The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
O presidente boliviano Evo Morales em entrevista coletiva no aeroporto de Viena, na Áustria
Bolivian President Evo Morales at a press conference at the airport in Vienna, Austria
25 truths about the case Evo Morales / Edward Snowden: Case shows that the European Union is a political and diplomatic deception, always subservient to the demands of Washington
Full translation below the line.
Obama is Sending Arms to These Utterly Vicious Thugs and Murderers: Your Tax Dollars at Work
“Two Christians, one of them a priest, have been beheaded by militants because they were suspected of cooperating with the Syrian military, according to an Al-Alam report. A video uploaded to the internet yesterday shows two men with their hands bound, surrounded by dozens of people, many of them armed and cheering in celebration. The two are brutally executed – beheaded with a small combat knife. Echoing previous beheading recorded by insurgents, the head is held up to the cheers of onlookers and then placed on the body.”
I forced myself to watch the video of this atrocity done by these cruel bastards. In the second instance, the killer had to be handed a second knife to finish the job. These idiots appear unable to keep the knives sharp, much prolonging the pain and misery of their victims.
Article and Link to Video of Beheadings – CAUTION – Very Disturbing Imagery:
If you read my essay, A Sense of Proportion. (See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
‘Do Costs of Hunting Terrorists Exceed Benefits?'
Der Spiegel (Germany)
Phi Beta Iota:
See Also:
2012 PREPRINT Foreword to NATO Book on Public Intelligence for Public Health
The United States Seized Confidential Mail Records Of European Parliament
Privacy – Christian Engström: I can’t say I’m surprised – but we’ve got the United States and its security bureaucrats digging through our e-mail in the European Parliament. Mashable reveals that the United States has demanded information from Google about the communications of two Wikileaks activists. One of them is the Icelander Smári McCarthy (pictured).
These events catch our interest here in Brussels, here at the Pirate Party office in the European Parliament. We know Smári, and we have contacted him as a consultant to produce a report on Iceland as an “information paradise” and a conceivable centre for cloud computing (www.islandsofresilience.eu).
Continue reading “Rickard Falgvinge: USA / NSA Raiding Emails of European Parliament”
Patrick Cockburn has written a very important essay on Syria in the London Review of Books (attached below). The essay is aptly titled but has only a few oblique, albeit important, references to Sykes – Picot Agreement, a document some readers may not familiar with. Let's begin with a little background.
The Sykes-Picot agreement (it was a secret agreement concocted by two bureaucrats) is one of the most cynical documents in the creation of the modern Middle East.
The Encylopaedia Britannica describes it accurately as follows:
It was a … “secret convention made during World War I (1916) between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes
For those of you that don't know, the US doesn't spend much time/energy/effort on military strategy and theory. They do spend money on political scientists and engineers to provide a substitute. Regardless, this deficit means the US continually falls victim to strategic errors due to stale military theory.
The big one we recently fell victim to?
The US unilaterally launched an arms race in autonomous weapons (for more on this read my article; Pandora Smiled).
NOTE: In fact, in all of the work I've done for the national security system (CIA, NSA, DoD, JCS, DNI, etc.), I've never run across a true military theorist. They don't exist in the 2 m plus person bureaucracy, despite trillions in spending based on those theories. Go figure?!? It's like building a Large Hadron Collidor without a physicist.
Well, that arms race is starting to bite us back, but not in the way our lazy national security strategists expected. There's a pretty good article in Vanity Fair about cyberwarfare and Iran by Michael Joseph Gross that details how.
It starts with a nice kick at the start, like Brave New War (on its fifth printing), but for cyberware:
The data on three-quarters of the machines on the main computer network of Saudi aramco had been destroyed. Hackers who identified themselves as Islamic and called themselves the Cutting Sword of Justice executed a full wipe of the hard drives of 30,000 aramco personal computers. For good measure, as a kind of calling card, the hackers lit up the screen of each machine they wiped with a single image, of an American flag on fire.
As you can see, if you like my stuff, it's worth the click to read the entire thing. Here's one of the payoffs:
In the U.S., the escalating bug-and-exploit trade has created a strange relationship between government and industry. The U.S. government now spends significant amounts of time and money developing or acquiring the ability to exploit weaknesses in the products of some of America’s own leading technology companies, such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft. In other words: to sabotage American enemies, the U.S. is, in a sense, sabotaging its own companies.
Here's another one from a bug developer:
“You don’t have to be a nation-state to do this,” he says. “You just have to be really smart.”
BTW: the lead graphic is close to an article I did for Wired in 2007, When Bots Attack. From the Vanity Fair article:
It reminded me of this graphic from my Wired article that I thought you would enjoy:
Syria: Reports from Aleppo indicate fighting continues and the opposition has lost ground in outlying areas. The reports also indicate the main government offensive push has not yet begun.
North Korea-Syria: According to South Korean press, on 14 June, a “well-informed diplomatic source” said that “North Korea has dispatched chemical weapon technicians to Syria since the mid 1990s and transferred chemical agent synthesis methods and technology to manufacture warheads for chemical weapon delivery.”
Comment: Last week an unidentified source in a Saudi news outlet said that North Korean chemical warfare officers are assisting the government. There is no confirmation that North Korean advisors are assisting Syrian forces in the current fighting, but North Korea has sold arms, missiles, chemical weapons and nuclear technology to Syria since at least the mid-1980s.
In light of the US decision to arm rebels because it says Syria used chemical weapons, Syria would seem to have little reason to not use chemical weapons more freely, as tactical situations require. The North Koreans could help with that. Plus, North Korea has sent pilots and air defense units in past Middle East conflicts, invariably aiding the side that was fighting against the US and its proxies.
Iran-Syria: The British newspaper The Independent reported on Sunday that its sources said that Iran made a military decision to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support Syrian government forces. The unidentified sources stated the decision was made before the outcome of the presidential election.
Comment: The Independent's report has not been corroborated, but it has gone viral on the Web. If confirmed, it would represent an Iranian escalation move in retaliation for the US decision to arm the Sunni rebels.
Egypt: For the record. President Mursi announced on the 15th, “We decided today to entirely break off relations with Syria and with the current Syrian regime.” He also said he had decided to close down the Syrian Embassy in Cairo. He also called for an end to Hezbollah's presence in Syria.
Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH: Syria Escalates — WWIII Kick-Off?”
