Public Intelligence Blog – Page 2814 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

2012/05/102012/05/10

Mini-Me: Agents of Religion – Religion of Agents

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Articles & Chapters, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government)

0Shares

Huh?

AGENTS OF RELIGION-RELIGION OF AGENTS (Vol. I): THE INFLUENCE OF FAITH IN THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICES

Zhyldyz Oskonbaeva (RIEAS Senior Advisor & Eurasian Liaison)

NEWSLETTER Issue #5 – May 2012 (Mediterranean Council for Intelligence Studies)

The more followers you have, the stronger is their belief in you. The more believers you have, the greater your chances of getting elected. With both you can rule the nation. The difference between the two is that believers will fight for their cause. This forms the basis for real power (From author).

The influence of religion is such that power, order and government perceive their effects as a stabilizer on society as well as the legitimation of their rule. Depending on the history, the state depends on a society that is moral, consistent and trusting in their institutions. As decision makers, real power ensures that their decisions will be both supported and followed by society. From the very beginning of society, religious institutions fought for “believers-parishioners.” As a result, politics borrows from religion in that it is a secularization of bureaucratic competencies formally entrusted to an absolute ruler ‘personally’ chosen by a supreme being and counseled by his representative on earth – embodied as the senior religious leader. Sometimes this symbiotic relationship is equal, sometimes dependent upon the other but always it is both visual and implied. What both understand is that power is expressed in numbers which is something they both need.

This analysis is a series of articles consisting of historical and contemporary facts in order to examine this relationship in more detail. By minimizing editorial comment and without bias to any particular religion, the intent to explore a dimension that remains largely underexplored in modern scholarship. In other words if intelligence professionals are dedicated patriots above the norm then what effect does religion play in the composition of their national identity and their duties in serving the state?

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Agents of Religion – Religion of Agents”

2012/05/102012/05/10

David Swanson: Colin Powell’s Treason – Lest We Forget

Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

4Shares

Colin Powell's Tangled Web

“I get mad when bloggers accuse me of lying — of knowing the information was false. I didn’t.” — Colin Powell.

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world's media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.

Colin Powell doesn't have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It's on videotape.

I tried to ask him about it in the summer of 2004. He was speaking to the Unity Journalists of Color convention in Washington, D.C. The event had been advertised as including questions from the floor, but for some reason that plan was revised. Speakers from the floor were permitted to ask questions of four safe and vetted journalists of color before Powell showed up, and then those four individuals could choose to ask him something related – which of course they did not, in any instance, do.

Bush and Kerry spoke as well. The panel of journalists who asked Bush questions when he showed up had not been properly vetted. Roland Martin of the Chicago Defender had slipped onto it somehow (which won't happen again!). Martin asked Bush whether he was opposed to preferential college admissions for the kids of alumni and whether he cared more about voting rights in Afghanistan than in Florida. Bush looked like a deer in the headlights, only without the intelligence. He stumbled so badly that the room openly laughed at him.

Continue reading “David Swanson: Colin Powell's Treason – Lest We Forget”

2012/05/102012/05/10

Chuck Spinney: Marriage Myths and Political Prancing

Cultural Intelligence

0Shares

… why a little scholarship can be a dangerous thing. Bravo.

The Myth About Marriage

Garry Wills, The New York Review of Books, 2012-05-09, 1:30 PM

Why do some people who would recognize gay civil unions oppose gay marriage? Certain religious groups want to deny gays the sacredeness of what they take to be a sacrament. But marriage is no sacrament.

Some of my fellow Catholics even think that “true marriage” was instituted by Christ. It wasn’t. Marriage is prescribed in Eden by YHWH (Yahweh) at Genesis 2.24: man and wife shall “become one flesh.” When Jesus is asked about marriage, he simply quotes that passage from Genesis (Mark 10.8). He nowhere claims to be laying a new foundation for a “Christian marriage” to replace the Yahwist institution.

Some try to make the wedding at Cana (John 1.1-11) somehow sacramental because Jesus worked his first miracle there. But that was clearly a Jewish wedding, like any other Jesus might have attended, and the miracle, by its superabundance of wine, is meant to show the disciples that the Messianic time has come. The great Johannine scholar Father Raymond Brown emphasizes this, and concludes of the passage: “Neither the external nor the internal evidence for a symbolic reference to matrimony is strong. The wedding is only the backdrop and occasion for the story, and the joining of the man and woman does not have any direct role in the narrative.”

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Marriage Myths and Political Prancing”

2012/05/10

Sepp Hassleberger: Open Source Car Created in Three Months – Interview

03 Economy, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Future-Oriented, Hacking, Liberation Technology, Methods & Process

0Shares

Interviewing Joe Justice from Team Wikispeed on the Future of Manufacturing (and Consumption)

Joe Justice is the ideator of Team Wikspeed: a team of volunteers distributed around the world who recently created a prototype car that is open source, modular and ultra-efficient in just three mo… …YES, in just three months compared with the years it takes traditional car manufacturers to bring out a new model.

