Being watched in Europe.
Steve Aftergood: Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Acquisition: Issues for Congress, April 16, 2013
Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Military
Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Acquisition: Issues for Congress, April 16, 2013
Summary
Increasing calls for intelligence support and continuing innovations in intelligence technologies combine to create significant challenges for both the executive and legislative branches. Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems are integral components of both national policymaking and military operations, including counterterrorism operations, but they are costly and complicated and they must be linked in order to provide users with a comprehensive understanding of issues based on information from all sources.
Relationships among organizations responsible for designing, acquiring, and operating these systems are also complicated, as are oversight arrangements in Congress. These complications have meant that even though many effective systems have been fielded, there have also been lengthy delays and massive cost overruns. Uncertainties about the long-term acquisition plans for ISR systems persist even as pressures continue for increasing the availability of ISR systems in current and future military operations and for national policymaking. These challenges have been widely recognized.
A number of independent assessments have urged development of “architectures” or roadmaps setting forth agreed-upon plans for requirements and acquisition and deployment schedules. Most observers would agree that such a document would be highly desirable, but there are significant reasons why developing such an architecture and gaining an enduring consensus remain problematic.
Winslow Wheeler: Pentagon’s budget realities mandate new Defense team
Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
The tired old ideas in SecDef Hagel's first defense budget make clear that he needs new thinking from his DOD team, or a new team.
Pentagon's budget realities mandate new Defense team
By Winslow T. Wheeler – 04/16/13 07:25 PM ET
President Obama's budget for the Department of Defense for 2014 is a strange document. As if to justify its disconnect from reality, someone in the administration advertised it to the press as basic to Obama's overall negotiations with Republicans. If true, that does not augur well for needed change in the Pentagon.
What the Defense budget request really shows is that there is no new thinking in the Pentagon for putting defense spending on a constructive path. There is not even anything that promises a departure from the last-minute, hysterical decision making we observed in the denouement of the 2013 defense budget process.
As submitted, the new Defense plan simply wishes away the statutory reality of sequestration, and to pretend to save money, it trots out only tired old ideas.
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Reference: 100 Critical Points About 9/11
07 Other Atrocities, Articles & Chapters, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military, Worth A Look
100 Critical Points About 9/11
By “Tommy”
Introduction/Challenge to ‘Debunkers’:
It’s time for ‘debunkers’ to showcase their years of hard work. I’m looking for a concise and agreed-upon explanation for each of the following items so that we might forever put to rest these ‘nonsense conspiracy theories’ about 9/11.
Ideally, I’m hoping for a 1-4 sentence long, simplified explanation for each of these listed circumstances, explaining how they fit into the widely-accepted narrative. If any of these conditions were not present as alleged, or if you find them to be irrelevant, just explain a more accurate interpretation of the corresponding data.
Choose any number or set of numbers from the following list. For each point, write what you believe to be the official stance relative to the mainstream “Arab terrorist” narrative. Consistency and consensus is what we’re looking for. The goal of this article is to have each of these points adequately addressed in order to demonstrate, for any future “truthers”, that there is a reasonable explanation for these circumstances that was simply overlooked by the 9/11 Truth movement.
Eventually, I would like to be able to construct a full outline of the ‘debunker’ consensus on these most-relevant aspects of 9/11.
Some of the points, below, may seem familiar. Special thanks to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (VIDEO) and all of the honest institutions and individuals who have made this article possible.
Continue reading “Reference: 100 Critical Points About 9/11”
Marcus Aurelius: How a Single Contractor Spy Turned Pakistani Majority Against the USA
Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military
New York Times, April 9, 2013
How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the United States
The burly American was escorted by Pakistani policemen into a crowded interrogation room. Amid a clatter of ringing mobile phones and cross talk among the cops speaking a mishmash of Urdu, Punjabi and English, the investigator tried to decipher the facts of the case.
“America, you from America?”
“Yes.”
“You’re from America, and you belong to the American Embassy?”
“Yes,” the American voice said loudly above the chatter. “My passport — at the site I showed the police officer. . . . It’s somewhere. It’s lost.”
On the jumpy video footage of the interrogation, he reached beneath his checkered flannel shirt and produced a jumble of identification badges hanging around his neck. “This is an old badge. This is Islamabad.” He showed the badge to the man across the desk and then flipped to a more recent one proving his employment in the American Consulate in Lahore.
“You are working at the consulate general in Lahore?” the policeman asked.
“Yes.”
“As a . . . ?”
“I, I just work as a consultant there.”
“Consultant?” The man behind the desk paused for a moment and then shot a question in Urdu to another policeman. “And what’s the name?”
“Raymond Davis,” the officer responded.
“Raymond Davis,” the American confirmed. “Can I sit down?”
“Please do. Give you water?” the officer asked.
“Do you have a bottle? A bottle of water?” Davis asked.
Another officer in the room laughed. “You want water?” he asked. “No money, no water.”
Another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he understanding everything? And he just killed two men?”
Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of America’s secret war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented new alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A. team set up operations from a safe house in the city.
But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who approached his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and rickshaws. Davis took his semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot through the windshield, shattering the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car and shot several rounds into his back.
He radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the S.U.V. struck and killed a young Pakistani motorcyclist and then drove away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets and a piece of cloth bearing an American flag. The camera inside Davis’s car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken surreptitiously.
SchwartzReport: USA at Bottom in Child Well Being — and Tops in Military Spending, Imprisonment, Divorce, and Obesity
06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude
U.S. Ranks Near Bottom of UNICEF Report on Child Well-being
KATIE MCDONOUGH, Assistant Editor – Salon
The cliché holds that: Our children are our future. If that is true we don't have much of a future. We don't seem to give a damn about our children and, as the UNICEF report makes clear, it shows.
The United States ranked in the bottom four of a United Nations report on child well-being. Among 29 countries, America landed second from the bottom in child poverty and held a similarly dismal position when it came to ‘child life satisfaction.”
Keeping the U.S. company at the bottom of the report, which gauged material well-being, overall health, access to housing and education, were Lithuania, Latvia and Romania, three of the poorest countries in the survey.
Marcus Aurelius: Politically-Correct Pentagon Gets It Half Right — On Religious Counterintelligence
Cultural Intelligence, Government, Ineptitude, Military
New York Post, April 11, 2013, Pg. 27
Perils Of A Politically Correct Pentagon
By Michael A. Walsh
One of the core functions of government is to defend the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic — that’s part of the oath of enlistment that all service personnel take. But only a flinty, clear-eyed — and politically incorrect — assessment of all threats can enable the military can do its job.
Today, however, the brass at the Pentagon seems hell-bent on turning the world's most powerful military into an arm of the PC Police, a fresh field for “politically correct” bureaucrats on which to push their morally blind relativism.
Take the recent Defense Department briefing document that classified Catholics and Evangelical Protestants as “extremists” — the moral equivalent of al Qaeda and the Ku Klux Klan. It also lumped Christians together with free-floating “Islamophobia,” Hamas, Sunni Muslims, the Jewish Defense League and the backwoods Hutaree militia as potential threats to the Republic.
“Religious extremism is not limited to any single religion, ethnic group, or region of the world,” the briefing paper notes, which is true: The military must prepare for every eventuality, however remote, which is why we have plans for war with Canada and France, should the need arise.
But including half the country’s population on a list of potential terrorists does seem a bit extreme — especially when some 40 percent of active-duty military self-identify as evangelicals.
The Army quickly disavowed the presentation and blamed it on faulty “Internet research” by an Army Reserve figure outside the chain of command.
