Category: Ethics

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Berto Jongman: YouTube (1:52) Jeremy Scahill on Significance of Wikileaks as Source on US Dirty Wars and Department of State Being Over-Ruled

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence, YouTube
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Published on Apr 24, 2013

Watch the full interview with Jeremy Scahill on Democracy Now! at http://owl.li/knEmh. Jeremy Scahill, author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield, has spent years covering secret U.S. warfare through drone strikes, targeted killings, and enlisting foreign militias in countries from Somalia to Pakistan. Speaking to Democracy Now!, Scahill says U.S. diplomatic cables released WikiLeaks were instrumental in researching the book. “In terms of understanding how the covert apparatus works, WikiLeaks was indispensable,” he says. “We're going to look back decades from now and realize that because of the release of those documents, there was a huge shift in how we understand some of the more hidden aspects of U.S. policy.”

Watch the 50-minute Part 1 of our interview with Jeremy Scahill at http://owl.li/klnWN.

Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on 1,100+ TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Check out our vast news archive and stream live 8-9am ET at http://www.democracynow.org.

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Michael S. Kearns: Frederick Nietzsche on Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Michael S. Kearns
Michael S. Kearns

On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

Über Wahrheit und Lüge im außermoralischen Sinn (in English: “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense“, also called “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense“[1]) is an (initially) unpublished work of Friedrich Nietzsche written in 1873, one year after The Birth of Tragedy.[2] It deals largely with epistemological questions of truth and language, including the formation of concepts.

Wikipedia / On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

2013-04-23 Nietzsche on Truth and Lies in Nonmoral Sense

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Berto Jongman: Existential Risk to Humanity

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

How are humans going to become extinct?

By Sean Coughlan

BBC News, 24 April 2013

EXTRACT

Dr Bostrom believes we've entered a new kind of technological era with the capacity to threaten our future as never before. These are “threats we have no track record of surviving”.

Lack of control

Likening it to a dangerous weapon in the hands of a child, he says the advance of technology has overtaken our capacity to control the possible consequences.

Experiments in areas such as synthetic biology, nanotechnology and machine intelligence are hurtling forward into the territory of the unintended and unpredictable.

Synthetic biology, where biology meets engineering, promises great medical benefits. But Dr Bostrom is concerned about unforeseen consequences in manipulating the boundaries of human biology.

Nanotechnology, working at a molecular or atomic level, could also become highly destructive if used for warfare, he argues. He has written that future governments will have a major challenge to control and restrict misuses.

There are also fears about how artificial or machine intelligence interact with the external world.

Such computer-driven “intelligence” might be a powerful tool in industry, medicine, agriculture or managing the economy.

But it also can be completely indifferent to any incidental damage.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Existential Risk to Humanity”

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Michael Brenner: Is CIA a National Liability?

Academia, Corruption, Ethics, Government
Dr. Michael Brunner
Dr. Michael Brenner

The C.I.A.: A National Liability?


Senior Fellow, the Center for Transatlantic Relations; Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh

Huffington Post, 22 April 2013

The errant actions of the C.I.A. are by now so evident that they are a staple of Washington conversation. Like the weather, though, it is the topic everybody talks about, but does nothing about. The drone revelations, and the administration's stonewalling, that coincided with John Brennan's confirmation hearings created a stir. That incident struck a nerve because the White House looked ready to extend its claim to a right to kill Americans abroad to the domestic scene. The prospect of moves to bring the Agency to heal quickly died down once he made a vague promise to downsize the drone program. Moreover, no elected official voiced concern about the implications of killing lots of foreigners — even innocent civilians — as we are doing routinely in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.

That may change. Now we have the graphic account of a maverick C.I.A. conducting its own clandestine war against the government of Pakistan without a stipulated authorization. And doing so in a ham-handed manner that helped to ruin whatever small chance remained of extricating ourselves from Afghanistan and neighboring frontier areas of Pakistan without leaving behind a dangerous chaos on both sides of the Durand Line. The detailed picture painted by two authoritative accounts of the notorious Raymond Davis affair, and its clamorous aftermath, provides us with a fine-grained view of studied ignorance and appalling incompetence among C.I.A. leaders in Langley and Islamabad (Mark Mazzetti, Jeremy Scahill). It also describes National Security Council sessions for which ‘dysfunctional' would be a generous term. The slanging matches among cabinet members on matters of sensitivity and importance took place with an absent commander in chief failing to exercise the policy guidance and operational oversight that are his mandate as president.

