Journal ISSN 1078-1935 – Page 2095 – Public Intelligence Blog

CIA's Secret Security Group Emerges From Shadows

High-risk assignments draw many from U.S. Special Forces

By Greg Miller and Julie Tate

The rapid collapse of a U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya exposed the vulnerabilities of State Department facilities overseas. But the CIA’s ability to fend off a second attack that same night provided a glimpse of a key element in the agency’s defensive arsenal: a secret security force created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies.

The GRS, as it is known, is designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in high-risk outposts.

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Bodyguard details have become so essential to espionage that the CIA has overhauled its training program at the Farm — its case officer academy in southern Virginia — to teach spies the basics of working with GRS teams.

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“They don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals and they’re not writing up intelligence reports,” a former U.S. intelligence official said. Their main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down informants and provide an “envelope” of security, the former official said, all while knowing that “if push comes to shove, you’re going to have to shoot.”

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Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: CIA Self-Destruction Continues…”

2012/12/272012/12/27

SchwartzReport: China’s Contradictions — High Speed Rail Up, Wealthy Chinese Move to USA

02 China, 03 Economy

World's Longest High-speed Train Opens in China

The Associated Press/Washington Post

We're spending our money in Afghanistan, making their ruling elite, and ours literally pots of money. Meanwhile the Chinese are doing what….? That's right building high speed rail. Meanwhile our passenger trains, when you can find one, average a searing 59 miles an hour across tracks laid when your grandfather was a boy.

BEIJING — China on Wednesday opened the world’s longest high-speed rail line that more than halves the time required to travel from the country’s capital in the north to Guangzhou, an economic hub in southern China.

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Trains on the latest high-speed line will initially run at 300 kph (186 mph) with a total travel time of about eight hours. Before, the fastest time between the two cities by train was more than 20 hours.

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Rich Chinese Flee, Bringing Their Wealth With Them

ROBERT FRANK, Reporter & Editor – CNBC

The Chinese are transforming themselves economically. But they are using a political system to do it that people flee when they are able. This is a very important insight to keep in mind. Ironically many of these fleeing Chinese end up in the U.S., bring their money with them.

Most countries worry about brain drain. China is worried about millionaire drain.

A new report in China shows that 150,000 Chinese – most of them wealthy – emigrated to other countries in 2011. While that number may not seem high for a country of more than a billion people, the flight of China's richest – and the offshoring of their fortunes – could cost the country jobs and economic growth, according to the study from the Center for China and Globalization and the Beijing Institute of Technology.

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2012/12/262012/12/26

Koko: Human Concepts of Time Improving

Earth Intelligence

Environment May Be Key to Human Evolution

Charles Choi

LiveScience, 25 December 2012

At Olduvai Gorge, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment, researchers added.

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The researchers discovered that Olduvai Gorge abruptly and routinely fluctuated between dry grasslands and damp forests about five or six times during a period of 200,000 years.

“I was surprised by the magnitude of changes and the rapid pace of the changes we found,” Freeman told LiveScience. “There was a complete restructuring of the ecosystem from grassland to forest and back again, at least based on how we interpret the data. I've worked on carbon isotopes my whole career, and I've never seen anything like this before.”

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2012/12/26

Dolphin: Dishonesty was on display everywhere in 2012

Cultural Intelligence

Old news but always worth revisiting.

Dishonesty was on display everywhere in 2012

USA Today, 26 December 2012

EXTRACT:

“Cheating creates its own gravitational force. The very act of cheating and getting away with it significantly increases the chances you'll do it again,” says Michael Josephson, president of the Josephson Institute of Ethics in Los Angeles. In its annual survey of high school students, 51% admitted cheating on an exam in the past year.

Phi Beta Iota: Cheating by individuals is the enabler of cheating by institutions. The consequences are global — poverty, disease, environmental degradation, wars, financial implosions, weather modification — all from a lack of ethics.

See Also:

David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (Mariner Books, 2004)

Michael Sandel, Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard University Press, 2006)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

2012/12/262012/12/27

Gold Transformer: Three Wild-Ass Brain and Soul Teasers

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

From the alternative reality group, three brain stretchers…..note how ethics is the key to quantum leap.

Geoengineering Chemtrails HAARP World Orders Times Lines Ascension

The-Uncommitted-Investigator

Extra-Dimensional and Extra-Terrestial Existences

EXTRACTS FROM GEOENGINEERING

Stellar Evolution is Backwards!

