The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
It's happening! Should spread like wildfire once it passes a natural tipping point.
Continue reading “John Maguire: YouTube (3:26) DIY Open Source Cell Phones & Mesh Telephony”
UK pays price for MI5 courting terror
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Asia Times, 30 May 2013
The brutal murder of an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight in the southeast London district of Woolwich raises new questions about the British government's national security strategy, at home and abroad. Officials have highlighted the danger of “self-radicalizing” cells inspired by Internet extremism, but this ignores overwhelming evidence that major UK terror plots have been incubated by the banned al-Qaeda-linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun.
Equally, it is no surprise that the attackers had been seen earlier on the radar of MI5, the UK's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. While Al Muhajiroun's emir, Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed – currently self-exiled to Tripoli in northern Lebanon – has previously claimed “public immunity” due to murky connections with British intelligence, compelling evidence suggests such connections might still be operational in the context of foreign policy imperatives linked to oil and gas interests.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: GLADIO B Comes Home to London — USA Next?”
I strongly agree with [former US CIA Director] R. James Woolsey and [a former CIA analyst and Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an Advisory Board to Congress] Dr. Peter Vincent Pry that the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat to the U.S. demands our strongest attention (“How North Korea Could Cripple the U.S.,” op-ed, May 21).
Analysis of Multimedia Shared on Twitter After Tornado
Humanitarian organizations and emergency management offices are increasingly interested in capturing multimedia content shared on social media during crises. Last year, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) activated the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHN) to identify and geotag pictures and videos shared on Twitter that captured the damage caused by Typhoon Pablo, for example. So I’ve been collaborating closely with my colleague Hemant Purohit to analyze the multimedia content shared by millions of tweets posted after the Category 5 Tornado devastated the city of Moore, Oklahoma on May 20th. The results are shared below along with details of a project I am spearheading at QCRI to provide disaster responders with relevant multimedia content in real time during future disasters.
For this preliminary multimedia analysis, we focused on the first 48 hours after the Tornado and specifically on the following multimedia sources/types: Twitpic, Instagram, Flickr, JPGs, YouTube and Vimeo. JPGs refers to URLs shared on Twitter that include “.jpg”. Only ~1% of tweets posted during the 2-day period included URLs to multimedia content. We filtered out duplicate URLs to produce the following unique counts depicted above and listed below.
Clearly, Instagram and Youtube are important sources of multimedia content during disasters. The graphs below (click to enlarge) depict the frequency of individual multimedia types by hour during the first 48 hours after the Tornado. Note that we were only able to collect about 2 million tweets during this period using the Twitter Streaming API but expect that millions more were posted, which is why access to the Twitter Firehose is important and why I’m a strong advocate of Big Data Philanthropy for Humanitarian Response.
Could anything have checked America’s mad rush to war in Iraq in 2003, driven as it was by a cabal of neoconmen intent on cynically manipulating the trauma of 9-11 to achieve a different agenda?
Perhaps (1) if Colin Powell had the courage to resign on principle rather than allowing himself to be pressured into giving his disgraceful imitation of Adlai Stevenson's performance at the UN during the Cuban Missile Crisis, or almost certainly (2) if the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair sided with France, Germany, and Russia and the majority of Europeans in opposing the Iraq war. Of course, no one will ever know, but Powell enjoyed immense moral stature at the time, and without his cheerleading, the veneer of Bush’s and Cheney’s moral authority would certainly have been far weaker. The case of Blair, aka Bush’s poodle, is more complex: If the UK sided with Europe, Bush would have been isolated and the march to war very likely might well have been still born.
But a large number, perhaps a majority, of the English people do not see themselves as being Europeans. And the English elites, like Blair, trust instead in using the UK’s “special relationship” with the US to punch above their weight in world affairs. Viewed narrowly, the UK-US special relationship has roots in WWII, but the UK’s proud sense of separateness from Europe reaches back at least a 1000 years in history and is grounded in its island geography. The English have never resolved the question: Are they part of Europe? The UK’s tepid membership in the EU illustrates the point.
The below op-ed by Immanuel Wallerstein argues that European question is again coming to forefront of British politics and pressure to leave the EU is mounting. Moreover, the question is being complicated by the growing regional tensions in Northern Ireland, Wales, and especially Scotland.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Whither the British Poodle?”
Globalization Creates a New Worry: Enemy Convergence
By THOM SHANKER
New York Times, 30 May 2013
WASHINGTON — Adm. James G. Stavridis, who stepped down this month as NATO’s supreme commander, has been at war in two wars — overseeing the alliance’s role in the enduring mission in Afghanistan as well as the shorter combat air campaign over Libya.
Combined with his tenure before NATO — he was the top officer at the military’s Southern Command, for a total of seven years in a senior four-star billet — Admiral Stavridis had been the longest-serving global combatant commander in the American military.
As he rose through the ranks of command over a 37-year career in uniform, Admiral Stavridis also came to be recognized as one of the military’s most prolific authors on strategy, operations and tactics. Today, though, ask what worries him most, and he answers in a single word: convergence.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Admrial James Stavrides Expands on “Open Source Security””
This has been the US right-wing's position all along.
Retired 4 star Admiral Blows Whistle on Benghazi new Evidence
EXTRACT
This apparent abduction by terrorists of our ambassador and then negotiated trade for the Blind Sheikh would have been the “October Surprise” that would have elevated President Obama’s flagging popularity and boosted his approval ratings for a re-election. A dramatic prisoner exchange that saved our ambassador’s life However, something went horribly wrong. A cunning and illegal bit of treachery by the Obama White House turned into something entirely different. Obama’s October surprise turned into a carnage orchestrated by the White House itself as the President, Leon Panetta, and CIA Director, David Petraeus watched via a UAV real-time feed as a 7 hour attack on the Benghazi Embassy raged. Reportedly, stand down orders were given several times to different units within striking distance.
A plot of pure deception
With what should have been only a staged kidnapping of Ambassador J. Christian Stevens, instead, Navy Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty refused a stand down order and began doing their job of protecting the ambassador using force. Immediately the well-trained Seals began inflicting heavy casualties upon the terrorists who thought they were merely in a cake walk to abduct Ambassador Stevens without mishap. As a result of the plan going awry, a massive attack arose from the anger of the terrorists who felt they had been betrayed by President Obama. In the aftermath of the battle which saw Navy Seal Glen Doherty killed after the embassy had been overrun along with the ambassador’s staff. Ambassador Steven’s whose body showed up 5 hours later at a Benghazi hospital supposedly overcome by smoke, but as the initial foreign press reports indicated a much different outcome, in fact, Stevens was raped, tortured, and dragged around Benghazi in retaliation for the botched Obama White House plan.If not for foreign press agents, who were there and saw, we would never have known the truth as the sold out leftist media of the US would have hidden this fact to aid President Obama’s campaign efforts.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Admiral Lyons on Benghazi as October Surprise”
