The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Continue reading “John Robb: Economic Reality & Political Treason”
Yesterday, the Nieman Watchdog journalism group at Harvard asked me to evaluate how well the press is scrutinizing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. Basically, it's not; instead, Panetta seems to be free of informed, skeptical questioning; he must be absolutely delighted with the treatment he is receiving.
Why is the press ignoring Panetta's frenzied rhetoric and data-free myths?
The defense secretary likens budget-cutters to Nazis and makes assertions that simply aren't true — but the media don't seem to care, writes Winslow Wheeler.
The silence in the press about the overheated rhetoric and dubious myths from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta makes for a very unhappy comparison of today’s defense journalism compared to previous eras when, for example, SecDef Casper Weinberger was the subject of serious critical analysis.
Phi Beta Iota: Leon Panetta, like Bob Gates before him, is a posturing pimp for the military-industrial complex that pays 5% bribes to get 95% discounts on the taxpayers treasure. He could not stand up to fifteen minutes on the same stage with any one of us–Chuck Spinney, Winslow Wheeler, Ralph Peters, Bob Scales, etcetera.
Panetta's Frenzied Rhetoric Is Not Stopping the Decay of U.S. Forces
Huffington Post, 14 October 2011
Before Tuesday this week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had been sprinkling Washington D.C. with words like “doomsday mechanism,” “catastrophic,” and “shooting ourselves in the head” to describe any cuts in the Pentagon's budget beyond the $450 billion over 10 years (overall a 4 percent reduction) he and President Obama have already committed to. Panetta had set a new standard for overheated rhetoric to defend the Pentagon's budget.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta, like Gates and others before him, is a political toad incable of telling the truth or pursuing the public interest. He is telling two major lies in all of his speeches: 1) that cutting the defense budget will weaken national security; and 2) that what we pay $1 trillion a year (in borrowed money) for is “the finest fighting force in the world.” Not so less the infantry, which is 4% of the force, takes 80% of the casualties, and receives 1% of the budget. In an honest government, Panetta would be impeached–and all his senior generals and senior executive sychopants retired.
Corruption cubed.
Petraeus tells CIA analysts to heed troops on war
AP, 14 October 2011
WASHINGTON – David Petraeus, the former general who led the Afghanistan war and now heads the CIA, has ordered his intelligence analysts to give greater weight to the opinions of troops in the fight, U.S. officials said.
CIA analysts now will consult with battlefield commanders earlier in the process as they help create elements of a National Intelligence Estimate on the course of the war, to more fully include the military's take on the conflict, U.S. officials say.
Phi Beta Iota: On the surface, this is a good order. Understanding both sides, however, suggests that this is a repeat of the Sam Adams – Westmoreland dictated fraud. The US military and NATO are lying to the public and to their respective legislative and executive branches about the continuing failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across Africa. We no longer post the recurring slams on the falsehoods being purveyed. It is so very sad when our senior officials are so blatantly lacking in integrity and depriving us all of the intelligence that we are paying for.
See Also:
Journal: CIA and the Culture of Corruption
Journal: Reflections on Integrity UPDATED + Integrity RECAP
Review (Guest): Fixing the Facts – National Security and the Politics of Intelligence
US Intelligence Lies to “Defer” to General Petraeus
YouTube Sex with Pilots vs. Intelligence Officers
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)
Cynthia McKinney, 10 October 2011.
Third of Four Installments on Libya: Israel and Libya
Once again, Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya peels away the veneer of legitimacy and deception enveloping the U.S./NATO genocide currently taking place in Libya. In his first article, Nazemroaya exposed the mechanism by which the world came to “know” of the need for a humanitarian intervention in the Libyan Arab Jamahirya and U.S./NATO admissions of targeted assassination attempts against the Leader of the 1969 Libyan Revolution, Muammar Qaddafi. In his first of these four installments since his return from Libya, Nazemraoya makes it clear that there never was any evidence given to the United Nations or the International Criminal Court to warrant or justify United Nations Resolutions 1970 and 1973 or current U.S./NATO operations inside Libya.
Continue reading “Cynthia McKinney: US & Israel Against Africa & Arabia”
The Real Story of How Israel Was Created
CounterPunch, October 11, 2011
To better understand the Palestinian bid for membership in the United Nations, it is important to understand the original 1947 U.N. action on Israel-Palestine.
The common representation of Israel’s birth is that the U.N. created Israel, that the world was in favor of this move, and that the U.S. governmental establishment supported it. All these assumptions are demonstrably incorrect.
In reality, while the U.N. General Assembly recommended the creation of a Jewish state in part of Palestine, that recommendation was non-binding and never implemented by the Security Council.
Second, the General Assembly passed that recommendation only after Israel proponents threatened and bribed numerous countries in order to gain a required two-thirds of votes.
Third, the U.S. administration supported the recommendation out of domestic electoral considerations and took this position over the strenuous objections of the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The passage of the General Assembly recommendation sparked increased violence in the region. Over the following months the armed wing of the pro-Israel movement, which had long been preparing for war, perpetrated a series of massacres and expulsions throughout Palestine, implementing a plan to clear the way for a majority-Jewish state.
It was this armed aggression, and the ethnic cleansing of at least three-quarters of a million indigenous Palestinians, that created the Jewish state on land that had been 95 percent non-Jewish prior to Zionist immigration and that even after years of immigration remained 70 percent non-Jewish. And despite the shallow patina of legality its partisans extracted from the General Assembly, Israel was born over the opposition of American experts and of governments around the world, who opposed it on both pragmatic and moral grounds.
Let us look at the specifics.
Read full article with specifics.
Phi Beta Iota: The specifics demonstrate with great clarity that at the time the U.S. Government had intelligence but lacked integrity. Today the U.S. Government lacks both intelligence and integrity. Electoral Reform is the sole possible demand that can resolve the crisis of US democracy and US capitalism run amok–inverted into velvet theatrical facism.
Well, this is harsh w/r/t Westy…
Wall Street Journal
October 8, 2011
Pg. C5
Bookshelf
By Max Boot
Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. By Lewis Sorley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 416 pp., $30
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
Full Text and Links below the Line.
Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: WSJ on Viet-Nam War – Lack of Integrity”
