There is not much new here, other than Curveball's public admission, but note Colonel Wilkerson’s comment below. One the one hand, Wilkerson admits he was a party to the “sexed up” intelligence; on the other, he wants us to believe Powell (and by extension himself) was being used. Given that “Curveball” was suspected of being a liar by the German intelligence (BND) as well as the CIA, the most charitable interpretation of Powell’s enthusiastic imitation of Adlai Stevenson's speech to the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis is that once the decision to attack Iraq was made, neither Powell nor Wilkerson had the courage to resign on principle, and both chose instead tobe a party to the fabrication — or as we used to say in the Pentagon he chose to be “used” by going along to get along.
A man whose lies helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow.
“Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up. It was a confidence trick that changed the course of history, with Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi's lies used to justify the Iraq war.
Certain types of life science research involving “high consequence pathogens and toxins” would be subject to new review and risk mitigation procedures which might include classification of the research or termination of the funding, according to a U.S. government policy issued yesterday by the National Institutes of Health.
The policy applies to research involving 15 specified biological agents and toxins which “pose the greatest risks of deliberate misuse with most significant potential for mass casualties or devastating effects to the economy, critical infrastructure or public confidence.”
Research that increases the lethality or transmissibility of the agent or toxin, or otherwise enhances its harmful consequences, will be subject to the new review procedures.
Based on the outcome of the review, a risk mitigation plan may be developed. If less restrictive measures were deemed inadequate, the new policy would allow for national security classification of the research or termination of government funding.
Phi Beta Iota: Nice but inadequate. The government is paying lip service to this necessary precautionary principle. If they were really serious, such a policy would encompass all agricultural and industrial processes without exception.
As the global economy collapses and increasing numbers recognize that no one is addressing our common problems with intelligence and integrity, it seems like a good time to quickly survey the state of the World Brain /Global Game. Here are a few headlines with short comments.
The Network of Global Agenda Councils, launched by the World Economic Forum three years ago, comprises more than 1,000 thought leaders who meet at least four times a year – three times in virtual meetings and once during the annual Summit on the Global Agenda in the United Arab Emirates, arguably the biggest intellectual brainstorming in the world.
RS: This is the World Economic Forum / 1% “front” version of the World Brain. There is a great deal that can be harvested from this endeavor, but it lacks a strategic analytic model, a commitment to open source data access and other fundamentals of the M4IS2 process. It is inherently elitist. Of interest is the fact that all of its community lists have been blanked out
RS: Eugene Garfield with the Institute of Scientific Information (now Thompson Reuters), and then Dick Klavans with Maps of Science, have done more than any other to actually create a structure for identifying strengths, gaps, and emergent possibilities in the World Brain on the basis of published formal knowledge. One of my most prized possessions is the internal massive PDF file (shown here as a snapshot) that allows for drilling down all the way to each and every sub-discipline. Here are two of the seminal works:
RS: Using techniques developed by Garfield and Klavans (much of this done prior to computing advances, by hand), Thompson Reuters now offers a service that can show, by country, region, university, or discipline, where the strengths and weaknesses are on the basis of citation analysis. One example for the USA is shown here to the side. This remains severely deficient for two reasons: first, the persistence of inbred citation cabals; and second, the extremely poor coverage of languages other than English, French, and German. There is a third deficiency beyond that of citation analytics, and that has to do with the identification of unpublished experts of various kinds–I am especially interested in the indigenous experts and the oral historical knowledge they have inherited from prior generations. Finally, there is a fourth deficiency yet to be addressed that will eventually turn citation analytics on its head: most research is isolated from both a strategic analytic model and true cost economics. When these two are eventually factored in, I believe there will be a revolutionary shift in interest away from Western citation cabals and toward those in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, and Turkey, among others.
RS: To the best of my knowledge, and having failed to get Jeff Bezos to think of Amazon as the World Brain is gestation (including reviewers and readers down to the zip code level of specificity), no one, anywhere, is actually putting together a strategic analytic model, global true cost data, and a global grid of published and unpublished experts in all languages. Some of the Earth Science networks have the right idea, but are missing some big pieces.
EarthGame™ is a massively multiplayer online strategic design and planning real-world “game.” It is also a set of tools for recognizing, defining and solving global and local problems onboard Spaceship Earth. It combines the vast and growing wealth of global data available on the web with sophisticate data visualization techniques, embeds these within a powerful strategic planning and design methodology, and places all this into a gaming context.
RS: Medard Gabel, co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, remains the only person I know of (i.e. in the English language) who is serious about creating the Global Game. Earth Intelligence Network (EIN) funded his definition of the preliminary staffing and cost, as well as the trademarking (in his name) of EarthGame. I have approached one massive multi-player game firm about joining with Wolfam Alpha and EarthGame, but they were not interested. Below is the high-level summary he created for EIN.
RS: I am aware of the World Game as managed by the Buckminster Fuller Institute and commercialized by OSEarth. Neither of these has the mind-set, depth, or breadth that Medard and I have envisioned together. The Global Economics Game has some laudable aspects to it, but accepts so many false assumptions about true cost and corruption and the way the world actually works that it would need a considerable make-over–never-the-less, it is a most impressive endeavor and not to be over-looked.
