In a very oddly worded public response to a question posed to him during an online interview, Barack Obama dances around the topic of using military drones to kill Americans inside of the United States. Watch the following response and as you do, keeping in mind at no point does President Obama simply say NO we would never do that…
Phi Beta Iota: What is frightening is that Obama is incapable of saying, simply, “NO, we will not use drones to kill people inside the USA.” Taken in combination with the various “suicidings” across the USA, the “natural gas” explosions, and many unexplained “disappearances,” an outside observer would be hard-pressed to offer a vote of confidence for this Administration's grasp of the “rule of law.” John Brennan was told, in writing, to get the drones off the table in his opening remarks. He refused to do that. For that reason alone (the willful confirmation that he WANTS the drones unfettered), he should not be confirmed and Congress should mandate an end to the CIA drone program — transfer all of the drones to the military, and turn them into UNARMED organic reconnaissance assets within the Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) Program.
Both the critics and the admirers of the Central Intelligence Agency have tended to portray it as an all-knowing, all-powerful, invulnerable entity and to exaggerate the ability of America's spies to determine the outcome of developments around the world. An American reporter interviewing an ordinary citizen—or an official—in Cairo, Buenos Aires, or Seoul may hear that “everyone knows” that the CIA was behind the latest rise in the price of vegetables or the recent outbreak of flu among high-school kids. It’s like you Americans aren't aware of what's obvious (wink, wink).
New histories of the agency, drawing on recently released classified information and memoirs by retired spies, provide a more complex picture of the CIA, its effectiveness, and its overall power, suggesting that at times Langley was manned not by James Bond clones but by a bunch of keystone cops. My favorite clandestine CIA operation, recounted in Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, involves its 1994 surveillance of the newly appointed American ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee. When the agency bugged her bedroom, it picked up sounds that led agents to conclude that the ambassador was having a lesbian love affair with her secretary. Actually, she was petting her two-year-old black standard poodle.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees this week arguing that unless their budgets are augmented with still more money they will hollow out the armed forces. Most in the press and Congress didn't read their assertions that way, but two near simultaneous reports that provide some meaningful context for the Chiefs' demands recently became public. They put the Chiefs' behavior in a very different light.
America's generals are just as morally bankrupt as Congress.
BY WINSLOW WHEELER
Foreign Policy | FEBRUARY 14, 2013
I read two critically important reports this week on the impact that sequestration would have on national defense. That possible reduction in military spending — $48 billion, or 7.4 percent of the $645 billion currently appropriated for fiscal year 2013 — is being characterized by the stampede of hysterics who run the Pentagon as the virtual end of national security as we know it. What these two reports show is that we should now consider the Pentagon as morally and mentally broken as Congress.
The first report, by Chuck Spinney, who spent a few decades inside the Department of Defense evaluating budgets, weapons, and bureaucratic behavior, was published at Counterpunch and Time's Battleland blog. The second was a Congressional Research Service report by Amy Belasco, who has spent the last few decades at CRS and the Congressional Budget Office parsing defense budgets and their implications.
Both authors indirectly address the testimony this week of the deputy secretary of defense and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff at the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. To a man, they lent all the rhetorical and substantive support they could muster to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's depiction of sequestration as “doomsday” and to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey's description of it as an “unprecedented crisis” — a characterization he augmented by adding that he was “jumping up and down.” He truly was.
Put simply, the chiefs and their ostensible civilian masters plan to implement the cuts mandated by law in the most destructive, negative way possible, which has the convenient effect — for them — of pushing Congress and the White House to cough up more money. According to their testimony, the Army will reduce training levels to such a low point that units cannot be sent to Afghanistan. The Navy plans to postpone, if not cancel, maintenance for ships in a fleet already at historic lows for upkeep and repair, and deployments to the Persian Gulf have already been postponed. The Air Force is going to further reduce its historically low training of pilots, and maintenance will also hit new lows. Throughout the services, civilian maintainers, auditors, and program overseers will be furloughed, aircraft will be grounded, and ships held in port.
