It’s one thing to make an object invisible, like Harry Potter’s mythical cloak. But scientists have made an entire event impossible to see. They have invented a time masker.

Think of it as an art heist that takes place before your eyes and surveillance cameras. You don’t see the thief strolling into the museum, taking the painting down or walking away, but he did. It’s not just that the thief is invisible – his whole activity is.

What scientists at Cornell University did was on a much smaller scale, both in terms of events and time. It happened so quickly that it’s not even a blink of an eye. Their time cloak lasts an incredibly tiny fraction of a fraction of a second. They hid an event for 40 picoseconds (trillionths of a second), according to a study appearing in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

We see events happening as light from them reaches our eyes. Usually it’s a continuous flow of light. In the new research, however, scientists were able to interrupt that flow for just an instant…

[continues at AP via Physorg. Thanks to Tar Wight for the tip.]

The general is surprisingly good at meditation. It’s not just the impeccable posture — that might be expected of a man long used to standing at attention. It’s his hands, which rest idly on his knees, and his combat boots, which remain planted firmly on the floor. Over the next several minutes, Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Surgeon General of the Army, will keep his eyes closed and his face perfectly relaxed.

Few in this hotel conference room, where three dozen have assembled to mark the 10th anniversary of the Samueli Institute, a research organization specializing in alternative therapies, are able to match Schoomaker’s stillness.

Even as our first speaker implores that we “close [our] eyes … feel the chair, feel the air, feel the breath going in and out,” this motley crew of professors, bejeweled clairvoyants, military personnel and Einsteinian-haired futurists tap their toes, shuffle papers and ogle paper plates of fruit and croissants.

“Wherever you’ve come from, wherever you imagine you’re going, you’re actually only doing it right now, in this moment.” Our meditation guru for the day, Dr. Wayne Jonas, is not only a retired Army medical officer and former director of the holistic branch of the National Institute of Health. He’s also the leader of the organization we’ve met to celebrate.

Schoomaker is here because he has a health crisis on his hands. And he’s betting on guys like Jonas to help cope with it — despite the obvious institutional schisms between Schoomaker’s organization and this one.

The Pentagon is turning to alternative medicine to help alleviate the devastating symptoms of Post-traumatic stress disorder that afflict more than 250,000 military personnel; soothe the brain trauma that’s left thousands more with tremors, speech impediments and memory lapses; and assuage the chronic pain that lingers after grueling, repeat deployments.

The Samueli Institute might be the Pentagon’s best chance at making alt-medicine work. Or, at least, figuring out if it even stands a chance…

[continues at Wired]

Months ago, I asked the Pentagon for its visual records of Osama bin Laden’s sea burial under the Freedom of Information Act. Today, I received a thick packet of No— a complete denial that any records exist. Read it.

The core of the response is this: the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States Special Operations Command, and the Department of the Navy all had their records searched. Nothing. Admiral Mike Mullen’s email was scanned. Nothing. The Pentagon claims not a single person aboard the USS Carl Vinson, where Bin Laden’s remains were disposed of, took a single picture. Not a single email from the ship makes reference to photo or video. Essentially: nobody in the military has evidence. So did these things ever exist? If so, they’re in a filing cabinet at the CIA, where they’ll be safe for the rest of time.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 breezed through Congress and headed to the White House, even though public opposition to parts of the bill, now directed at President Obama in the hope of a hail Mary veto, remains strong. The most troubling aspects of the bill violate fundamental rights provided in the U.S. Constitution to American citizens by giving the government sweeping power to indefinitely detain citizens without trial. Like many other pieces of legislation, this year’s NDAA is another push in a long series of movements marching the U.S. Towards a hard right, nearly fascist state.

In addition to this, the NDAA also contains troubling language regarding Department of Defense interests in Iran, China, Wikileaks, defense contractors and more. A report from a conference on the NDAA contains tough talk in respect to both China and Iran. Considering the amount of saber rattling many warhawks have already engaged in, one has to wonder seriously whether the U.S. Could further engage in military actions towards Iran and what exactly, the DOD believes our attitude towards the Chinese will be in the coming year. The bill contains an amendment which requires economic sanctions towards entities in Iran as well as a provision for “an independent review of current U.S. Capability gaps to counter Iran and China” (emphasis mine). The conference report also says it “takes steps to ensure that the United States is fully prepared to defend our vital interests against an emerging competitor” in regards to China.

