Corruption – Page 842 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/10/22

Journal: Is Israel’s Infamy Obama’s Third Strike?

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off...

Pusillanimity or Hypocrisy or Both

Memo to Obama: Three Strikes and You're Out

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

I believe Obama's schtick during his campaign for president was to subtly encourage his adversaries to impale themselves of the horns of their own contradictions. This kind of strategy can be particularly effective in the all-important moral dimension of an election, or indeed, any other kind of conflict. To be sure, Obama had the help of widespread disgust with Bush, as well as an exquisitely timed, terrible financial meltdown, but the parallels in his campaigns against Hillary Clinton and John McCain suggest he had an instinctive feel for gaining leverage by using what reformers in the Pentagon called the Motherhood and Mismatch, or M&M, strategy. (See my CounterPunch essay on that theme.) But to date, his strategy for governance has failed utterly to live up to that brilliance. He blew at least two stunning opportunities that seemed designed in heaven for a decisive M&M strategy. He capitulated to a morally bankrupt establishment by bailing out the banksters and then caving in to the insurance companies on health care reform.

Obama now has a third opportunity, and like his campaigns against Clinton and McCain, it is partly the result of his own making, be it accidental or deliberate. As Ira Chernus shows in a persuasively argued 19 October essay, Israel's hypocrisy in the so-called peace process has reached stunning proportions. The Palestinians are going out of their way to accommodate Israel in the so-called peace talks, but each time the Palestinians sell out their patrimony by caving in to a new Israeli demand — like recognizing Israel as a Jewish state as opposed to recognition of Israel per se, the Israelis up the ante by inserting poison pills aimed at queering any deal — like saying that settlement expansion in East Jerusalem will not be part of a settlement freeze because East Jerusalem is a part of Israel, a claim not recognized by international law, the United States, or Europe, and then acting as if Israel is the injured party.

Read balance of article….

2010/10/22

Journal: Bank of America into Receivership?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

‘FORECLOSE ON THE FRAUDSTERS'
White Collar Crime Expert Calls For FDIC To Take Control Of Bank Of America

Charging that the ongoing foreclosure fraud epidemic is the work of precisely the same unrepentant bank officers whose fraudulent mortgage schemes crashed the financial system in the first place, two leading critics of the financial industry are calling on the FDIC to put some of the nation's biggest banks into receivership — starting with the Bank of America — and make them clean house.

William K. Black, a former regulator and white-collar crime expert who cracked down on massive fraud during the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, and his fellow economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, L. Randall Wray, write in the Huffington Post that it's time to “foreclose on the foreclosure fraudsters”. They write:

Read on….

2010/10/212010/10/21

Journal: US State Department Clueless on Afghanistan

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Officers Call

humanitarian news and analysis
a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Analysis: Peace moves in Afghanistan as fighting goes on

EXTRACT:

The Taliban have rejected formal contacts with Kabul and dubbed the process “futile propaganda”. They have repeatedly vowed not to engage in any negotiations until all foreign forces leave Afghanistan.

Ordinary Afghans are suffering the most. The conflict has killed and wounded thousands over the past few years, according to the UN.

EXTRACT:

Richard Barrett, coordinator of the UN al-Qaeda-Taliban monitoring team, however, believes the Taliban are “beginning to look at alternatives to fighting”.

The government has dropped the term “moderate Taliban” which it used in previous peace efforts: President Karzai has invited all Taliban, including their reclusive supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, to peace talks.

However, Washington has rejected a role for Mullah Omar in the peace process.

“I can’t imagine Mullah Omar playing a constructive role in Afghanistan… Our focus on Mullah Omar, from a US standpoint, is based on his complicity in support of al-Qaeda that led to the plot of 9/11,” Philip J. Crowley, assistant secretary in the US State Department, told reporters on 14 October.

Read full article…..

Phi Beta Iota: Over the past decade we have observed that at the political level, the US Department of State is next to worthless for two reasons: it does not know the truth of any matter, it simply parrots ideologically designed phrases; and it is consequently incapable of speaking truth to power. The US Government is broken and bankrupt beyond imagination.

2010/10/20

Journal: Nine Under-Reported Stories on Bank Fraud

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Media

Dan Froomkin

froomkin@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Nine Stories The Press Is Underreporting — Fraud, Fraud And More Fraud

If it wasn't already blindingly obvious that pervasive fraud was at the heart of the financial crisis and the ensuing foreclosure catastrophe, you would think that the latest news — that banks have routinely been lying their heads off in the rush to kick homeowners off the properties they fraudulently induced them to buy in the first place — would pretty much clinch it.

And yet the mainstream media still by and large hasn't connected the dots.

What we are seeing all around us are the continued effects of a vast criminal enterprise that has never been brought to account, employing a process that, as University of Texas economist James Galbraith explains, involved the equivalent of counterfeiting, laundering and fencing.

So the person with the right expertise to lead us here is a criminologist — in particular William K. Black, one of the few effective regulators in recent history (during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s), a notorious knocker of heads and currently professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and author of the book, “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One”.