Continue reading “Michael Brenner: Is CIA a National Liability?”

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Berto Jongman: Connecting Iran & Hezbollah to Boston — Iranian Denial (on Canada) — USA Irony

07 Other Atrocities, Ethics, Government
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Kahlili is  a questionable source but he did predict that Canada would be next. He also has several lines indicating that US intelligence was warned and informed about the threat.

We have to see what happens now in France and the UK. There are indications that Hezbollah networks in Europe have been strengthened and activated. The attack in Bulgaria last year is still not solved and widely debated. Israel wants it to be a Hezbollah attack. If definite proof is found that will be a reason for the EU to blacklist Hezbollah. Over the last few months there has been a tremendous pressure by Israel and the US on the EU to do this.

I have been following this hypothesis since 2004 since I read Kenneth Timmerman's Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran, which included the official minutes of a meeting between Quds Force officials, Ayman al Zawahiri and Imad Mugniyeh discussing the strategy which Kahlili now lays out in his article. I found it a plausible hypothesis but over the last ten years I have never been able to get support for it. Very few people actually had read the book which is a must read if you want to be informed about developments in Iran.

Kahlili has today an article about the panic in Iran about his previous articles saying there was a link to Iran. Today a car bomb attack against the French embassy in Tripoli. If Kahlili is right the next attack should be against a UK target. Even when Kahlili is not trustworthy his articles are having an impact which is why I follow this guy.

Iran planned Boston bombings for 2 years

Source reveals research included high-value targets inside U.S.

Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Forces, ordered reconnaissance and intelligence gathering on various events and public gatherings in the United States years ago, culminating in the bombings at the Boston Marathon one week ago, WND has learned.

According to a source within Iran’s intelligence services, the Islamic regime’s Quds Forces, a special unit of the Revolutionary Guards in charge of extraterritorial operations, have done extensive planning on gatherings, events and high-value targets in the United States for some time, but for two years focused on events such as the Boston Marathon.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Connecting Iran & Hezbollah to Boston — Iranian Denial (on Canada) — USA Irony”

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Greg Palast: Venezuela’s Recent Election — A History of Democracy Against Empire

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence
Greg Palast
Greg Palast

Did Chavez’ Pick Steal the Election in Venezuela?

By Greg Palast for Vice Magazine – Leer el artículo en español aquí.

Tuesday, 23. April 2013

The guy in the cheap brown windbreaker walking up the dirty tenement steps to my New York office looked like a bus driver.

Nicolas Maduro, elected President of Venezuela last Sunday, did indeed drive a bus, then led the drivers’ union, then drove Chávez’ laws through the National Assembly as Venezuela’s National Assembly chief.

And this week, the US State Department is refusing to accept the result, suggesting Maduro hijacked the vote count. But did he?

EXTRACT:

Chávez himself read my findings on potential elections theft – to his nation on his TV show – and then he moved swiftly, establishing an election system that Jimmy Carter, who has headed vote observer teams in 92 nations, called, “an election process that is the best in the world”.

Here’s how it works: every Venezuelan voter gets TWO ballots. One is electronic, the second is a paper print-out of the touch-screen ballot, which the voter reviews, authorises, then places in a locked ballot-box. An astounding 54 percent of the boxes are chosen at random to open and check against the computer tally. It’s as close to a bulletproof count as you can get.

Still, the loser bitched and – his bluff called – was allowed to pick all the precincts he wanted – 12,000 – to add to the audit.

And that’s why the US State Department then has to turn to the threat of bullets and “Third Ring” mayhem in the streets – to undermine the legitimacy of the new Maduro government and signal the US willingness to support a new coup.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Greg Palast: Venezuela's Recent Election — A History of Democracy Against Empire”