Given the information dumps from Wikileaks over past two years, as well as the horrid treatment of Private Bradley Manning, on trial for providing information to Wikileaks, the Pentagon is very interested in keeping other potential whistleblowers at bay. The Defense Department’s research arm already expressed interest this year in employing a disinformation campaign against would be Wikileakers. The NDAA conference report codifies that interest, saying it:

Requires the Secretary of Defense to establish a comprehensive program to detect unauthorized uses of classified information. Requires technological solutions, updated policies and procedures, and enforcement measures to assist with detection of such unauthorized activities.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media.

Once again, the military industrial complex is howling about money, with its most fervent supporters knowing that the U.S. government is completely broke, but believing budget cuts have to come from somewhere that isn’t the DOD. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said on Wednesday that another round of cuts aside from the $350 billion called for in August is “nuts” and would be a “doomsday mechanism,” according to The Hill.

Since the year 2000, defense spending has increased 86%, not counting funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with other money going to the general “War on Terror.” The DOD budget has increased in size every year, and by the end of FY2011, total military spending including ongoing wars will nearly hit $3 trillion.

In no uncertain terms, Panetta hinted that even if conflicts were to end, defense spending would not decrease “on his watch.” At the Association of the U.S. Army conference, Panetta said in the past, the military was “hollowed out” at the end of major conflicts and said “we must never make that mistake again.” In other words, though we spend more money each year on the military, it will never be enough, and enacting a small portion of cuts, drawn out over a decade, is more dangerous to national security than a new Soviet Russia teeming with Osama Bin Ladens.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media

New Left Project writes about the inhuman future of how we engage in warfare. Will the decision whether to conduct military strikes eventually be determined by algorithm?

One night last summer Shakeel Khan and his family were at home in North Waziristan when there was a huge explosion. ‘I was resting with my parents in one room when it happened. God saved my parents and I, but my brother, his wife, and children were all killed.’ The children were five and three years old. Khan says, ‘I must support my aged parents now but I earn very little We don’t have enough to reconstruct our house and fear that the drones will strike us again.’ Shakeel Khan and his family, living in a remote part of Pakistan, had become victims of one of the newest weapons on the planet: unmanned drones.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, are aircraft which can be piloted remotely using wireless technology. Most military drones are fairly small and used over distances of a few kilometres for intelligence and reconnaissance purposes. Over the past few years however we have witnessed the rapid rise of the use of armed drones such as the Predator and the Reaper. They are used by US and British forces to launch attacks at great distances while the operators sit safely in air-conditioned trailers over 7,000 miles away in a base near Las Vegas. It is not just the US and the UK. Israel too has used armed drones to launch attacks in Gaza (indeed it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that the drone wars were conceived in the occupation); Italy has been using drones over Libya; and it is estimated that over forty other countries are now trying to buy or develop their own drones. A recent defense market report predicted that annual global spending on drones would double to $11.5 billion over the next few years.

While supporters of unmanned systems like drones argue they are in effect the same as piloted aircraft, others are beginning to see that by removing one of the key restraints to warfare – the risk to one’s own forces – unmanned systems seem to be making armed attacks much more likely. This year alone US forces have been engaged in armed conflicts in six separate countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan), something that many military experts are saying would not be possible without the use of drones.

Drones are also clearly eroding legal and human rights. In Pakistan and Yemen, for example, the CIA are using drones to undertake assassinations of individuals placed on a so-called ‘high value target’ list. The hi-profile targeted killing of US-born cleric Anwar al-Alwaki this weekend is just the latest example. Human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have condemned such killing and the UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial killing has repeatedly called on the US to explain how they justify using drones to target and kill individuals under current international law. Although the UK has never officially confirmed that it operates a High Value Target list, it has hinted that it does and a recent presentation at an MoD conference in Cardiff told the delegates to assume ‘that a HVT list was agreed and maintained.’

As well as targeted killing, drones are being used to deliver what the military call ‘persistent presence’. Without on-board pilots, drones are able to loiter over a particular area for hours, days, and even weeks, enabling weapons operators and intelligence analysts back at base to scrutinise particular areas looking for suspicious behavior and ‘targets of opportunity’. It is suggested that this way of using drones is leading to high civilian casualty rates, and it is perhaps easy to see why. With young servicemen and women subjected to long hours of boredom whilst in control of lethal technology, mistakes are bound to be made. While the secrecy surrounding the circumstances of drone strikes makes these allegations difficult to prove, a NATO enquiry into attack on a convoy in Afghanistan in February 2010, in which 23 civilians were killed, reported that drone operators had ‘downplayed’ the presence of civilians as they wanted an attack to go ahead.

