Ed Lansdale specialized in false flag terrorism and false flag bombings for the CIA in the Philippines and then in Viet-Nam. Source.
Israel specializes in car bombings — mostly as primers (pun intended) to sell a lot of security to the paranoid, but sometimes, we speculate, to influence its “host” the USA.
Anyone willing to attack the USS Liberty and murder and maim U.S. sailors is capable of any crime against humanity. Source.
Today, against the Capitol, an FBI-enabled individual carried a suicide vest that was disabled beforehand — we suspect the FBI actually constructed the vest, reminding us of CIA giving the Iranians the complete plans for building a nuclear bomb. Source.
Below is a useful compilation of warnings about a false flag terrorism set focused in enabling an Israeli attack on Iran with US drawn in.
Most interesting is Zbigniew Brzezinski's coming over to the side of the angels.
The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950′s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister
American and Israeli officials admit that they have repeatedly carried out terrorism and then blamed it on Arabs (and see this)
In my opinion, one of the most important books written in recent years on the subject of the global arms trade and its corrupting effects is Andrew Feinstein's, The Shadow World, Inside the Global Arms Trade. This voluminous book is mind numbing in its detail, but it is thoroughly sourced and, I believe, it will become a standard reference over time. Anyone trying to understand the dark and dangerous corner of the global economy and its politics must read this book. (To be sure, I am biased because I was a minor source in this book and I consider Andrew a good friend.)
Naturally, the arms makers are not too happy with the Shadow World and want to keep it hidden in the musty stacks of your local library. I am attaching two recent essays to help you determine if this book should be forgotten. They were published on the Lexington Institute' Early Warning Blog. Lexington is funded in large part by defense contractors and is hardly impartial on all matters regarding defense spending, so the first essay is quite expected; the second, however, comes as a surprise, to Lexington's credit.
The first essay is a predictable critique of Andrew's book by Robert Trice, a retired Senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin. Think of his effort as an attempt to move Andrew's book to a forgotten corner in the back room.
To understand the saliency of Trice's effort, consider his career. Robert Trice is a case study in the quintessential pattern of gorging oneself on cash flow pumped out by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex's big green spending machine. Holding a PhD in political science, he began his defense career in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, where he eventually became Director for Technology and Arms Transfer Policy — or in plain english, a resident shill in the Pentagon for promoting international arms sales — the subject painted in not so flattering terms by Feinstein. Trice then moved to Capital Hill and worked as the defense Legislative Assistant to Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR) for about three years. I met him in this position because Bumpers was interested in the military reform work my colleagues (Pierre Sprey and John Boyd) and I were doing in the Pentagon. But Trice, as Bumpers' advisor, was clearly a reluctant reformer. (Although Bumpers showed initial and enthusiastic interest in our work, nothing came of it.) In the essay below Trice now slings a little mud, saying the three of us are not just wrong but wrongly motivated, because we are “anti-defense.” Soon thereafter, the presumably pro-defense Trice cashed out of Bumpers office to work in the Defense industry, serving first as a Vice President for Business Development at McDonnel Douglas (in plain english this is a marketing job and in the MICC, marketing, or business development, means greasing the skids in Congress and the Pentagon for your firm's tinker toys — which is a good position for a poly sci type, because he couldn't design airplanes at McAir or Lockheed). Trice then moved to Lockheed Martin where his business development portfolio including shaping L-M's new business strategies and operations for the global market, which of course is the subject of Andrew's book. Obviously a person with his background of bottom feeding so successfully in the MICC's money machine, especially in the international arms trade arena, comes to the reviewing table with … shall we say … a certain amount of bias.
