I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
The Obama administration has demonstrated once again, as it did in Libya and as it’s done in a variety of surveillance cases, that its view of executive power in the arena of national security is hardly any less expansive than Dick Cheney’s was. The fact that this was predictable makes it no less alarming.
Just as the leaders of US national security thinking led America into the war in Iraq based on the false premise of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and reckless, but politically powerful, rhetoric, Washington's elite are now circling the wagons around the defense budget. They are using the same disingenuous tactics and the same kind of rhetorical gibberish. While they have successfully intimidated the rest of the political system, they are also making huge fools of themselves.
I express my views on this and some defense budget facts you have not heard from these people in a commentary. Titled “The Stench of Elitism in Defense Spending,” it is available at the Politics page of the Huffington Post. Under the better mannered title “Elites Are Wrong,” an edit is also available at AOL Defense.
My colleagues at Resolve and Invisible Children have just launched their very impressive Crisis Map of LRA Attacks in Central Africa. The LRA, or Lord’s Resistance Army, is a brutal rebel group responsible for widespread mass atrocities, most of which go completely unreported because the killings and kidnappings happen in remote areas. This crisis map has been a long time in the making so I want to sincerely congratulate Michael Poffenberger, Sean Poole, Adam Finck, Kenneth Transier and the entire team for the stellar job they’ve done with this project. The LRA Crisis Tracker is an important milestone for the fields of crisis mapping and early warning.
U.S. President Barack Obama is piling up foreign policy disasters. In at least three areas, crucial for world peace and American interests — Arab-Israel, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Yemen-Somalia — he is pursuing a course which can only be described as foolhardy. The anger and hate towards the United States which he is generating could take a generation to dispel.
. . . . . . .
Is it not time to enquire whether U.S. policy has not created more terrorists than the CIA has managed to kill? Would it not be better if the United States were simply to declare victory in Afghanistan — and indeed in all the other places where its Special Forces operate — bring its troops home as soon as possible and turn its attention to tending the wounds in its own broken society?
Phi Beta Iota: The assumption that US foreign policy is somehow focused on peace or prosperity is evidently not correct. The people who make policy and give orders are not stupid–they are achieving the outcomes they desire. What is different is that a much greater percentage of the public than ever before can now use public intelligence to determine that these policies are not in the public interest, and therefore, are much more likely to be associated with treason–high crimes and misdemeanors that yield personal profit and public pain.
Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated
Brad Friedman, Salon, 27 September 2011
It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.
Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.
Phi Beta Iota: The two political parties and the Department of Justice under varied Administrations have known of all this since the Diebold machines were first introduced and their CEO bragged publicly that he would “deliver” the next election to George Bush Junior. What kind of Nation is so stupid and so apathetic as to tolerate this kind of pervasive electoral crime?
Two of the lead researchers in the study were able to demonstrate a number of different ways that voting machines could be hacked. They used a $1.29 microprocessor and a circuit board that costs about $8, along with a $15 remote control. They demonstrated that the cheap hack worked from over a half-mile away.
Summary: We now have enough experience with drone warfare to study its effects. Just as in physics, our actions affect ourselves as well as our targets. Social science research shows that drones are a gateway to moral disengagement dehumanization, and deindividuation. The great distances drones operate over, manipulated by faceless-nameless-lawyeristic-voyeurs, creates an emotional, mental, and physical divide between “us” ( i.e. our government) and the enemies we kill. Drones allow us to dissociate our actions from our values, a useful high-cost and high-tech justification. At the end are links to gain more information about this new form of warfare.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
— Newtons Third Law of Motion, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687)
Winslow Wheeler: His article gives a chilling rebuke to those who glibly see them as “the future of warfare” and essential for counter-terror operations without acknowledging the consequences.
Robert Steele: The US Government has lost both its intelligence and its integrity. This has been a consistent theme of this web site, and while I have distanced myself from the day to day operations of Phi Beta Iota–they now have a life of their own–G. I. Wilson is one of the original Marines in this era able to demonstrate both intelligence and integrity, and one of the original gurus on asymmetric warfare. That he got to be a Colonel is a credit to the Marine Corps. “Authority” in the U.S. Government is now irrational, illegitimate, and out of control. Even from a practical stand-point, the bandwidth for remote killer drones costs more than human pilots would, and human pilots would have the added advantage of situational awareness, something that simply cannot be achieved from a one-dimensional cockpit in the middle of the USA. From killer drones to JSOC assassinations to the totally illegal war on Libya, the US Government is now a monstrous collage of atrocities being perpetuated against its own public (22% unemployment, 18 veterans a day committing suicide, just under 16% under the poverty line) as well as foreign publics from Palestine and Libya to Central Asia to the Southern Hemisphere. What is being done “in our name” is unaffordable, reprehensible, and long over due for presentation to the International Tribunal with a long list of “by name” perpetrators that should run from Congress and the White House down to the individual pilots and squadron commanders that have betrayed their Oaths of office. What we are doing every day is neither patriotic nor moral.
