WASHINGTON — Defense Department officials are negotiating to buy and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of an Afghan war memoir they say contains intelligence secrets, according to two people familiar with the dispute.
The publication of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony A. Shaffer, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, has divided military security reviewers and highlighted the uncertainty about what information poses a genuine threat to security.
FrontlineSMS is an open-source software that enables two-way text messaging between cheap mobile phones and laptops over cellular (GSM) networks.
FrontlineSMS: Credit
FrontlineSMS:Credit aims to make every formal financial service available to the entrepreneurial poor in 160 characters or less. By meshing the functionality of FrontlineSMS with local mobile payment systems, implementing institutions will be able to provide a full range of customizable services, from savings and credit to insurance and payroll.
FrontlineSMS: Learn (not finished yet) FrontlineSMS:Learn leverages ubiquitous mobile technology—SMS or “text messaging”—to support and strengthen education and training initiatives and human capacity development and make learning opportunities available anytime and anywhere. Using the application knowledge and higher-order reasoning and decision-making skills can be developed, reinforced and assessed leading to improved transfer of learning, increased knowledge retention, long-term changes in behavior and, ultimately, improvements in service delivery.
FrontlineSMS: Legal (new)
These low-cost systems enable remote coordination between informal dispute resolution workers and the formal legal system, improving service delivery, range, and cost efficiency.
In addition to this core platform, FrontlineSMS:Legal is developing additional plug-ins that will add value to local organizations working to provide legal services. FrontlineSMS:Legal products offer several key functionalities:
To paraphrase Yogi Berra it's déjà vu all over again for KBR.
In my Aug. 31 post I wrote about a significant pro-veteran ruling in the Oregon KBR Qarmat Ali litigation. This is the case where Oregon National Guard troops allege KBR's liability for negligence and for fraud arising out of plaintiffs' exposure to sodium dichromate and resultanthexavalent chromium poisoning while assigned to duty at the Qarmat Ali water plant in 2003.
Paul Papak, the federal district judge rejected the motion by KBR and co-defendants to dismiss the suit for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction and rejected it.
CIA rendition: US court throws out torture case, citing state secrets
Appeals court judges sound apologetic tone in ruling; plaintiffs say they were tortured overseas in ‘extraordinary rendition' program.
Under the state secrets doctrine, courts have generally granted deference to executive branch claims that certain litigation may involve highly sensitive US government information which, if disclosed, would cause significant damage to national security.
. . . . . .
In a dissent joined by four other judges, Judge Michael Hawkins said the court was wrong to dismiss the entire lawsuit at such an early stage. He said the case should be remanded to a federal judge to determine to what extent actual evidence in the case might raise a threat of disclosing state secrets.
Hawkins acknowledged that the state secrets doctrine is an established precedent. But he said the privilege need not be so broadly enforced.
“The doctrine is so dangerous as a means of hiding governmental misbehavior under the guise of national security, and so violative of common rights of due process, that courts should confine its application to the narrowest circumstances that still protect the government’s essential secrets,” he wrote.
The majority concluded its opinion with a quasi apology to the plaintiffs. “Our holding today is not intended to foreclose – or to prejudge – possible nonjudicial relief, should it be warranted for any of the plaintiffs,” Judge Fisher said.
The world’s population will grow to 9 billion over the next 50 years — and only by raising the living standards of the poorest can we check population growth.
This is the paradoxical answer that Hans Rosling unveils at TED@Cannes using colorful new data display technology (you’ll see).
Phi Beta Iota: This is consistent with the report of the UN High-Level Threat Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, which identified POVERTY as the top threat to humanity, in part because it spawns everything else including Infectious Disease (#2), Environmental Degradation (#3, the poor doing more damage than all the corporations on the planet), and so on. See also:
What has become abundantly clear is that the Obama administration has taken the Bush-era doctrine of the world as a battlefield and run with it. US special forces are now operating in seventy-five countries across the globe—up from sixty under Bush—and special operations sources say Obama is a major fan of the work of JSOC and other special operations forces.
Despite its portrayal in the movies, working at the Central Intelligence Agency isn’t glamour and danger all the time. In fact, for most officers, it’s more like a normal 9-to-5 job. This story is the first in a series that will debunk certain myths and misperceptions about working at the CIA.
Meet Brad, Chris, Larry, and Eleanor — all experienced CIA officers with time spent overseas. In this article, they’ll share their insights and do their best to debunk myths about being an Agency employee.
Phi Beta Iota: Just shaking our head. CIA, 9 to 5. The other observation is that unilateral anything is bad, bad, bad. We should be creating multinational regional stations and using host country case officers on the street, not muscle-bound guys whose idea of cover clothing is shorts and corafam shoes.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2010
The news broke around 1 p.m. with a few sketchy details. Gunman. Shots. Hostages. Discovery building.
Within minutes, there were photos, including an astonishing one of a man clad in shorts, carrying a rifle and stalking through what looked like an office courtyard.
The news of a gunman at the Discovery Channel's headquarters in Silver Spring indeed traveled fast on Wednesday, but none of it came through radio, TV or newspaper Web sites, at least not at first. As it has with other breaking news events — the landing of a jet on the Hudson River in 2009, the 2008 massacre in Mumbai — the story unfolded first in hiccupping fits and starts on Twitter, the much-hyped micro-blogging service that has turned millions of people into worldwide gossips, opinion-mongers and amateur news reporters.
FrontlineSMS