Bin Laden Show 00: Taliban Offer Pre-9/11 and Post-9/11, US Rejection

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Government, Peace Intelligence

0Shares

Interview with Mullah Omar, Arnaud de Borchgrave (June 2001) – Very important and rare interview with Mullah Omar the head of the Taliban almost three months before 9-11 on the front page of the Washington Times (June 18). Omar suggested Osama bin Ladin was a problem he wanted to resolve. Bush Administration showed no interest in pursuing this lead. The information in de Borchgrave’s 2001 report is consistent with that in an important report issued in February 2011 by theCenter on International Cooperation at New York University, which is summarized by Gareth Porter in Counterpunch here.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

Phi Beta Iota: There are other reports of the Taliban approaching the US Department of State (including one approach to a CIA officer under cover). After 9/11 the Taliban resurfaced these offers, but asking only that Bin Laden receive a public trial. In every instance before and after 9/11 the US refused to consider the Taliban offers to turn over Bin Laden. One can only surmise that between them the CIA and the White House were quite content with the role Bin Laden was playing in AF, and that removing him would actually interfere with US plans for which Bin Laden was, like Lee Harvey Oswald, a “patsy” in the not-so-great game.

2012/05/102012/05/10

Eagle: Worldwide Incumbents Facing the Wrath of Angry Voters BUT Voters Still Mired in False Left-Right (No Difference) Paradigm

11 Society, Cultural Intelligence

0Shares

Activist Post

As angry citizens around the world are becoming aware of how broken the global economic and political systems are, their desperation for real change has resulted in dramatic shifts in political majorities in the Western world.In March of this year, voters in Australia miffed by Gilliard’s reversal on her pledge not to introduce carbon taxes, nearly wiped out her Labor party in Queensland.The majority Labor party went from holding 51 seats to just 7 in what operatives called “devastating” and a “stunning reversal” in the nation’s political party power.

Just last week, U.K.’s prime minister David Cameron had to apologize for terrible election losses where hundreds of his fellow Conservative councillors lost their seats “against a difficult national backdrop.” Pundits called it “embarrassing.”

Cameron blamed voter sentiment on his “difficult decisions to deal with the debt, the deficit and the broken economy that we inherited,” decisions which he vowed to “go on making” with or without public support.This weekend saw two more European powerhouses take big hits. France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy lost his re-election bid, while Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) party in Germany took a nose dive in state elections spelling trouble for her re-election next year.

Also over the weekend, a major power shift happened in Greece as furious voters delivered a “humiliating defeat” to the “bank bailout and austerity” parties that previously held majority rule.What does this wave of anti-incumbent sentiment mean for Obama and the Democrats in U.S. elections this fall? And, will replacing one party with another actually solve anything?The mounting anger manifesting as the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movements does not bode well for incumbents in the United States. If these recent elections in Europe and Australia are any indication, Obama may be heading for the same fate.

Tracking polling shows that Obama is neck-and-neck with either GOP front-runner Mitt Romney or GOP hopeful Ron Paul. With the general election still half-a-year away and economic conditions worsening for most Americans, it seems Obama could face defeat in November.

To the question of whether these “radical” shifts in power will actually mean anything; many view it as just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And they’re likely correct.

Voters may believe that by voting for candidates who oppose bank bailouts and austerity, somehow the iceberg of debt owed to criminal bankers will vanish. Perhaps if newly elected leaders follow the Iceland model of debt forgiveness and real monetary reform, these countries may stand chance.

Without that, however, playing musical chairs in the false left-right paradigm will likely do no good.

Read other articles by Eric Blair here.

See Also:

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

We the People Reform Coalition

2012/05/092012/05/09

NIGHTWATCH: France-Greece Shock Bankers Into Reality

08 Wild Cards, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

0Shares

Europe: For the record. German Chancellor Merkel and the European Council have changed in the last 48 hours from emphasizing austerity and the importance of adhering to agreements and goals to focusing on growth.

The two economic ideas are not mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, the growth has not been discussed in connection with south European sovereign debt. The rise of the socialists in France and the rejectionists in Greece seems to jolted the European bankers to consider potentially more innovative ideas about continental economic health besides “pay what you owe” policies.

The window of innovation will not last long because the debt exceeds the capacity to pay it down. The demographics of up to 50% unemployment among the most able cohorts of the work forces in Mediterranean European states defeat growth without statism. This is the threat.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Chuck Spinney: Europe in Crisis Rule by Troika Spain and Hungary Next

Chuck Spinney: Financial Coups Destroying Europe

Chuck Spinney: German Economic Imperialism Killing Europe?

John Steiner: Iceland Defies Banks, Recovering Rapidly

Michel Bauwens: Michael Hudson on the crucial link between democracy and debt throughout history

Mini-Me: Iceland Breaks the Back of Western Banking

Mini-Me: Iceland Triumphs Over Banks, Western Governments Continue the Charade

NIGHTWATCH: Financial Crisis Now a Crisis of Fundamentals

Mini-Me: US Dollar Out, Yuan, System D, and Open Money In + Meta-RECAP