To understand the scale of the problem, you only need to look at the numbers.
For example, the mobile giant Ericsson has been tracking the growth in mobile traffic for years. But 2009 was a landmark year, according to the firm’s Patrik Cerwall: “That year saw more data traffic than voice traffic over the mobile networks”. And the data traffic has been doubling every year since – far outracing Cooper’s law.
The big accelerator was the smartphone, which suddenly made the data-carrying capacity of 3G networks attractive. “People didn’t really understand the benefit of 3G until the app concept changed everything,” Cerwall elaborates.
Data-hungry video is also driving demand. Networking firm Cisco has just reported video downloads last year crossed the 50% threshold, accounting for half of all data transferred over the mobile networks.
At the moment, there are around 1.1 billion smart phones across the world; by 2018 (the horizon for the Ericsson forecasts) that will treble to 3.3 billion. If you think that in 2012, smartphones represented only 18% of total global handsets, but represented 92% of total global traffic, you begin to see the problem.
And the growth will continue relentlessly, according to the Cisco analysis. In 2012, for example, global mobile data traffic grew 70% from 2011, to 885 petabytes per month – that is 885 million gigabytes of data. And in the next five years, it is expected to increase 13-fold, eventually reaching 11.2 exabytes (11, 200 million gigabytes) per month by 2017, according to Cisco.
‘We reached a point in the fighting, in spring 2012, when we needed proper support. We needed heavy machine guns, real weapons. Money was never an issue: how much do you want? Fifty million dollars, a hundred million dollars – not a problem. But heavy weapons were becoming hard to find: the Turks – and without them this revolution wouldn’t have started – wanted the Americans to give them the green light before they would allow us to ship the weapons. We had to persuade Saad al-Hariri, Rafic Hariri’s son and a former prime minister, to go to put pressure on the Saudis, to tell them: “You abandoned the Sunnis of Iraq and you lost a country to Iran. If you do the same thing again you won’t only lose Syria, but Lebanon with it.”’ The idea was that the Saudis in turn would pressure the Americans to give the Turks the green light to allow proper weapons into the country.
Now suddenly, while on the ground the revolution was still in the hands of small bands of rebels and activists, a set of outside interests started conspiring to direct events in ways amenable to them. There were the Saudis, who never liked Bashar but were wary of more chaos in the Middle East. The Qataris, who were positioning themselves at the forefront of the revolutions of the Arab Spring, using their formidable TV networks to mobilise support and their vast wealth to fund illicit weapons shipments to the Libyans. And of course there were the French and the Americans.
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At the end of January, I met a friend of Abu Abdullah; he’d once been a wealthy man, a merchant, but he’d seen his wealth dwindle as all his businesses came to a halt. His lips were quivering with anger and he kept thumping the table with his fist.
‘Why are the Americans doing this to us? They told us they wouldn’t send us weapons until we united. So we united in Doha. Now what’s their excuse? They say it’s because of the jihadis but it’s the jihadis who are gaining ground. Abu Abdullah is $400,000 in debt and no one is sending him money anymore. It’s all going to the jihadis. They have just bought a former military camp from a battalion that was fighting the government. They went to them, gave them I don’t know how many millions and bought the camp. Maybe we should all become jihadis. Maybe then we’ll get money and support.’
Italy's former intelligence chief Nicolo Pollari has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in the rendition of a terror suspect.
The court in Milan also sentenced his former deputy Marco Mancini to nine years in jail over the 2003 kidnapping.
Italy's courts have already convicted in absentia 22 CIA agents over the same case. The abducted Egyptian cleric said he was flown to Egypt and tortured.
The 2nd half of this article below is about a a 1972 incident in New Orleans about another black, a vet, who loses it from constant injustice, and ends up killing a lot of cops and civilians before they get him. What amazes me is he has virtually no gun training, since he's Navy, yet he's an amazing shot, who himself avoids the bullets most of the time:
