The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Navy Yard shooting: media dump shocking story line
EXTRACT
So what really happened?
No word. No retraction from USA Today. No followup from USA Today or any other major media outlet.
“Just drop it. Who cares? It doesn’t fit with the official narrative. Let it go. Move on. We have a new story line. He never shot anybody in the parking garage. He walked into the building unhindered. So be it…”
Really?
U.S. command in Afghanistan gives Army 60 days to fix or replace intel network
The Pentagon’s main battlefield intelligence network in Afghanistan is vulnerable to hackers — both the enemy or a leaker — and the U.S. command in Kabul will cut it off from the military’s classified data files unless the Army fixes the defects within 60 days, according to an official memo obtained by The Washington Times.
The confidential memo says the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) flunked a readiness test and does not confirm the sources of outside Internet addresses entering the classified database.
Google Begs Court to Reconsider Ruling That Wi-Fi Sniffing Is Wiretapping
David Kravets
WIRED, 25 September 2013
Google is asking a federal appeals court to reconsider a recent ruling finding Google potentially liable for wiretapping when it secretly intercepted data on open Wi-Fi routers.
The Mountain View-based company said the September 10 decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will create “confusion” (.pdf) about which over-the-air signals are protected by the Wiretap Act, including broadcast television.
The case concerns nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The vehicles, which rolled through neighborhoods around the world, were equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But the cars also gathered snippets of content.
The search giant petitioned the San Francisco-based appeals court to reconsider its decision that allowed the case to proceed at trial — a ruling that upended Google’s defense.
Google claimed it is was legal to intercept data from unencrypted, or non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks. Google said open Wi-Fi networks are “radio communications” like AM/FM radio, citizens’ band and police and fire bands, and are “readily accessible” to the general public and exempt from the Wiretap Act — a position the appeals court rejected.
Yet again, the Air Force is trying to get rid of the A-10. The matter has been covered in the defense-specialized, but not the major, news media for about a week.
It comes as no real surprise to long-time observers of the A-10, but it is a very unpleasant surprise to US ground forces who have observed–all too closely–what the A-10 can do on the battlefield.
Air Force management has tried to defuse the growing controversy by fobbing off the plan as “pre-decisional,” but a briefing slide from Air Combat Command's 2015 budget plan shows that a decision has been made. Today, Defense News and others are reporting that Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) has put a hold on the nomination of Deborah James to be Secretary of the Air Force until she “gets answers” on just what the Air Force thinks it is up to.
One of the previous Air Force gambits to unload the A-10 was exposed by author Robert Coram in 2003 in the New York Times. Coram has been following the Air Force's new gambit since before it became public, and he has now written about it again. His new piece points out that the Air Force has been planning to dump the A-10 for some time by engineering things to strip out A-10 training and to push up A-10 operating costs, has tried to mask the strong preference of troops in combat for A-10 support, and has risen to a new level of willfully ignoring the painful lessons of combat.
Find Robert Coram's new commentary on the Air Force's 2013 effort to unload the A-10, “Air Force Brass Ignores War's Lessons to Wipe Out A-10s,” at the new website of the Straus Military Reform Project.
(In case the embedded link above does not work, the url for this commentary is http://www.pogo.org/our-work/
Coram is also the author of “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Air of War,” which addresses the early genesis of the A-10–and of the F-16 and of the F-15.
The Crisis at Fukushima 4 Demands a Global Take-Over
By Harvey Wasserman, WarIsACrime.org
We are now within two months of what may be humankind’s most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There is no excuse for not acting. All the resources our species can muster must be focussed on the fuel pool at Fukushima Unit 4.
Fukushima’s owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), says that within as few as 60 days it may begin trying to remove more than 1300 spent fuel rods from a badly damaged pool perched 100 feet in the air. The pool rests on a badly damaged building that is tilting, sinking and could easily come down in the next earthquake, if not on its own.
Some 400 tons of fuel in that pool could spew out more than 15,000 times as much radiation as was released at Hiroshima.
Continue reading “David Swanson: Harvey Wasserman on Fukushima's Coming Mega Meltdown”
The author is one of the best journalists in the Middle East.
Jonathan Cook
Counterpunch:, 2013-09-18
Nazareth.
