As of about 8 a.m. PST Thursday (or 6 p.m. in Tripoli, Libya's capital), the nation's Internet traffic began to flatline, and has been at zero since, says Google's Transparency Report.
Phi Beta Iota: While the world watches Libya, the USA is in the process of making the Internet a monopoly that can charge by the application instead of by the packet. In brief, Internet “neutrality” is a fraud in the USA, and the FCC is a front for the very large ISP's just as the Federal Reserve is a front for the private banks. Autonomous Internet is something that matters everywhere, including especially the USA.
Bahrain, Egypt-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), Lebanon, Libya, Libya-India, Comment on No-Fly Zones, Special Comment on Aid to Uprisings and Mercenaries
When Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly detected a slap at his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.
But what about everyone else in the U.S. power structure who went along with those insane and bloody wars? Shouldn’t such people – whether they acted out of ideology or opportunism – be kept away from levers of authority that might get others killed?
For instance, what about the top editors at the Washington Post, the New York Times and a host of other establishment publications and TV outlets who hopped on the pro-war bandwagon and mocked anyone who suggested that negotiations or some less violent means might be preferable? Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: Like most others, Dr. Gates finds his integrity late in life. It was not just those who lied to the public who betrayed the public trust, but also those like Dr. Gates who kept silent. A handful of us tried to buy full page advertisements against the wars, only to have them rejected by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, etcetera. This is what happens when the “elite” value their membership in the elite club more than they value their integrity. Integrity matters most when you can still make a difference, not after the fact when you have reaped all you could from “going along.” At this juncture in time, the simple best thing for America–apart from Electoral Reform–would be the resurrection of integrity among our senior officials.
Advocates of humanitarian intervention like to use Kosovo as an example of a “good” war to distinguish it from Bush's bad war in Iraq and the Bush/Obama bungles in Afghanistan. But Kosovo was a template for bungling and blowback in the wars of empire that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The below article is outlines some of the reasons why this is so.
A recent Council of Europe report says that during and after the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, militia leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) tortured and killed hundreds of Serbs and political rivals in secret Albanian hideouts, removed their organs for sale and dumped their bodies in local rivers.
The report added that these people were also heavily involved in drug, sex and illegal immigrant trafficking across Europe. Yet while all this was going on, the NATO powers had decreed that Serbia should be bombed into accepting the KLA as Kosovo's legitimate rulers — rather than the more popular Democratic League of Kosovo headed by the nationalist intellectual Ibrahim Rugova advocating nonviolent independence.
Recent years have not been kind to Western policymakers. They have shown an almost unerring ability to choose the wrong people for the wrong policies. Think back to the procession of incompetents chosen to rescue Indochina from the communist enemy. Does anyone even remember their names today? Yet at the time they were supposed to be nation-savers. Read more….
Phi Beta Iota: It is now known that the World Wars were enabled by bankers intent on empowering the evil side with loans so as to force the good side to borrow heavily. Bankers–and corporate mercenary interests with zero respect for “the public interest,” have created a world of grostesque inquality instead of a prosperous world at peace. Revolution 2.0 is connecting the public–that is phase one–to be followed by phase two, an informed public that will not brook corruption.
In the vast literature of intelligence-related memoirs, the new book Long Strange Journey by Patrick G. Eddington stands out in several ways.
Eddington entered the intelligence arena as an imagery analyst for the CIA's National Photographic Intelligence Center. Imagery analysis is a predominately technical activity and is not normally considered a hotbed of intrigue or controversy. Nor has it been widely featured in the intelligence “literature of discontent.” Eddington provides an introduction to the world of light tables, mensuration and the now-defunct world of the NPIC analyst.
Then Eddington himself defies easy stereotyping. As an Army veteran, a political conservative, and a person of faith, he might have been voted least likely to rock the boat and to become a whistleblower. But that's what he did. Continue reading “Secrecy News: CIA Culture In Detail”
“Saudi Arabia did not build a causeway to Bahrain just so that Saudis could party on weekends. It was designed for moments like this, for keeping Bahrain under control.”
– Dr. Toby Jones, expert on Saudi Arabia at Rutgers University
If Saudi Arabia was rattled by the fall of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, they will be in convulsions should Bahrain’s monarchy collapse. By all indications, the five other member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates) will go to all lengths to prevent it.
The Arab world’s “freedom contagion” is rapidly spreading. Bahrain’s revolt is being spearheaded by the country’s poor, disenfranchised Shia Muslim majority. Although Mubarak was deposed by a nation of 80 million, unrest in the tiny island kingdom of only 530,000 citizens poses a greater ostensible threat to the GCC, particularly Saudi Arabia and its own sizable, restive Shia minority.
Interesting, and if the point about Garmin is true, what is the relationship between them and the Air Force? The Air Force has gotten into a lot of areas that include tracking to the individual level (RFI) under the guise of tracking logistics….
Following a navigation system's instructions without driving into a ravine is hard enough as it is — can you even imagine how hard it'd be if you kept losing GPS reception every time you drove within range of an LTE tower? There have been a few anecdotal concerns raised over the last several weeks that LightSquared's proposed LTE network — which would repurpose L-band spectrum formerly used for satellite — is too close to the spectrum used by the Global Positioning System, leading to unintentional jamming when the towers overpower the much weaker GPS signals. Things have gotten a little more interesting, though, now that the US Air Force Space Command has officially piped in. General William Shelton has gone on record saying that “a leading GPS receiver manufacturer just … has concluded that within 3 to 5 miles on the ground and within about 12 miles in the air GPS is jammed by those towers,” calling the situation “unbelievable” and saying he's “hopeful the FCC does the right thing.”
Phi Beta Iota: Electromagnetic conflicts have been a known issue since the 1980's. The Soviets had emission control standards ten times tougher than the US, which had (and continues to have) virtually no standards at all. This is one reason why US forces in Afghanistan are so severely hampered, with drones, aircraft, radars, and various other “systems” all interfering with one another. Elsewhere, notably in England, modern cars come to a complete stop within a couple of kilometers of certain Royal Air Force emitting stations. All of this can be attributed to at least four root problems:
1. An acquisition archipelago (nothing sytematic about it) so stupid and out of control as to defy belief. No standards, no brains, no integrity.
2. Service-centric and mission-centric “preferred contractor” and “proprietary single point solutions” standard operating processes that are deliberately not orchestrated with other services, civilian elements of the government, or other nations.
3. A lack of integrity among senior officers who should know better.
4. A lack of integrity in Congress, where the focus is on collecting the 5% kick-back from delivered programs, not on actually serving the public interest by insuring affordability, interoperability, sustainability, and utility.