Earlier this year the British MoD admitted for the first time that it had killed Afghan civilians in a drone strike in March 2011. Responding to a parliamentary question from Green Party MP Caroline Lucas about the deaths David Cameron said, ‘I do not think that the answer is to turn our face away…’ Unfortunately the Prime Minister was not suggesting that we should of course face up to our responsibilities to these innocent victims, but was, rather predictably arguing that we cannot turn away from drone technology which, as he put it, is ‘taking out’ the bad guys.

In the US too, officials argue that drones are efficiently and carefully taking out only the ‘bad guys’. John Brennan, a former member of the CIA and currently a senior counter terrorism advisor to President Obama, has been mocked in the mainstream press for arguing in response to questions about drone strikes in Pakistan that ‘…for the past year there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop’. Those claims were shown to be patently untrue by the excellent research work on drone strikes in Pakistan by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The BIJ working with local researchers, journalists and lawyers in Pakistan have uncovered hundreds of civilian deaths including those of more than 160 children, in drone strikes in Pakistan over the past seven years.

Military planners are also pushing for greater autonomy for drones and other unmanned systems. Some are even arguing that the autonomous systems themselves will be better at making the decision about when and where to fire weapons than humans. Gordon Johnson, formerly of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon, for example, commenting on the growth of robotic systems suggested that, ‘they don’t get hungry. They’re not afraid. They don’t forget their orders. They don’t care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes.’ While the technology for fully autonomous systems utilising artificial intelligence is still some way off military planners are pushing ahead with exploring the underlying technology that will increase autonomy of drones.

Many in government and the military see drones as the ‘perfect weapons for a war weary nation on a tight budget,’ as one journalist recently put it. They are much cheaper than traditional piloted aircraft, they enable the military to undertake armed attacks at little or no risk and their use is much easier to keep secret. However, both the military and the drone industry recognise that a major obstacle to the continued use of drones is the ‘public perception’ of drones. They recognize, as they put it, that the public has a ‘natural scepticism’ about the use of unmanned drones. It’s no coincidence then that we have seen a steady rise in stories about how drones and other unmanned systems could potentially be used for good purposes such as search and rescue, wildlife monitoring and environmental surveys; the idea of the ‘killer drone’ needs to be overcome.

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs the lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. He is also the author of several books: Torture Taxi, the first book to comprehensively cover the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program; I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me, a book looking at the world of black projects through unit patches and memorabilia created for top-secret programs; and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World, a book that gives a broader look at secrecy in the United States.

More on Media Roots

The hacker collective Anonymous has released a fresh batch of data taken from Vanguard Defense Industries, a Pentagon and FBI contractor.

The data release was revealed via a post on tor2web.org and later publicised on the group’s AnonymousIRC Twitter account. In it the group claimed to have released “1GB of private emails and documents belonging to Vanguard Defense Industries (VDI).”

Anonymous later said the e-mails belong to the contractor’s senior vice president, Richard T. Garcia, and contained information regarding “internal meeting notes and contracts, schematics, non-disclosure agreements, personal information about other VDI employees, and several dozen ‘counter-terrorism’ documents classified as ‘law enforcement sensitive’ and ‘for official use only.’”

A key bit of information highlighted in its release pertained to Vanguard Defense Industries’ ShadowHawk drones, which are used by military, law enforcement and private companies across the world and are loaded with grenade launchers and shotguns. Despite highlighting the ShadowHawk unmanned aerial vehicle, the group offered no clear reason for the attack on Vanguard Defense Industries besides its association with military and law enforcement agencies.

Read More: International Business Times

New architectural information has been released about Apple’s proposed, so-called spaceship headquarters in Cupertino. Apple Campus 2 building include 2.8 million square feet of space in the ring-shaped structure with room for some 13,000 employees. Apple will be building its own power center to provide electricity for the campus and will require little supplemental power from the local grid.

According to the city, Apple will be restoring some of the area’s native vegetation with the assistance of arborists from Stanford University.