President Barack Obama may have drawn his seemingly regretted “red line” around Syria’s chemical weapons, but it was neither he nor the international community that turned the spotlight on their use. That task fell to Israel.
It was an Israeli general who claimed in April that Damascus had used chemical weapons, forcing Obama into an embarrassing demurral on his stated commitment to intervene should that happen.
According to the Israeli media, it was also Israel that provided the intelligence that blamed the Syrian president, Bashar Al Assad, for the latest chemical weapons attack, near Damascus on August 21, triggering the clamour for a US military response.
It is worth remembering that Obama’s supposed “dithering” on the question of military action has only been accentuated by Israel’s “daring” strikes on Syria – at least three since the start of the year.
It looks as though Israel, while remaining largely mute about its interests in the civil war raging there, has been doing a great deal to pressure the White House into direct involvement in Syria.
That momentum appears to have been halted, for the time being at least, by the deal agreed at the weekend by the US and Russia to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.
To understand the respective views of the White House and Israel on attacking Syria, one needs to revisit the US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago.
Israel and its ideological twin in Washington, the neoconservatives, rallied to the cause of toppling Saddam Hussein, believing that it should be the prelude to an equally devastating blow against Iran.
Israel was keen to see its two chief regional enemies weakened simultaneously. Saddam’s Iraq had been the chief sponsor of Palestinian resistance against Israel. Iran, meanwhile, had begun developing a civilian nuclear programme that Israel feared could pave the way to an Iranian bomb, ending Israel’s regional monopoly on nuclear weapons.
The neocons carried out the first phase of the plan, destroying Iraq, but then ran up against domestic opposition that blocked implementation of the second stage: the break-up of Iran.
The consequences are well known. As Iraq imploded into sectarian violence, Iran’s fortunes rose. Tehran strengthened its role as regional sponsor of resistance against Israel – or what became Washington’s new “axis of evil” – that included Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Israel and the US both regard Syria as the geographical “keystone” of that axis, as Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, told the Jerusalem Post this week, and one that needs to be removed if Iran is to be isolated, weakened or attacked.
But Israel and the US drew different lessons from Iraq. Washington is now wary of its ground forces becoming bogged down again, as well as fearful of reviving a cold war confrontation with Moscow. It prefers instead to rely on proxies to contain and exhaust the Syrian regime.
Israel, on the other hand, understands the danger of manoeuvring its patron into a showdown with Damascus without ensuring this time that Iran is tied into the plan. Toppling Assad alone would simply add emboldened jihadists to the troubles on its doorstep.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Israel Still Angling for Attacks on Syria and Iran”
A Lament for the State of Analysis Tech in Economics
It seems like state-of-the-art analysis tools would be a priority in the data-rich field of finance. That’s why it is startling to learn that the technology being used by economic analysts and consultants seems to be stuck in the era of Windows 95. About Data shares a data-loving former economist’s lament in, “Bridging Economics and Data Science.”
Blogger Sam Bhagwat majored in economics because he was intrigued by innovative uses of data in that field; for example, a professor of his had gleaned conclusions about European patent law from a set of 19th century industrial-fair records. As he progressed, though, Bhagwat came to the disappointing realization that his field still relies on technology for which “outdated” is putting it mildly. He writes:
“When I graduated, the questions had changed, but the fundamental tools of analysis remained constant. Half of my classmates, including me, were headed to consulting or investment banking. These are ‘spreadsheet monkey’ positions analyzing client financial and operational data.
“In terms of relationship-building, this is great. Joining high strategy or high finance, you walk through the halls of power and learn to feel comfortable there. But in terms of technical skill-set, not so great. You begin to specialize in spreadsheets, a tool which hasn’t significantly improved since 1995.
“For someone like me, who wants to solve the most interesting problems out there, dealing with gigabytes and terabytes of data, realizing this was bitter medicine. Computational data analysis has changed a lot in the last twenty years, but my career track — economics, consulting, finance — hadn’t.”
So that is how one inquiring mind decided to make the leap from economics to data science. Bhagwat says he taught himself programming so he could pursue work he actually found challenging. I wonder, though—will he use his dual expertise to help bridge the gap between the two disciplines, or has he moved on, never to look back?
Cynthia Murrell, September 18, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
