Al Jazeera exclusive: The investigation into the death of al-Qaeda's leader blames top leaders for ‘gross incompetence'.
EXTRACT:
The Commission’s 336-page report is scathing, holding both politicians and the military responsible for “gross incompetence”, leading to “collective failures” that allowed Bin Laden to escape detection, and the United States to perpetrate “an act of war”.
This CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force warns that “escalating attacks on countries, companies, and individuals, as well as pervasive criminal activity, threaten the security and safety of the Internet.” The number of “state-backed operations continues to rise, and future attacks will become more sophisticated and disruptive,” argues the Task Force report, Defending an Open, Global, Secure, and Resilient Internet.
With the ideal vision of an open and secure Internet increasingly at risk, the Task Force urges the United States, with its friends and allies, “to act quickly to encourage a global cyberspace that reflects shared values of free expression and free markets.”
The Task Force concludes that “the most pressing current threat is not likely to be a single, sudden attack that cripples the United States,” but rather “a proliferation of attacks that steal strategically important or valuable data and destroy confidence in the safety and trustworthiness of the Internet.” The U.S. administration has named China as a major source of cyber espionage, and the Task Force also finds China to be a serious cause of concern.
As Balko demonstrates in a long excerpt from his book, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, published in Salon, the incident described below, plus innumerable incidents of police extreme, overwhelming and excessive violence, are not rising due to a few bad apples and rogue cops, but rather to a much deeper “institutional” problem. That's one and polite way to put it. But it begs the question of why there is an “institutional” problem. Maybe this is a symptom of something deeper still: that the 1% who control the “institutions” want excessiveness from a highly militarized police who are officially directed to shoot first and ask questions later in order to condition the 99% to be intimidated and thus controllable as economic conditions the 1% created seriously deteriorate. A military and militarized police force's sole duty during economic collapse will be to protect the 1% from the 99%. But to do that job well requires training and conditioning, hence such incidents can be expected to occur for that purpose much more frequently.
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“Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit.
Several months earlier at a local bar, Fairfax County, Virginia, detective David Baucum overheard the thirty-eight-year-old optometrist and some friends wagering on a college football game. “To Sal, betting a few bills on the Redskins was a stress reliever, done among friends,” a friend of Culosi’s told me shortly after his death. “None of us single, successful professionals ever thought that betting fifty bucks or so on the Virginia–Virginia Tech football game was a crime worthy of investigation.” Baucum apparently did. After overhearing the men wagering, Baucum befriended Culosi as a cover to begin investigating him. During the next several months, he talked Culosi into raising the stakes of what Culosi thought were just more fun wagers between friends to make watching sports more interesting. Eventually Culosi and Baucum bet more than $2,000 in a single day. Under Virginia law, that was enough for police to charge Culosi with running a gambling operation. And that’s when they brought in the SWAT team.
On the night of January 24, 2006, Baucum called Culosi and arranged a time to drop by to collect his winnings. When Culosi, barefoot and clad in a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his house to meet the man he thought was a friend, the SWAT team began to move in. Seconds later, Det. Deval Bullock, who had been on duty since 4:00 AM and hadn’t slept in seventeen hours, fired a bullet that pierced Culosi’s heart.
Sal Culosi’s last words were to Baucum, the cop he thought was a friend: “Dude, what are you doing?”
The Federal Reserve’s QE3 has flooded the stock and bond markets with low-interest liquidity that makes it profitable for speculators to borrow cheap and make arbitrage gains buying stocks and bonds yielding higher dividends or interest. In principle, one could borrow at 0.15 percent (one sixth of one percent) and buy up stocks, bonds and real estate throughout the world, collecting the yield differential as arbitrage. Nearly all the $800 billion of QE2 went abroad, mainly to the BRICS for high-yielding bonds (headed by Brazil’s 11% and Australia’s 5+%), with the currency inflow for this carry trade providing a foreign-exchange bonus as well.
This seems like a relatively simple question. For different reasons, both POTUS and Congress apaprently seek to break the military. POTUS' view, arguably rooted in anticolonialism, focuses on reducing the US, to include the military, to the status of the Third World, while in Congressional (read: Tea Party) minds, the military is the principal cash cow and thus acceptable/desirable collateral damage in the pell-mell races for (1) “deficit reduction” and (2) some strange version of a “peace dividend” to reallocate dollars from “makers” to “takers.” Sooner or later, the chickens will come home to roost, another Task Force Smith will occur, etc.
Aviation Week & Space Technology, July 7, 2013 , Pg. 14
Up Front
Searching For Straight Answers
Why do Obama and Congress refuse to help the Pentagon plan for budget cuts?
A new book reveals that intelligence tactics devised for use abroad are employed against America's own citizens
Henry Porter
The Observer, Saturday 6 July 2013
Out of the blue, and right from the heart of the American military establishment – the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California, no less – comes a coup of analysis that has a really important message for the British and American public. It is that the counterinsurgency wars of the past decade have not only been a bloody failure, but that the tactics, methods and hardware of these wars have inevitably ended up being used against the public at home. Think of mass surveillance, of drones, secret courts, the militarisation of the police, detention without trial.
Hannah Arendt identified “the boomerang effect of imperialism on the homeland” in TheOrigins of Totalitarianism, but the academic Douglas Porch has used the history of Britain, France and America to demonstrate that all the rhetoric about bringing, respectively, Britishness, liberté and freedom and democracy to the “little brown people who have no lights” is so much nonsense and that these brutal adventures almost never work and degrade the democracies that spawned them in the first place.
We always vaguely knew that there must be link between what our forces were doing abroad and what was going on at home – did we not? But what Porch does so crisply in Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War is to underwrite Arendt's insight with scholarship that goes back two-and-a-half centuries, taking in numerous forgotten conflicts. For example, he shows how intelligence techniques, devised by the US army in the Philippines war, were used on US unions and even suspected “reds” in Hollywood.
