References – Page 20 – Public Intelligence Blog

Let the pope keep the kingdom and the glory — the CIA wants the power.

By Martin A. Lee,| July/August 1983 Issue

One day in July 1944, as the Second World War raged throughout Europe, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan was ushered into an ornate chamber in Vatican City for an audience with Pope Pius XII. Donovan bowed his head reverently as the pontiff intoned a ceremonial prayer in Latin and decorated him with the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Sylvester, the oldest and most prestigious of papal knighthoods. This award has been given to only 100 other men in history, who “by feat of arms, or writings, or outstanding deeds, have spread the Faith, and have safeguarded and cham-pioned the Church.”

Although a papal citation of this sort rarely, if ever, states why a person is inducted into the “Golden Mili-tia,” there can be no doubt that Donovan earned his knighthood by virtue of the services he rendered to the Catholic hierarchy in World War II, during which he served as chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In 1941, the year before the OSS was officially constituted, Donovan forged a close alliance with Father Felix Morlion, founder of a European Catholic intelligence service known as Pro Deo. When the Germans overran western Europe, Donovan helped Morlion move his base of operations from Lisbon to New York. From then on, Pro Deo was financed by Donovan, who believed that such an expenditure would result in valuable insight into the secret affairs of the Vatican, then a neutral enclave in the midst of fascist Rome. When the Allies liberated Rome in 1944, Mor-lion re-established his spy network in the Vatican; fromthere he helped the OSS obtain confidential reports provided by apostolic dele-gates in the Far East, which included information about strategic bombing targets in Japan.

Pope Pius' decoration of Wild Bill Donovan marked the beginning of a long-standing, intimate relation-ship between the Vatican and U.S. intelligence that continues to the present day. For centuries the Vatican has been a prime target of foreign espionage. One of the world's greatest repositories of raw intelligence, it is a spy's gold mine. Ecclesiastical, political and economic informa-tion filters in every day from thousands of priests, bishops and papal nuncios, who report regularly from every corner of the globe to the Office of the Papal Secretariat. So rich was this source of data that shortly after the war, the CIA created a special unit in its counterintelligence section to tap it and monitor developments within the Holy See.

Continue reading “Mother Jones: Their Will Be Done — CIA and the Vatican”

2013/05/312013/05/31

Berto Jongman: DARPA Weaponizes (Sort Of) the Internet — Has the Time Come to Close DARPA?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

The article is long and certainly worth reading, with many links. Below are two comments that capture the hacker view of this initiative.

This Pentagon Project Makes Cyberwar as Easy as Angry Birds

By Noah Shachtman

WIRED Magazine, 28 May 2014

Read full article.

EXTRACT (Comments):

BillStewart2012 ErikasBulbasaur • 3 days ago

Yes, it's the camo-colored-hat skript k1dd13 tool. And is it going to check whether it has the required warrants or legal authorization before launching an attack on a target, or just fire away? I've got some guesses..

. . . . . . . .

endus • 3 days ago

Leave it to the government to turn the internet into the next battlefield and to weaponize technology. Any new frontier we explore, the first priority is to figure out how the hell we are going to fight wars in it, because wars are what life is all about.

I work in infosec and I'm not saying passivity is an option, but this is the same idiotic mentality that causes so many problems in the “real world” today. Half the problems they talk about with the vulnerability of our infrastructure are totally avoidable if companies and agencies were willing to take basic security precautions, but that would be too easy and too cheap…how would the defense contractors make their money? Why make it about simple actions which can protect networks and computers and keep issues from spreading, when you can keep doing all the stupid ignorant stuff you were doing all along and find a way to escalate the conflict?

It's wonderful that they're trying to dumb down the technology so that people with no understanding of how this stuff actually works can command it too. We know from documentaries like “This is what winning looks like” and the book The Outpost just how well military bureaucracy functions. I can totally understand why we need to simplify the technology to a point where the brilliant minds that brought us Afghanistan and Iraq can work their magic in cyberspace too. If there's one thing we need on the internet it's the input of bloated, corrupt, out of date government agencies.

Someday humankind will figure it out…if we don't destroy ourselves first, that is. We're allowing the worst and most corrupt elements of our society to lead the way, and then we wonder why everything is so screwed up. I get that the rest of the world has equally corrupt and evil people running it, but is the best answer to that problem really to appoint our own legion of corrupt sheisty assholes to combat them?

2013/05/282013/05/28

Walter Dorn: Technology for Peacekeeping + PKI RECAP

United Nations & NGOs

BRIEFING: 2013-05-29 Dorn Technology for Peace Operations

2013/05/222013/05/22

Berto Jongman: NATO Gladio B, Ayman al-Zawahiri as Asset, Destabilizing Russian Border Countries….NSA Barred from Monitoring Azerbaijan, Turkey, Belgium, and UK + GLADIO/False Flag Meta-RECAP

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

A great deal of information. Being read in Europe.

Special Report | Why was a Sunday Times report on US government ties to al-Qaeda chief spiked?

FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds was described as “the most gagged person in the history of the United States” by the American Civil Liberties Union. Was the Sunday Times pressured to drop its investigation into her revelations?

By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

CeaseFire Magazine, 16 May 2013

Sibel Edmonds - Ceasefire Magazine

A whistleblower has revealed extraordinary information on the U.S. government’s support for international terrorist networks and organised crime. The government has denied the allegations yet gone to extraordinary lengths to silence her. Her critics have derided her as a fabulist and fabricator. But now comes word that some of her most serious allegations were confirmed by a major European newspaper only to be squashed at the request of the U.S. government.

