A retiring Marine colonel who commanded a special operations unit in Africa during the deadly 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, told Congress on Wednesday that an elite four-man team under his command was kept in the Libyan capital that night to prevent attacks there.
Col. George Bristol’s statement corroborates previous testimony by his subordinate officer, Army Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson. Gibson told the House Armed Services Committee in June that, contrary to previous media reports, he was not ordered to “stand down” by higher headquarters in response to the Benghazi attacks. Rather, Gibson’s team was told to stay in the city of Tripoli to defend Americans there in the event of additional attacks and to help survivors being evacuated from Benghazi, Bristol said.
Architects & Engineers for 911 Truth — serious people on a serious mission.
The 9/11 Consensus Panel, co-founded by David Ray Griffin, lends its support to the ReThink911 Ad campaign; Scale models of the WTC complex highlight the new items added to the AE911Truth Store; Senator Tammy Baldwin and other politicians struggle to respond to key 9/11 questions from CSPAN callers; ReThink911 is now approved for ads in San Francisco, London and Sydney – donate to make them a reality!
Are healthcare costs in developed countries simply opportunistic? One Indian healthcare entrepreneur thinks so.
Devi Shetty, heart surgeon turned businessman, has a vision for India — cut-price, life-saving surgery for those who cannot afford it otherwise. Shetty has created 21 healthcare centers around India with a difference; by trimming down operational costs, the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery has been sliced in half in the last two decades.
In the surgeon’s centers, cardiac surgery costs 95,000 rupees ($1,583).
In the swirl of information about the NSA, some interesting chunks of data get lost. I am not referencing the fascinating assertion that the NSA cannot search its own emails. (You can find the details of this possibly inaccurate but quite amusing story at http://goo.gl/2Lx0hs.
Like Fish & Wildlife, the NSA has a youth communication program in place. One of the facets of this initiative is called Change the World. The subsite of NSA.gov (http://www.nsa.gov/change/index.shtml) provides information about an online competition for those in middle and high school. There is a word puzzle, a “print your own cipher disk”, and information about substitution ciphers. (A substitution cipher is a method of encryption by which units of plain text are replaced by text according to an assembly recipe. For more information Princeton University offers additional information at http://goo.gl/HF3J5X.) The NSA site does not explain this to the 6th to 12th graders. I assume that any child looking at NSA.gov will have a working knowledge of cipher methodologies.
The most interesting item on the NSA subsite offers:
Be a savvy social networker! First thing for any savvy social networker is to access your own privacy and security settings so that only people you know can access your social networking site. If you are involved in social gaming with people you don’t know, stay in control and stay comfortable. Stay in disguise and if you suspect someone is “gaming” you or asking too many personal questions, tell your parents or a trusted adult. Keep track of what the person is saying, but do not communicate or send chats to them. Do you download “cheat” programs that promise information to how to perform better or beat a game? Sometimes cheat downloads are used to implant a virus or malware on your computer!
The footer to the Web page contains the standard NSA tag and a 2009 date stamp.
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IMHO, bad call by the AG. What Snowden did could very easily cause US deaths if not immediately then sometime down the road. I see no fundamental difference between him and Julius and Ethel Rosenburg, the two WWII traitors who compromised the atomic bomb to the Soviets and were later tried, convicted, and executed. How would the AG conceivably explain guaranteeing Snowden's life to the loved ones of some future casualty of his treachery? A lot of people have spent a lot of their lives, and some have lost their lives, protecting classified information. This makes a mockery of all that.)