Photo: Cody Oliver, USMC

The Burning Man may be incinerated faster than usual this year … Noah Schachtman reports for Wired:

There was a time, not all that long ago, when the Pentagon sank tens of millions of dollars into remote-controlled lightning guns that it hoped would fry insurgent bombs before they killed any more troops. Now, disassembled parts from the one-time wonder-weapons are being sold on eBay. At least one buyer snatched up the gear, hoping to use it in his latest art project for Burning Man.

All of which would make for a funny little story, if that buyer didn’t discover that the multimillion dollar “Joint Improvised Explosive Device Neutralizers,” or JINs, were kluged together from third-rate commercial electronics, and controlled by open Wi-Fi signals. In other words, the Pentagon didn’t just overpay for a flawed weapon. On the off-chance the JIN ever worked, the insurgents could control it, too.

“This is the hack of all hacks,” says Cody Oliver, a freelance technologist in San Francisco. “And this is what they were selling to the government? Holy shit.”

OK, that story is kind of funny, too. In its own dark way.

It started one day last April, Oliver says. He was brainstorming with sometime-employer, Elon Musk, about their next project for Burning Man. For the last three years, Oliver had built for Musk “art cars” — tricked-out jalopies — in the shape of rocket ships that Musk then drove around the festival. (Musk is the founder of the rocket-maker SpaceX, among other firms.) This year, Oliver suggested something different — a remote-controlled art car. Musk liked the idea. So Oliver started trolling eBay for robotic control systems.

He figured he’d get something industrial grade, that already had all the safety and interference issues sorted out. Oliver quickly found a pair of Omnitech Robotics NGCM1 controllers — the kind of high-end electronics that ordinarily sold for tens, if not, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Oliver bought a pair for a thousand bucks. He sent his dad down to a nondescript warehouse in Tucson, Arizona to pick the stuff up.

Oliver knew there was something different about these controllers almost as soon as he took them out of the crate. The steering wheel was outfitted with black buttons labeled “Enable Weapon” and “Weapon On.” In the center was a big red button marked, “STOP!”…

[continues in Wired]

The Pentagon is developing plans to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as both a resource and a weapon in future conflicts. Its research and development agency is offering $42 million in funding to anyone who can help.

Social media will change the nature of warfare just as surely as the telegraph, the radio and the telephone did, and the Pentagon is fearful of being caught short. Some of its goals were laid out in a document being circulated among potential researchers and is to be presented at a briefing on Tuesday in Arlington, Va., at the offices of the military contractor System Planning Corporation.

As social media play increasingly large roles in fomenting unrest in countries like Egypt and Iran, the military wants systems to be able to detect and track the spread of ideas both quickly and on a broad scale. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is soliciting innovative proposals to help build what would be, at its most basic level, an Internet meme tracker …

More in the NY Times

Top Pentagon officials will announce tomorrow their decision to certify lifting the ban on gays serving openly in the armed forces, two defense officials said.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are ready to certify that the armed forces are fully prepared for the change and that it won’t harm military readiness, said the officials who weren’t authorized to discuss the decision before the announcement.

President Barack Obama signed legislation into law in December that would repeal the prohibition, called “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” 60 days after the Defense Department drafts a plan for putting the new regulations in place and Obama and Pentagon officials certify that the shift wouldn’t harm recruitment, retention or readiness.

Obama is scheduled to meet with Panetta and Mullen tomorrow afternoon.

Read More on Bloomberg

While Congress and the President fight it out over the debt ceiling and all of America quietly shudders over whether our economy will completely default on itself, at least one industry still hums along without a care in the world.

Amidst a fiscal crisis of apparently apocalyptic proportions, where the GOP demands dollar for dollar spending cuts from the budget in order to raise our debt limit, the Pentagon asked Congress for $264 million to cover part of a $771 million overrun on the F-35 program. The Hill reports Republican Senator John McCain let the news slip via Twitter, saying “Congress notified that first F-35 jets have cost overruns of $771M. Outrageous! Pentagon asking for $264M down payment now. Disgraceful.”

Leaders of the program Lockheed Martin spat back on Twitter, contending “The F-35 team is focused on reducing costs of the jets and is showing significant improvement in key areas,” to which the ranking Senate Armed Services Committee member McCain said “taxpayers deserve better.”