I first interviewed Black in April, and recently checked back in and asked him about this ongoing problem of the mainstream media's inability to properly cover this story. He responded with this breathless and breathtaking list of failings (slightly edited for publication):

WOW. BRUTAL TRUTHS NOT NOT NOT BEING COVERED BY THE CORPORATE MEDIA. Click to Read Original Nine. US Government passivity (one should say: collaboration in crime) is so deep as to be worthy of massive public outrage–if the story were known to the public….

2010/10/19

Journal: US Intelligence Wasting Billions of Dollars

03 Economy, 10 Security, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Officers Call

U.S. intelligence agencies ‘wasted' billions: Senator faults mismanagement

By Shaun Waterman The Washington Times

8:07 p.m., Tuesday, October 12, 2010

U.S. intelligence agencies have wasted many billions of dollars by mismanaging secret, high-technology programs, the deputy chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says.

“The American public would be outraged if they knew,” Sen. Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Republican, told The Washington Times. “Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted.”

Mr. Bond said he was unable to provide details or exact figures because the programs are classified. “I wish I could, but I can't,” he said, adding that “many billions of dollars” were wasted on “just one program” that had been canceled recently.

Read complete article online….

Phi Beta Iota: It is actually tens of billions. If you take General Tony Zinni's estimate that secret intelligence provided him with, “at best” 4% of what he needed as commanding general of the US Central Command (USCENTCOM), then engaged in two wars and several “expeditions,” and you take $75 billion a year as the now public amount, what you end up with is a range: $72 billion wasted at the high end, or our personal estimate, $66 billion wasted at the low end. This is reprehensible. It is also misleading to suggest that the new reviews of over-spending on new initiatives will cut waste. The waste is in the “base” and it is the base that needs to be churned by cutting 20% a year for each of five years running (yes, that does add up to 100%). For a still valid detailed review that had inputs from the top two guys for national security and C4I at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) at the time, see 2000 ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World.

2010/10/18

Journal: Humans Living 50% Beyond Earth Capacity

03 Environmental Degradation, Corruption, Earth Intelligence

UN calls for immediate action to save life on Earth

By Kyoko Hasegawa

Agence France-Presse First Posted 07:22:00 10/19/2010

TOKYO—The world must act immediately to stop the rapid loss of animal and plant species that allow humans to exist, the United Nations warned on Monday at the start of a major summit on biodiversity.

EXTRACT:

At the start of the decade, UN members pledged under the Millennium Development Goals to achieve “a significant reduction” in the rate of wildlife loss by 2010, the International Year of Biodiversity.

Instead, habitat destruction has continued unabated, and some experts now warn that the planet faces its sixth mass extinction phase – the latest since dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.

EXTRACT:

The Earth's 6.8 billion humans are effectively living 50 percent beyond the planet's biocapacity in 2007, according to a new assessment by WWF that said by 2030 humans will effectively need the capacity of two Earths.

2010/10/182010/10/18

Secrecy News Headlines: Iraq + Lies Leading to Iraq

04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Media, Military, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

** DOD SEES NO INTEL COMPROMISE FROM WIKILEAKS DOCS
** REVISITING THE DECISION TO GO TO WAR IN IRAQ

It is to be expected that national intelligence services will sometimes fail to identify and discover a threat to the nation in a timely fashion. But when intelligence warns of a threat that isn’t really there, and then nations go to war to meet the phantom threat — that is a serious, confounding and deeply disturbing problem.

But in a nutshell, that is the story of the war in Iraq, in which the U.S. and its allies attacked Saddam Hussein’s Iraq because of the supposedly imminent threat posed by Saddam’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction — a threat that proved illusory.

A new book published in the United Kingdom called “Failing Intelligence” provides a remarkable account of the British experience of how intelligence on the Iraqi WMD program was shaped and packaged to support the decision to go to war in Iraq. The book’s author, Brian Jones, was the chief specialist in weapons of mass destruction on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff. He was also a skeptic of the stronger claims made about the existence of Iraqi WMD stockpiles. The book documents his mostly unsuccessful attempts to register that skepticism, to moderate the extreme claims made by government officials, and later to hold those officials accountable for their actions.

He provides a detailed first-hand account of how his efforts were consistently deflected in the rush to war, and how intelligence declined into propaganda. It’s a grim but instructive case study in the overlapping failure of intelligence gathering, intelligence production, and intelligence oversight.

The National Security Archive has recently published three richly informative collections of declassified U.S. and British government documents on the lead-up to the Iraq war (including several key documents cited or relied upon by Brian Jones).

“The more deeply the processes of creating the government reports on the alleged Iraqi threat are reconstructed — on both sides of the Atlantic — the more their products are revealed as explicitly aimed at building a basis for war,” wrote John Prados of the National Security Archive and journalist Christopher Ames in an analysis of the documents.

“In the light of a decision process in which no serious consideration was given to any course other than war, the question of whether American and British leaders set out to wage aggressive war has to be squarely faced,” they wrote.

Review: Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush

Review: VICE–Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

Review: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

Review: Shooting the Truth–The Rise of American Political Documentaries

Review: Grand Theft Pentagon–Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror