Phi Beta Iota: This is an extraordinary document, 997 pages in length, going back deeply into history and including contextual history for Texas, big oil, and US corruption generally. It would benefit from visualization.
Mini-Me: GOP War on Honest Voting
Corruption, Government
The GOP's War on Voting Comes to Washington
House Republicans want to kill the federal agency charged with making sure voting machines work.
Mother Jones, Dec. 1, 2011
Republicans in state legislatures across the country have spent the past year mounting an all-out assault on voting rights, pushing a slew of voter ID and redistricting measures that are widely expected to dilute the power of minority and low-income voters in next November's elections. Now that effort has come to Capitol Hill, where the House* will vote Thursday on a GOP-backed bill to eviscerate the Election Assistance Commission (EAC)—the last line of defense against fraud and tampering in electronic voting systems around the country.
[UPDATE: The bill passed 235-190 on a mostly party-line vote.]
Josh Kilbourn: War Against Iran Has Been Underway
04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
The Atlantic, Dec 2, 2011
Adam Chandler, the Goldblog deputy-editor-for-monitoring-Iran-obsessively-even-though-Goldblog-himself-also-monitors-Iran-obsessively, pointed out to me the other day that perhaps the West has already begun the attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, that perhaps we ought to reframe this issue a bit. The attacks he mentioned are not the usual sub-rosa, eyebrow-raising tech and computer virus sort of attacks, but outright physical attacks. This is more a semantic issue, I suppose (and yes, I realize the Iranian regime is virulently anti-semantic), but operations against Iran are seeming to move away from the pure Mossad-in-the-70s-style attacks to straight-up military confrontations. I don't know if this is a sign of escalation or desperation or both, though it seems fair to say that less subtlety on the part of Israel, the U.S. and whoever else is doing this suggests that the previous tactics were deemed insufficient.
Following a (perhaps not-so-mysterious) explosion on a military base last month that took with it the life of Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam–one of the Iranian missile program's most distinguished OGs–comes news of a second explosion in Isfahan this past Monday, which according to sources “struck the uranium enrichment facility there, despite denials by Tehran.”
Of course, accurate news out of Tehran is hard to come by, but if you want to take this a step further, one might consider Tuesday's (perhaps not-so-spontaneous) storming of the British embassy by Iranian “students” to be quite an effective smokescreen in keeping news of this second explosion from making serious waves. If you've had a lot of coffee, it's also worthy to note that on Monday evening, following the explosion in Iran, four missiles fired from southern Lebanon struck Israel–the first such incident in over two years.
I'm not entirely convinced, but it's not unreasonable to group these recent explosions with the Stuxnet virus of last summer that haywired an uranium enrichment facility in Natanz; last October's explosion at a Shahab missile factory; the killing of three Iranian nuclear scientists in the past two years, last November's attempted assassination of Fereydoun Abbasi-Davan–a senior official in the nuclear program — and rumblings of a second supervirus deployed this month as proof that the West's war on Iran's nuclear program is getting less covert by the minute.
Richard Wright: Technology Not A Substitute for Brains
Corruption, Government, Military
My experience with GCHQ was that they were able to conduct better processing and anaysis than NSA at consideribly less cost. I remember one particularly difficult puzzle that I was trying to work out using the latest contactor designed programs (vapor ware) and getting nowhere. An analyst (and friend) at GCHQ managed to solve the puzzle using the back of an envelope and a stub pencil (which I accused him of stealing from his boss). Another GCHQ associate explained to me that when you don't have the money for a lot of bells and whistles you have to actually think your way through problems. GCHQ serves as an example that effective Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) does not have to depend on a massive budget and expensive computer systems. As John Boyd pointed out its the brain that wins battles.
Go Online, Beat a Puzzle and Become a British Spy
New York Times, December 2, 2011
LONDON — Psst! Wanna be a spy?
EXTRACT:
But judging by the response to the spy agency’s puzzle, the government faces an uphill struggle, partly because in the community of hackers, government itself is uncool, if not the enemy. One hacker going by the name Ady who entered a comment on the BBC’s Web site urged the agency to “stick to employing upper-class twits from Oxford and Cambridge.” Hackers, called “hobbyists” in the post, know that “governments are not really the sort of people you want to get involved with,” Ady said.
See Also:
1992 E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & intelligence (Full Text Online for Google Translate))
Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both
DefDog: New $300 million intelligence campus
Corruption, Government, Military
Here is a quick $300 million that could be saved…..and reduce the workforce by the 3000 people they were going to move….