The second essay is Andrew Feinstein's polite repost to Trice's bucket of grease. Andrew's background could not be more different than that of Trice. Whereas Trice gorged himself and became a wealthy ‘pillar of the establishment' by slopping in America's defense trough, Andrew put his ass on the line trying to rein in the excesses of that trough's South African equivalent. In the late 1980s, Andrew, a young white South African, joined Nelson Mandella's African National Congress (ANC), because he opposed Apartheid. In 1994, after the fall of Apartheid, he was elected in South Africa's first democratic election to be an ANC member of parliament. But Andrew took his parliamentary oversight responsibilities seriously, and while in parliament, he set up a kind of one man Truman Committee to investigate allegations of ANC corruption in some international weapons deals. And he hit pay dirt, but rather than shutting up when he was pressured by party elders to close down his investigation into a £5bn arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption, he resigned in protest from Parliament. His political memoir, After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, was published in 2007 and became a bestseller in South Africa.
With the backgrounds of these two protagonists in mind, I urge you to read Trice's critique of Andrew's latest book first (Attachment 1 below) and then Andrew's repost (Attachment 2 below) and judge for yourself who is closer to being a straight shooter — and read The Shadow World.
Nationally, official Census numbers show 9% of seniors in poverty. Among children, 22% — 15.6 million — live in poverty.
. . . . . . .
A 2011 analysis by the Urban Institute, a public policy and research center, found public spending per child was $11,300 over the course of a year. The spending included federal and state programs for education, health such as Medicaid and nutrition, social services and housing. The report said some of those programs are being cut as states wrestle with dwindling budgets. By comparison, public spending on seniors was about $24,800 per person, mostly in federal funding for Social Security and Medicare.
Phi Beta Iota: The US Budget is not based on a coherent strategic model, on a national strategy, or even on any fundamentals such as save the children, preserve the water. How a nation treats its children can be a reasonable predictor of the future of that nation.
An article like this poses the question – who is really insane, psychiatrists or the people they treat? When readers finish this article, they may vote for the former.
“In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health experts said its new categories and “tick-box” diagnosis systems were at best “silly” and at worst “worrying and dangerous.” Some diagnoses – for conditions like “oppositional defiant disorder” and “apathy syndrome” – risk devaluing the seriousness of mental illness and medicalising behaviors most people would consider normal or just mildly eccentric, the experts said. At the other end of the spectrum, the new DSM, due out next year, could give medical diagnoses for serial rapists and sex abusers – under labels like “paraphilic coercive disorder” – and may allow offenders to escape prison by providing what could be seen as an excuse for their behavior, they added.
I have begun drafting my portion of the new Handbook of Intelligence Studies (Routledge, 2013), it is a chapter early on entitled “The Craft of Intelligence.” I pick up where Allen Dulles and Sherman Kent left off. My graphic on Intelligence Maturity captures the essence of my thinking at the strategic level, but of course there is more to come, including the desperate need to restore integrity to all that we do.
In 1988 I ghost-wrote for the Commandant of the Marine Corps an article that he enhanced and signed, “Global Intelligence Challenges in the 1990's.” At that time my focus was on the difference between the conventional threat and the emerging unconventional threat.
Now my focus is on the purpose and process of intelligence as decision-support. We must — we will — move from secret intelligence for the few to open intelligence for the many; from expensive centralized largely worthless intelligence to free and low-cost distributed intelligence relevant to every person at every level on every issue; from intelligence as window-dressing for channeling $80 billion a year to banks and corporations, to intelligence as an integral element of every aspect of a Smart Nation.
Today Owl sent me a link to an article, Philip E. Tetlock and Barabara A Mellers, “Intelligent Management of Intelligence Agencies,” American Psychologist, 2011, pp. 1-12. I respect Owl, so I printed it and read it twice.
This article is completely out of touch with reality and the authors have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the literatures pertinent to their endeavor. Out of 89 cited sources 12 are non-intelligence-related prior publications of the lead author, 1 is a prior publication of the second author, and 11 are ostensibly about intelligence but truly marginal selections. So 12% sources on the subject, 13% self-citation, and 75% escoteric psycho-babble irrelevant to the actual challenge. As an intelligence professional, I am offended that two ostensibly erudite individuals would dare to publish this trype without even a semblance of understanding of the subject under discussion.
Trust is an essential building block of any economic and social system. Systems that attempt to operate without it inevitably fail. A loss of trust typically preceeds a collapse in legitimacy.
The book is all about the mechanisms for building trust. There are four mechanisms:
moral controls,
reputational pressure (shame),
institutional pressure (legal system), and
security controls (encryption, locks, etc.).
He contends (rightly) that in the modern world, we don't typically make/have the personal relationships required to build moral and reputational trust. We typically make impersonal relationships when we interact with a global economic system (you buy stuff made by people you don't know). As a result, we rely up on institutional (legal compliance) and security (to guard against bad behavior) to provide the level of trust necessary to make the global economy work.
There are two massive problems with that.
Legal compliance is increasingly a farce. Take the mortgage settlement the US government and the financial industry reached over rampant fraud in mortgage lending. I wrote a bit more about it on the Resilient Community blog if you want more detail. What does this mean? That even at the national level in a “developed country” it is impossible to use legal means to enforce trustworthiness (let's not even talk about compliance at the global level). It's doesn't work anymore. It's just too easy for anybody with financial means, to buy off country's legal system for pennies on the dollar (to the damage caused). The compliance system is broken.
So, that leaves us with security as the only way to prevent bad actors from running away with the global system. This leads me to a great presentation I heard yesterday by Dan Geer. He's another philosopher “king” of crypto-security (but for the CIA). Very smart guy. He made a convincing case that security is scaling slower than data, bandwidth, node, and user growth. It is falling behind and will continue to fall behind as the global system grows.
Upshot: it's already nearly impossible to secure big organizations. Every Fortune 500 company has and will continue to compromised. The government's systems are already a sieve. There's almost nothing that can be done about it and it will get increasingly worse. Forget about securing a single person trying to connect to the global system. They are just sheep ready for slaughter.
So, what happens now?
The global system will continue to grow. Trust will continue to leak as attempts at compliance and security fail to work effectively. The economic depression we have already started gets worse and worse and worse. Disorder erupts. It grows….
Is there a solution? An alternative form of social order that can provide a scalable global solution?
Yes. Resilient communities. Resilient communities rescale your life down to a rational level. They make personal relationships with the people that economically interact with you possible (again).
Hey, let the rest of the world sink into the squalor of a trust free world. It will make that system easier to trounce in head to head competition for people.
It may have been the one and only thing which prevented an attack on Iran during the Bush years. Chairman of the Judiciary Committee John Conyers spent years fending off nationwide calls to impeach George W. Bush over the invasion of Iraq, the shredding of the Constitution after 9/11, and other high crimes and misdemeanors culminating in a summer of 2008 “non-impeachment impeachment hearings,” in which witnesses such as Rep. Brad Miller, Rep. Maurice Hinchey, Rep. Walter Jones, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, Vincent Bugliosi and many others came together to implore the committee to bring articles of impeachment.
At one point Conyers closed to the committee room to any further audience members, prompting calls of “shame! shame! shame!” from the packed halls of the Rayburn Building to which people had traveled from across the country, but established numerous closed-circuit television viewing rooms for the public in other parts of the Hill.
Conyers refused to impeach, but did in fact draw one hard line in the sand, saying that if Bush attacked Iran, it would guarantee impeachment proceedings. George Bush must have believed him. Now as the crazies beat the drums for war with Iran, driving Obama almost irresistibly to war, Conyers has fallen silent. As recently as January 25, Obama said no options were “off the table.”
If we attack Iran, it will be an excuse to pour millions of rounds of utterly demonic – there is no other word – depleted uranium ammunition into a country which has done us no harm, which acknowledges the right of navigation in international waters but merely insists that it will not be bullied. The U.S. is determined to impose sanctions no matter what Iran says about its weapons programs, in a perfect replay of the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Then as in Iraq, this will kill and maim entire generations of the most innocent life imaginable, that which sits and will sit in their mothers' wombs.
