.
Please pay close attention to the part where he let says that in an interview show he had with the Deputy Israeli General Consul for the Southeast, that he was upset by her description of the dire threat that Israel was living under…the 15,000 rockets.
This is pure Israeli-Iran threat hype, of course. It should be prosecutable under the Nuremberg precedents, ‘waging an offensive war’, and all of us here look forward to the day where we can watch the trials online.
We have written many times that Iran is of no offensive threat to the U.S. or Israel, with their military totally deployed in a defensive mode which it has to be from the threat of Israel’s Weapons of Mass Destruction umbrella.
Read full article with many links.
Phi Beta Iota: Fascinating at multiple levels, including the exploration of current best-selling book in Israel, Israeli political crime families, and more.
David Isenberg: Steve Coll Reviews Three Books on Secret American Security State
04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Book Lists, Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Officers Call
Our Secret American Security State
The New York Review of Books, February 9, 2012
Steve Coll
Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State
by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
Little, Brown, 296 pp., $27.99
Intelligence and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform
by Paul R. Pillar
Columbia University Press, 413 pp., $29.50
Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda
by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
Times Books, 324 pp., $27.00
What is the American intelligence bureaucracy good for? The question is difficult to ask in a serious way in Washington because it risks raising the hackles of career intelligence professionals and their political sponsors at a time when spy agencies remain under pressure to combat resilient if diminished international terrorist groups and to monitor and check Iran’s nuclear program, among other challenges. Yet a serious, transparent review of the intelligence system’s strengths and limitations is overdue.
The past decade has witnessed one of the most egregious misuses of intelligence in American history—the Bush administration’s distortion of information about Saddam Hussein’s terrorist ties and unconventional weapons, in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. It has also seen a surge of paramilitary activity and covert action that has included the operation of secret prisons, the use of torture, and targeted killing. The Obama administration ended officially sanctioned torture, but it has refused to allow official inquiries into how it occurred, and the administration has increased the number of covert, unacknowledged targeted killings through the use of armed, unmanned aerial drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
In all, a president who might have challenged the American intelligence bureaucracy and given it a new direction has instead maintained and even expanded what he inherited. Nor has Congress reviewed the hasty organizational reforms it enacted after September 11 or reckoned in depth with the problems exposed by the Iraq disaster. The vital questions that seemed to be begged after the Bush era—about the intelligence system’s scope, effectiveness, costs, outsourcing, legal justifications, and vulnerability to politicization—have remained largely unaddressed.
. . . . . . .
After September 11, newspaper Op-Ed pages were full of recommendations for radical departures in American intelligence, changes that might place new emphasis on lean and adaptable operations. There was much talk of a long-term development of “human sources of information”; of the need for risk-taking and the bold penetration of what are known in the intelligence agencies as “denied areas,” such as Iran and North Korea. Some of that ambition has been fulfilled; it is difficult to measure how much, since so much of the detail of post–September 11 covert action and intelligence collection remains secret.
. . . . . .
What is plain, nonetheless, is that the larger story of the American intelligence system is one of continuity. The bureaucracy has defended itself from outside investigation and oversight and has followed many of the trajectories set during the Eisenhower years. The relative strengths of tactical American intelligence tradecraft today include innovative technology, vacuum cleaner–like collection of electronic data worldwide, computer algorithms that sort valuable information from noise, and the bludgeoning effects on adversaries of huge if wasteful spending. These methods look very similar to those of the anti-Soviet intelligence system. The bureaucracy’s weaknesses—inefficiency, ignorance of local cultures, revolving doors, self-perpetuation, vulnerability to political pressure, and an overall lack of accountability—are deeply familiar, too.
Read full article with registration.
Phi Beta Iota: The New York Review of Books is retarded. Search for the article to read the full piece without their demand for registration. We note with interest that most of these themes were clearly addressed by Robert Steele in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), but “blacked out” by the sycophantic media including Steve Coll and David Ignatius. It is a rare day when a mainstream media person gets this real–Mr. Coll now administers the New America Foundation, a front for the Obama Administration that receives taxpayer funding it has not earned. This sudden “conversion” by Mr. Coll may be a preamble to a very large but still insufficient and ineffective cut of secret intelligence just prior to the election. Neither Mr. Coll nor the Obama Administration are interested in intelligence with integrity–only profiteering from the commonwealth while flim-flaming the public with theatrics.
See Also:
Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both
Penguin: US Empire Declares War on White Guys
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Analysis, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Media, Military, Officers Call
Read this at least three times. This is a talking points memorandum for the Empire cabal, which is now ready to take on the white guys (including the white guys with guns). They believe blacks and hispanics are cowed, “weed and seed” has been a success story (in their view). This is a subtle hit job that sets the stage for treating white guys as failures who lost their cultural compass and must now be treated with the same federalization of state and local force and ultimate incarceration that has been used so extensively on blacks.
The Rodney King riots were the beginning of the breakdown of US Government legitimacy in the eyes of its own public. The economy is being juiced and the Republicans are playing along with the fiction that the economy is getting better. It is not. Unemployment is at 22.4% and 2013 is going to be catastrophic. Now imagine the Rodney King riots, this time with while guys who are armed to the teeth and very very pissed off, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a populist revolution.
The ideal of an ‘American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
Charles Murray
Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2012
EXTRACT
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
. . . . . . .
As I've argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.
. . . . . . .
Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody's fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won't make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won't make a difference.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010” (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.
Phi Beta Iota: The eight stages of genocide established by Dr. Greg Stanton are as follows: 1) Classification (us versus them); 2) Symbolization (codewords–e.g bums); 3) Dehumanization (equated with animals, eugenics applies); 4) Organization (federalization of state and local police, opening of the Halliburton-build civil disturbance camps now ready for use); 5) Polarization (attack all independent and centrist movements and leaders); 6) Preparation (use NDAA to incarcerate without due process those who object to the nazification of the USA); 7) Extermination (through a mix of precision kills and “accidental” epidemics, gut the white middle class now diving into poverty); 8) Denial (already taking place at Davos 2012 – capitalism failed, not the elite).
Penguin: Gabriel Kolko on CIA’s Contradictions / Cassandras
10 Security, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Officers CallGABRIEL KOLKO is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience.
Paid to be Ignored
GABRIEL KOLKO
Counterpunch, 20-21 January 2012
At no time has the U.S. based its foreign policies on facts — as opposed to its conceptions reliant on sheer wishes, interests, or pretensions, (its ambitions are often a mixture of all of these). Nor has it had fears that are warranted by reality. It has needs, whether economic or geopolitical. It has, however, often had the correct intelligence and the facts before it to warrant entirely different policies on its part. At the same time as it gets into tenuous military situations, situations it is often destined to lose and pay a great deal for while in the process of doing so, it employs people to produce rational analyses—which it then ignores. Why?
Phi Beta Iota: This is one of the longest, most cogent pieces we have seen on the internal and external contradictions inherent in the CIA archipelago of contrasting functions, values, and marginal outputs. It is totally consistent with the many books reviewed here on intelligence.