In Reciprocal System (RS) physics, Larson comes up with a better structure for the atom, based on the concept of scalar motion, and as a natural consequence of that structure determines two “destructive limits” for atoms: a thermal limit and an age limit. The thermal limit is the common limit used in thermo-nuclear reactions, but the age limit is unknown to conventional science and concerns the capture of charged, electron neutrinos by the atom that create isotopic mass.7 When the age limit is reached,8 an element becomes radioactive and explodes. When Larson applied those concepts to astronomy, he found a different mechanism for stellar combustion based on those limits. Combustion is based on exploding atoms—fission, not fusion—and that led to

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When you consider these consequences from a corrected stellar evolution, one conclusion is obvious: global warming is not due to flatulent cows, but to the fact the sun is getting hotter, and will continue to get hotter.

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In my opinion, this solar transition is the “harvest” or “ascension” to a new state for life on Earth—not just man—all life on Earth. All the physical properties get “kicked up a notch,” as Emeril would say, commonly known as a “higher density” or a “higher dimension.”

Continue reading “Gold Transformer: Three Wild-Ass Brain and Soul Teasers”

2012/12/26

David Isenberg: Spanking Bill Kristol — and Other Neo-Cons

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Military

Take My Neocon — Please

In case you are not aware, Jews have long been drawn to and practiced humor. It is just a plain matter of fact that in any listing of top U.S. komikers (comics) over half of them are going to be Jewish. Think Bud Abbott, Woody Allen, Hank Azaria, Bea Arthur, Lewis Black, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, George Burns, Billy Crystal, Al Franken, The Three Stooges, and The Marx Brothers, to name a very few.

So, as a duly certified member of the Chosen, allow me to explain what some of my fellow tribe members have been doing lately to bring comic relief to the American public. Please note that these are not the usual standup suspects we are accustomed to seeing on comedy clubs and late night talk shows.

No, these are a distinct subcategory of the Jocus Judaica species; otherwise known as Jewish neocons, a distinct, but voluble segment of the overall neocon community.

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Reading between the not so thinly veiled lines (to paraphrase from the Wizard of Oz; pay no attention to the neocon hiding behind the accusation of anti-Semitism) the criticism of Hagel comes down to the fact that he may be reluctant, perhaps even unwilling, -Oh Dear Yahweh! – to attack another Middle Eastern country, like, oh say, Iran.

Speaking as both a Jew and American military veteran if that is the mark of an anti-Semite we need more of them.

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2012/12/262012/12/26

Richard Wright: Friedman on Hagel — Zionists Backing Down? Steele Overview & Remember the USS Liberty

Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Media, Military

Given the out of control slander and vicious opposition of the Zionists and the neo-cons to Chuck Hagel's leaked nomination prospects, this comes as a pleasant surprise.

Give Chuck a Chance

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

New York Times December 25, 2012

In case you haven’t heard, President Obama is considering appointing Chuck Hagel, a former United States senator from Nebraska and a Purple Heart winner, as the next secretary of defense — and this has triggered a minifirefight among Hagel critics and supporters. I am a Hagel supporter. I think he would make a fine secretary of defense — precisely because some of his views are not “mainstream.” I find the opposition to him falling into two baskets: the disgusting and the philosophical. It is vital to look at both to appreciate why Hagel would be a good fit for Defense at this time.

The disgusting is the fact that because Hagel once described the Israel lobby as the “Jewish lobby” (it also contains some Christians). And because he has rather bluntly stated that his job as a U.S. senator was not to take orders from the Israel lobby but to advance U.S. interests, he is smeared as an Israel-hater at best and an anti-Semite at worst. If ever Israel needed a U.S. defense secretary who was committed to Israel’s survival, as Hagel has repeatedly stated — but who was convinced that ensuring that survival didn’t mean having America go along with Israel’s self-destructive drift into settling the West Bank and obviating a two-state solution — it is now.

I am certain that the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes on Israel — that it is surrounded by more implacable enemies than ever and needs and deserves America’s backing. But, at the same time, this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account by slowing its self-isolating settlement adventure. And it’s going to get worse. Israel’s friends need to understand that the center-left in Israel is dying. The Israeli election in January will bring to power Israeli rightists who never spoke at your local Israel Bonds dinner. These are people who want to annex the West Bank. Bibi Netanyahu is a dove in this crowd. The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth. But most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews prefer to stick their heads in the sand, because confronting Israel is so unpleasant and politically dangerous. Hagel at least cares enough about Israel to be an exception.

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Continue reading “Richard Wright: Friedman on Hagel — Zionists Backing Down? Steele Overview & Remember the USS Liberty”