In this incredibly powerful interview with Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a wealth of info is mined regarding the real parties involved in the Benghazi stand down and the truth behind the to be released 9/11 report of which 28 pages have not been released to the public for obvious reasons.
On March 4, 2014, the Administration submitted its Fiscal Year 2015 budget request, including a base funding request of $45.6 billion for the National Intelligence Program (NIP), and a base funding request of $13.3 billion for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP). On June 30, the DNI submitted an updated FY2015 budget request of $49.4 billion for the NIP including funding for overseas contingency operations. An updated budget request figure for the MIP has not yet been disclosed.
Phi Beta Iota: We consider these figures to be severely deceptive and roughly 70% of the actual combined total budget for green and black intelligence capabilities that are secret, toxic, and a mix of benignly worthless (standing armies of ignorant analysts, collection that is not processed) and pathologically dangerous (drones, renditions, covert operations, subsidies to foreign intelligence services). Our best guess of the actual total US secret intelligence budget remains US$100 billion per year, inclusive of thousands of private sector “intelligence” capabilities (many of them “open source” and extremely mediocre) that are embedded within acquisition and other contracts, all out of control and of dubious value.
President Obama said not long ago that his foreign policy principle was “not doing stupid stuff.” At about the same time his State Department and CIA were conspicuously guiding and supporting a coup d'etat in Ukraine that was the exact contradiction to the Obama policy statement. The Ukrainian Parliament's first post-coup act was to pass a resolution outlawing the use of the Russian language in the Ukraine, which is the native language of more than a fifth of the population of a country that has always been intimately involved in the history, religion and culture of the Russian nation. Nothing could have been more stupid.
What kind of country goes around bombing people with no strategic purpose and with little motive other than to “flex muscles” and “show toughness”? This answer also seems clear: one that is deeply insecure about its ongoing ability to project strength (and one whose elites benefit in terms of power and profit from endless war). … Is it even possible to imagine more potent evidence of systemic media failure than that (or systemic success, depending on what you think the media’s goal is)? But in terms of crazed irrationality, how far away from that false belief is the current fear on the part of Americans that there are ISIS sleeper cells “living in the United States”? … For those who keep running around beating their chests talking about the imperative to “destroy ISIS”: will that take more or less time than it’s taken to “destroy the Taliban”?
“You're still a superpower,” a top diplomat from one of America's most dependable Middle Eastern allies said to me in July of this year, “but you no longer know how to act like one.” He was reflecting on America's position in the world almost halfway into President Barack Obama's second term. Fresh in his mind was the extraordinary string of errors (schizophrenic Egypt policy, bipolar Syria policy), missteps (zero Libya post-intervention strategy, alienation of allies in the Middle East and elsewhere), scandals (spying on Americans, spying on friends), halfway measures (pinprick sanctions against Russia, lecture series to Central Americans on the border crisis), unfulfilled promises (Cairo speech, pivot to Asia), and outright policy failures (the double-down then get-out approach in Afghanistan, the shortsighted Iraq exit strategy).
“You're having the core conversation of our time.”
That was the message delivered on Tuesday by author Naomi Klein to participants of a conference whose focus is on “concrete steps towards a society beyond the imperative of growth.”
Today's news brought yet more stories of police shootings of people whose only real crime seems to be being black. It made me wonder how many people are killed by the police each year. It turns out that is a very hard number to pin down. So I went looking to see if anyone had written something recently about this! . Here's what I found. I was amazed to learn were have 17,000 different police agencies.
Major CDC Cover-up on Connection of Vaccines and Autism is About to Blow Open Like Mount Vesuvius
This story about a very big cover-up on the link between vaccines and autism committed by the CDC has been making the rounds on alternative media for the last ten days. The implications to be seen in this story so far are like the loud rumblings of a volcano about to blow. But if this volcano of a cover-up does blow open very soon into the mainstream, as is most likely – since alternative media outlets have reported on massive lawsuits being planned – given the connection, in this case to African-American children, this promises to rain down on the public a greater-than-ever-before awareness of corporatist-government collusion and corruption occurring on a massive, never-seen-before scale. Until now, the identity of the CDC whistle-blower was kept a secret, but his name is now out (highlights are mine):