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RS: The whole point of the Global Game is to connect all human minds with all information in all languages — and embedded open source everything tools — so that every person can play themselves, fully informed in a timely fashion, on every issue from local to global. I myself am actively in search of a major university interested in creating a School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance with a Center for M4IS2, a World Brain Institute, the Global Game (with Medard Gabel), and a prototype Center for Public Intelligence — all committed to open source software, hardware, spectrum, and OpenBTS as the hand-held standard.
As China is expected to rise to the status of a financial superpower within the next 8 years and eclipse the US economy by 2020, Africa becomes center stage in the greatest currency war the world has seen since the 1930s, which is now shifting into overdrive.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, collectively known as the BRICS nations, are moving forward with their plan to unseat the US dollar from its throne as the global trade currency and to replace it with a Chinese-denominated “super-sovereign” international currency.
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This Geo-political game to establish global monetary dominance is by no means limited to the attack on the US dollar. Instead this is merely the first strike of a concerted campaign of worldwide economic warfare that will soon follow which seeks to bring the United States and its western allies to their knees.
Ultimately the BRICS collective is staging a coup to overthrow the current global financial regime that has been dominated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the last global currency war was won at the end of World War II.
The attack comes partially in retaliation for the latest round of quantitative easing in which we witnessed the Federal Reserve deliberately printing trillions of dollars in an attempt to jump-start the U.S. economy by forcing investors back into the U.S. stock market by devaluing the US dollar.
Phi Beta Iota: One third of the global economy is transnational crime, and one third System D or “off the books” entrepreneurial information economics routing around governments. Now that we know the final third is legalized crime, it becomes much easier to understand why two thirds of the brain power on the planet has opted out of the legalized crime world that favors the 1%.
All might find this interesting from the perspective that a Judge did not buy into a government claim that clearly showed a lack of integrity on its part. While the Administration can bluster all it wants about other people, it appears that it doesn't want that right extended to its population…..
DETROIT – A federal judge on Tuesday gutted the government's case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities who insisted they had captured homegrown rural extremists poised for war.
U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts said the members' expressed hatred of law enforcement didn't amount to a conspiracy to rebel against the government. The FBI had secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia starting in 2008 to collect hours of antigovernment audio and video that became the cornerstone of the case.
“The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level,” the judge said on the second anniversary of raids and arrests that broke up the group.
Roberts granted requests for acquittal on the most serious charges: conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion, against the United States and conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Other weapons crimes tied to the alleged conspiracies also were dismissed.
“The judge had a lot of guts,” defense attorney William Swor said. “It would have been very easy to say, ‘The heck with it,' and hand it off to the jury. But the fact is she looked at the evidence, and she looked at it very carefully.”
The trial, which began Feb. 13, will resume Thursday with only a few gun charges remaining against militia leader David Stone and son Joshua Stone, both from Lenawee County, Mich. They have been in custody without bond for two years.
Prosecutors said Hutaree members were antigovernment rebels who combined training and strategy sessions to prepare for a violent strike against federal law enforcement, triggered first by the slaying of a police officer.
But there never was an attack. Defense lawyers said that highly offensive remarks about police and the government were wrongly turned into a high-profile criminal case that drew public praise from Attorney General Eric Holder, who in 2010 called Hutaree a “dangerous organization.”
This effort destroys any trust that may have been left…..days are numbered (to aid in an election also)…..
New security for U.S. troops in Afghanistan
By Lolita C. Baldor and Pauline Jelinek
Associated Press, 28 March 2012
WASHINGTON — U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan have assigned “guardian angels” — troops that watch over their comrades even as they sleep — and have ordered a series of other increased security measures to protect troops against possible attacks by rogue Afghans.
The added protections are part of a directive issued in recent weeks by Marine Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to guard against insider threats, according to a senior military official. And they come in the wake of a spike in attacks on U.S. and coalition forces by Afghans, including the point-blank shooting deaths of two U.S. advisers in Afghanistan's Ministry of Interior.
Some of the changes have been subtle, others not so much.
Sayed Ishaq Gillami (should be Gillani): Sayed Ishaq Gailani (born 1954) represents Paktika in the Wolesi Jirga, Afghanistan's lower house of parliament.[1] He is the founder and chairman of the National Solidarity Movement of Afghanistan and currently serves on the Wolesi Jirga's International Relations committee. While still an influential member of the Gailani family, he has claimed leadership of the family and adopted the title Pir. However, most of his family recognizes his uncle, Ahmad Gailani, as the leader of the family and the Qadiriyya Sufi order. (Pir is a title for a Sufi master equally used in the nath tradition. The title is often translated into English as “saint” and could be interpreted as
“Elder”. In Sufism a Pir's role is to guide and instruct his disciples on the Sufi path.) This means his credentials are impeccable (outside the discord within the family over the title Pir) and nobody in Afghanistan would accuse him of falsehood.
General Sher Mohammed Karimi: (from the article – of the Afghan Army) He is not just from the Afghan Army, he is in fact Chief of Staff. I know the man personally and he bears no ill-will toward the US. I would put much stock in what he says. These two individuals, although not understood by our leadership, represent two of the most unbiased people in Afghanistan. This alone lends great credence to their stories. For ISAF/NATO and this Administration to be 180 degrees out will only serve to see a significant increase in attacks on ISAF/NATO personnel, all because of their position and not related to anything the ISAF/NATO personnel did.