Military planning $300 million intelligence campus in Bethesda
The Pentagon plans to set up a $300 million hub in Bethesda for the federal government’s intelligence-gathering agencies on a 40-acre site vacated in September by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Phi Beta Iota: Military Construction (MILCON) has been out of control since the Iraq War was declared by Dick Cheney and company. For a “community” (more like a goat fest) that provides “at best” 4% of what the President needs, this is a no-brainer–it should be shut down.
David Swanson: 70 Years of Lies About Pearl Harbor
04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Media, Military, Officers Call
70 Years of Lying About Pearl Harbor
By davidswanson
WarIsACrime.org, 04 December 2011
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's fervent hope for years was that Japan would attack the United States. This would permit the United States (not legally, but politically) to fully enter World War II in Europe, as its president wanted to do, as opposed to merely providing weaponry and assisting in targeting of submarines as it had been doing. Of course, Germany's declaration of war, which followed Pearl Harbor and the immediate U.S. declaration of war on Japan, helped as well, but it was Pearl Harbor that radically converted the American people from opposition to support for war.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had tried lying to the American people about U.S. ships including the Greer and the Kerny, which had been helping British planes track German submarines, but which Roosevelt pretended had been innocently attacked. Roosevelt also lied that he had in his possession a secret Nazi map planning the conquest of South America, as well as a secret Nazi plan for replacing all religions with Nazism. And yet, the people of the United States didn't buy the idea of going into another war until Pearl Harbor, by which point Roosevelt had already instituted the draft, activated the National Guard, created a huge Navy in two oceans, traded old destroyers to England in exchange for the lease of its bases in the Caribbean and Bermuda, and — just 11 days before the “unexpected” attack — he had secretly ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States.
Continue reading “David Swanson: 70 Years of Lies About Pearl Harbor”
Thomas Briggs: No, China Does Not Have 3,000 Nuclear Weapons (Nor Does CIA Have Clandestine Assets Anywhere Relevant)
02 China, 10 Security, Academia, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence
Here is another posting related to this topic to balance the earlier piece from the Washington Post.
No, China Does Not Have 3,000 Nuclear Weapons
A study from Georgetown University incorrectly suggests that China has 3,000 nuclear weapons.The estimate is off by an order of magnitude.
By Hans M. Kristensen
EXTRACT:
According to the International Panel on Fissile Materials, China has produced an estimated 2 tons of plutonium for weapons. Some has been consumed in nuclear tests, leaving roughly 1.8 tons. The estimate is consistent with what the U.S. government has stated and theoretically enough for 450-600 warheads.
Total production of HEU is thought to have been approximately 20 tons. Some has been spent in nuclear tests and research reactor fuel, leaving a stockpile of some 16 tons. That’s theoretically enough for roughly 640-1,060 warheads.
Another critical material is Tritium, which is used in thermonuclear weapons. China probably only produces enough Tritium at its High-Flux Engineering Test Reactor (HFETR) in Jiajiang to maintain an arsenal of about 300 weapons.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2009 that China likely has produced enough weapon-grade fissile material to meet its needs for the immediate future. In other words, no vast warhead expansion is in sight.
Read more, several excellent images.
Phi Beta Iota: We are reminded of how the British government sacrificed its intelligence and integrity in copying from a university paper to inflate the Iraq WMD threat, and we continue to believe that the “restricted” papers the students were given are both grounds for an investigation of their professor, and grounds for an Inspector General if not a Department of Justice inquiry into illegal PSYOP funding influence from the Pentagon to Georgetown University. It merits positive comment that neither the CIA's “all source” Directorate of Intelligence nor the CIA's Open Source Center are capable of this level of work–the students, and their professor–have done a great deal of good. They simply cannot combine — as the CIA and DIA cannot combine — open sources in all languages; deep analytic tradecraft; and rigorous personal integrity….nor does the CIA have any clandestine assets in China relevant to this particular inquiry, nor does the US Intelligence Community have leadership capable of focusing all-source collection and requisite (non-existent) processing on this vital question. On the one hand, the Pentagon is correct to say that the US intelligence community stinks on all questions Chinese; on the other, the Pentagon and the White House are telling impeachable lies to Congress and the public on all matters relating to the Chinese threat and the Pentagon budget. Our personal speculative estimate of China's nuclear capability is closer to 30 operable weapons, to which we add that the US has never actually tested any of its nuclear weapons–we literally do not know if they will work as advertised.