Of course, the Defense Department and its pet contractors believe any kind of spending cuts, even on a program to build a plane that has no mission, would be catastrophic. Top defense trade organization Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) President Marion Blakey argued in a letter to House Speaker John Boehner “understand the unique national security threats posed by skyrocketing debt, but we believe those threats will only be compounded if funding for the Department of Defense is cut precipitously during this critical stage of budget reduction negotiations.” Blakey went on to say “Any cuts to defense must be generated in a careful and thoughtful manner, guided by our military leaders.

Read the full post at Diatribe Media.

It’s fascinating, and a quick skim highlights both that the majority of military action is overlooked, forgotten or unknown by the much of the public, and that with each passing decade, we seem to engage in warfare with increasing frequency. A mid-eighties retro snippet:

Secret U.S. tests show[ed] startling military uses for weird new chemical agents. The so-called “loony gas,” which we believed could incapacitate enemies without actually harming them, turned out to be LSD. Although we acknowledged that LSD could make people “daffy,” we also stated that these psycho-chemicals were more or less humane. That is, the military could saturate enemies with LSD and take over their towns, without destroying them, before the people recovered.

In the morning of October 10, 2007, the beauticians boarded their flight to the Emirates. They carried duffelbags full of cosmetics, family photographs, Bibles, floral sarongs. More than half of the women left husbands and children behind. In the rush to depart, none of them examined the fine print on their travel documents: their visas to the Emirates weren’t employment permits but thirty-day travel passes that forbade all work, “paid or unpaid”. And Dubai was just a stopping-off point. They were bound for U.S. military bases in Iraq.

Lydia and Vinnie were unwitting recruits for the Pentagon’s invisible army: more than seventy thousand cooks, cleaners, construction workers, fast-food clerks, electricians, and beauticians from the world’s poorest countries who service U.S. military logistics contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (aafes) is behind most of the commercial “tastes of home” that can be found on major U.S. bases, which include jewelry stores, souvenir shops filled with carved camels and Taliban chess sets, beauty salons where soldiers can receive massages and pedicures, and fast-food courts featuring Taco Bell, Subway, Pizza Hut, and Cinnabon. (aafes’s motto: “We go where you go.”)

The wars’ foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as “third-country nationals,” or T.C.N.s. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers.

Read the rest at the New Yorker

American planes are entering Libyan air space, they are dropping bombs, and the bombs are killing and injuring people and destroying things. It is war. Some say it is a good war and some say it is a bad war, but surely it is a war.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration insists it is not a war. Why? Because the balance of forces is so lopsided in favor of the United States. War is only war, it seems, when Americans are dying, when we die. When only they, the Libyans, die, it is something else for which there is as yet apparently no name. When they attack, it is war. When we attack, it is not.

According to “United States Activities in Libya,” a thirty-two-page report that the administration released last week, “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors.”

[It's] a remarkable justification for going to war against Libya without the Congressional approval required by the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

In the early years of the Iraq war, the U.S. military developed a technology so secret that soldiers would refuse to acknowledge its existence, and reporters mentioning the gear were promptly escorted out of the country. That equipment – a radio-frequency jammer – was upgraded several times, and eventually robbed the Iraq insurgency of its most potent weapon, the remote-controlled bomb. But the dark veil surrounding the jammers remained largely intact, even after the Pentagon bought more than 50,000 units at a cost of over $17 billion.

Recently, however, I received an unusual offer from ITT, the defense contractor which made the vast majority of those 50,000 jammers. Company executives were ready to discuss the jammer – its evolution, and its capabilities. They were finally able to retell the largely-hidden battles for the electromagnetic spectrum that raged, invisibly, as the insurgencies carried on. They were prepared to bring me into the R&D facility where company technicians were developing what could amount to the ultimate weapon of this electromagnetic war: a tool that offers the promise of not only jamming bombs, but finding them, interrupting GPS signals, eavesdropping on enemy communications, and disrupting drones, too. The first of the these machines begins field-testing next month.

On a fist-clenchingly cold winter morning, I took a train across the Hudson River to the secret jammer lab.

Story continues at Wired.

Tightly connected. Massively funded. Working for war. This is what the peace movements are up against. Together, the top ten federal contractors, all working for the military, received $138.4 Billion in taxpayer funds through federal contracts during fiscal year 2010. In the first three months of 2011 alone, these ten corporations paid for the services of no fewer than 109 different lobbying firms, deployed to Capitol Hill along with their own in-house corporate lobbyists. A line is drawn between any two military contractors if they both hired the services of at least one lobbying firm in common; the number indicates the number of lobbying firms hired in common:

In the year after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration flooded the conquered country with cash to pay for reconstruction — wrapped bricks of $100 bills. They sent an initial full planeload of cash, followed by 20 other flights to Iraq by May 2004 in a $12-billion haul that U.S. officials believe to be the biggest international cash airlift of all time.