In a recent book Classified Woman, Sibel Edmonds, a former translator for the FBI, describes how the Pentagon, CIA and State Department maintained intimate ties to al-Qaeda militants as late as 2001. Her memoir, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story, published last year, charged senior government officials with negligence, corruption and collaboration with al Qaeda in illegal arms smuggling and drugs trafficking in Central Asia.

In interviews with this author in early March, Edmonds claimed that Ayman al-Zawahiri, current head of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s deputy at the time, had innumerable, regular meetings at the U.S. embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, with U.S. military and intelligence officials between 1997 and 2001, as part of an operation known as ‘Gladio B’. Al-Zawahiri, she charged, as well as various members of the bin Laden family and other mujahideen, were transported on NATO planes to various parts of Central Asia and the Balkans to participate in Pentagon-backed destabilisation operations.

According to two Sunday Times journalists speaking on condition of anonymity, this and related revelations had been confirmed by senior Pentagon and MI6 officials as part of a four-part investigative series that were supposed to run in 2008. The Sunday Times journalists described how the story was inexplicably dropped under the pressure of undisclosed “interest groups”, which, they suggest, were associated with the U.S. State Department.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: NATO Gladio B, Ayman al-Zawahiri as Asset, Destabilizing Russian Border Countries….NSA Barred from Monitoring Azerbaijan, Turkey, Belgium, and UK + GLADIO/False Flag Meta-RECAP”

2013/05/212013/05/21

SchwartzReport: The End of the Republic

Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Editor's Note

In today's issue I want to illustrate several trends, and show how they blend together into a meta-trend. This is our shadow. An amalgam of hysteria, fear, anger, racism, willful ignorance, and a sense of affronted victimization. Each of these stories illustrates an aspect of this meta-trend. By putting them together I wanted to give a sense of how broad this trend is. It is an act of intentioned self-sabotage of historic proportions. For other examples read Jared Diamond's Collapse, or Barbara Tuchman's March of Folly. We are coming to a crisis. I want to be clear here. This is not about partisanship, this is about attitudes and priorities. Finally, I close the edition with a different world, the one that could be, if we would only make national wellness a first priority. [Denmark, not the USA, is the gold standard for secular Western democracy.]

— Stephan

Letters at 3AM: An Arbitrary Nation
MICHAEL VENTURA – The Austin Chronicle

Is Democracy in Trouble?
E.J. DIONNE, JR. – Truthdig

Washington Gets Explicit: Its ‘war on Terror' Is Permanent
Glenn Greenwald – The Guardian (U.K.)

Beltway Scandal Machine Breaks, Knows Nothing About America
JOAN WALSH , Editor-at-Large – Salon

Rand Paul: UN has Secret Plot to ‘CONFISCATE and DESTROY ALL’ of America’s Guns
Eric W. Dolan – The Raw Story

Right-wing Radio Host: I Want to Shoot Clinton Right in the Vagina
ERIC W. DOLAN – The Raw Story

And finally let me close the edition with this… What we could do, what we could be… if socially progressive adults who had national wellness as a first priority made policy.

America Needs Denmark's
Senator Bernie Sanders, (I-Vt) – Reader Supported News

2013/05/192013/05/19

Penguin: Marines Poison Their Own for Decades

03 Environmental Degradation, 12 Water, DoD, Earth Intelligence, Ineptitude, Military

Force protection? Not at Camp Lejuene.

Victims: Marines failed to safeguard water supply

May 18, 8:24 PM (ET)

By ALLEN G. BREED, MICHAEL BIESECKER and MARTHA WAGGONER

CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. (AP) – A simple test could have alerted officials that the drinking water at Camp Lejeune was contaminated, long before authorities determined that as many as a million Marines and their families were exposed to a witch's brew of cancer-causing chemicals.

But no one responsible for the lab at the base can recall that the procedure – mandated by the Navy – was ever conducted.

The U.S. Marine Corps maintains that the carbon chloroform extract (CCE) test would not have uncovered the carcinogens that fouled the southeastern North Carolina base's water system from at least the mid-1950s until wells were capped in the mid-1980s. But experts say even this “relatively primitive” test – required by Navy health directives as early as 1963 – would have told officials that something was terribly wrong beneath Lejeune's sandy soil.

A just-released study from the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry cited a February 1985 level for trichloroethylene of 18,900 parts per billion in one Lejeune drinking water well – nearly 4,000 times today's maximum allowed limit of 5 ppb. Given those kinds of numbers, environmental engineer Marco Kaltofen said even a testing method as inadequate as CCE should have raised some red flags with a “careful analyst.”

“That's knock-your-socks-off level – even back then,” said Kaltofen, who worked on the infamous Love Canal case in upstate New York, where drums of buried chemical waste leaked toxins into a local water system. “You could have smelled it.”

Biochemist Michael Hargett agrees that CCE, while imperfect, would have been enough to prompt more specific testing in what is now recognized as the worst documented case of drinking-water contamination in the nation's history

Read full article with photos.

2013/05/18

Graphic: Really Simple Guide to Syrian-Centered WWIII Starting Line-Up

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, DoD, Officers Call, Strategy

Citation: “Graphic” Really Simple Guide to Syrian-Centered WWWIII Starting Line-Up,” Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, 18 May 2013.

Neal Rauhauser: Syria, Regional War, The Only Red Line That Matters + Syria Meta-RECAP