This month, the Pentagon and the Iraqi government are finally closing the books on the program that handled all those Benjamins. But despite years of audits and investigations, U.S. Defense officials still cannot say what happened to $6.6 billion in cash. For the first time, federal auditors are suggesting that some or all of the cash may have been stolen, not just mislaid in an accounting error. Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said the missing $6.6 billion may be “the largest theft of funds in national history.”

Theft of such a staggering sum might seem unlikely, but U.S. officials aren’t ruling it out. Some U.S. contractors were accused of siphoning off tens of millions in kickbacks and graft during the post-invasion period, especially in its chaotic early days. But Iraqi officials were viewed as prime offenders.

Pentagon officials have contended for the last six years that they could account for the money if given enough time to track down the records. But repeated attempts to find the documentation, or better yet the cash, were fruitless.

Iraqi officials argue that the U.S. government was supposed to safeguard the stash under a 2004 legal agreement it signed with Iraq. That makes Washington responsible, they say. Abdul Basit Turki Saeed, Iraq’s chief auditor, has warned U.S. officials that his government will go to court if necessary to recoup the missing money.

“Clearly Iraq has an interest in looking after its assets and protecting them,” said Samir Sumaidaie, Iraq’s ambassador to the United States.

David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller write in the New York Times reports:

The Pentagon, trying to create a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks on the United States, plans to issue a new strategy soon declaring that a computer attack from a foreign nation can be considered an act of war that may result in a military response.

Several administration officials, in comments over the past two years, have suggested publicly that any American president could consider a variety of responses — economic sanctions, retaliatory cyberattacks or a military strike — if critical American computer systems were ever attacked.

The new military strategy, which emerged from several years of debate modeled on the 1950s effort in Washington to come up with a plan for deterring nuclear attacks, makes explicit that a cyberattack could be considered equivalent to a more traditional act of war. The Pentagon is declaring that any computer attack that threatens widespread civilian casualties — for example, by cutting off power supplies or bringing down hospitals and emergency-responder networks — could be treated as an act of aggression.

[Continues at The New York Times]

The faces at the Pentagon are still mighty red since WikiLeaks. And they don’t want a repeat. A new directive from the Department of Defense aims at squelching leaks — by deputizing a massive number of employees as involuntary snitches.

The document, titled “Counterintelligence Awareness and Reporting (CIAR),” directs DoD employees, military and civilian alike, to “Report, in accordance…the contacts, activities, indicators, and behaviors” of their coworkers. And given the WikiLeaks story, this means keeping tabs on your neighbor’s computer. Suspicious (and must-report) behavior includes:

“Unauthorized possession or operation of cameras, recording devices, computers, and communication devices where classified information is handled or stored.”

“Discussions of classified information over a non-secure communication device.”

“Unauthorized copying, printing, faxing, e-mailing, or transmitting classified material.”

Read More on Gizmodo

Here’s one I missed completely, and it’s likely you did, too. It aired on CNN last January.

Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.

The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses” by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and is in the process against the United States economy.”

While economic analysts and a final report from the federal government’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission blame the crash on such economic factors as high-risk mortgage lending practices and poor federal regulation and supervision, the Pentagon contractor adds a new element: “outside forces,” a factor the commission did not examine.

“There is sufficient justification to question whether outside forces triggered, capitalized upon or magnified the economic difficulties of 2008,” the report says, explaining that those domestic economic factors would have caused a “normal downturn” but not the “near collapse” of the global economic system that took place.

Suspects include financial enemies in Middle Eastern states, Islamic terrorists, hostile members of the Chinese military, or government and organized crime groups in Russia, Venezuela or Iran. Chinese military officials publicly have suggested using economic warfare against the U.S.

Michael G. Vickers, assistant secretary of defense for special operations, said the Pentagon was not the appropriate agency to assess economic warfare and financial terrorism risks. (Associated Press)
In an interview with The Times, Mr. Freeman said his report provided enough theoretical evidence for an economic warfare attack that further forensic study was warranted.

“The new battle space is the economy,” he said. “We spend hundreds of billions of dollars on weapons systems each year. But a relatively small amount of money focused against our financial markets through leveraged derivatives or cyber efforts can result in trillions of dollars in losses. And, the perpetrators can remain undiscovered.

“This is the equivalent of box cutters on an airplane,” Mr. Freeman said…

[continues in the Washington Times]

This week the Pentagon sank to a new low: claiming that Dr. King would “understand” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. King’s legacy is clear: he opposed war and other violence and condemned war as “an enemy of the poor.”

Anwar Al Awlaki - Terrorist? Pentagon/CIA Employee? Same Thing!

Al-Qaeda terror mastermind Anwar Al-Awlaki, the man who helped plot the aborted Christmas Day bombing, the Fort Hood shooting, the Times Square bombing attempt, and who also preached to the alleged September 11 hijackers, dined at the Pentagon just months after 9/11 documents obtained by Fox News show. Thursday, October 21, 2010

American-born cleric Awlaki’s role as a key figure in almost every recent terror plot targeting the United States and Canada, coupled with his visit to the Pentagon, only confirms our long stated position that Awlaki is a chief terrorist patsy-handler for the CIA: he is the federal government’s premier false flag agent.

“Documents exclusively obtained by Fox News, including an FBI interview conducted after the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009, state that Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military’s outreach to the Muslim community in the immediate aftermath of the attacks,” states the report…

Al-Awlaki is a U.S. Citizen, who pursued a Doctorate in Education at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

Al-Awlaki is a U.S. Citizen, who pursued a Doctorate in Education at George Washington University in Washington D.C.

George Washington University is known for having close ties to the intelligence community, the most public of which is that GWU maintains the National Security Archive.

The Washington Post has reported that George Washington University has CIA employees teaching courses on their campus, as part of the CIA’s “Officers in Residence” program….

Photo: Piotr Grzywocz (CC)

Having been unable to eat in the presence of some canines throughout my life (folks, you really should have trained your dogs, you know who you are…) this one comes as no surprise. Spencer Ackerman writes on the always interesting WIRED’s Danger Room:

Drones, metal detectors, chemical sniffers, and super spycams — forget ‘em. The leader of the Pentagon’s multibillion military task force to stop improvised bombs says there’s nothing in the U.S. arsenal for bomb detection more powerful than a dog’s nose.

Despite a slew of bomb-finding gagdets, the American military only locates about 50 percent of the improvised explosives planted in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that number jumps to 80 percent when U.S. and Afghan patrols take dogs along for a sniff-heavy walk. “Dogs are the best detectors,” Lieutenant General Michael Oates, the commander of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, told a conference yesterday, National Defense reports. That’s not the greatest admission for a well-funded organization — nearly $19 billion since 2004, according to a congressional committee — tasked with solving one of the military’s wickedest problems.

Improvised explosive devices continue to rise in Afghanistan. There were 1,062 successful bomb attacks in the first eight months of 2010 there, compared to 820 during the previous period in 2009. Making matters worse in Afghanistan is the fact that most homemade bombs there are powered by fertilizers and chemicals, rendering metal detectors useless.

Picking up the chemical signature of those bombs should be relatively straightforward — just a matter of picking up the stray molecules that float away from unstable explosive material. In practice, it hasn’t been so easy. In 1997, a young program manager at Darpa launched the “Dog’s Nose” progam, to develop a bomb-sniffer as good as a canine’s. Today, that program manager, Regina Dugan, runs the entire agency. And Darpa is still has a project on the books to “leverag[e] the components of the canine olfactory system to create a breakthrough detection system.”

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It was the day this year that the often shadowy Wikileaks, chief nemesis of the Pentagon, maybe their worst nightmare—considered perhaps even more dangerous than the Taliban—surfaced again with the largest public drop of secret military documents in history. Wikileaks is a public web site run by the Sunshine Press, a non-profit group.

For understandable reasons, the Pentagon is at war with its information war against the war—literally.

Wikileaks introduced the significance of their immense treasure trove of secrets on their website this way: “The 391,832 reports (’The Iraq War Logs’), document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a ‘SIGACT’ or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.”

This time around, and unlike the earlier dissemination of what they called Afghan “war logs, they sanitized these documents to remove names that might become targets for retribution. The gesture did not satisfy the Pentagon that said they would provide aid and comfort to the enemy. Forcibly retired General Stanley McCrystal called the release “ sad.”

The Los Angeles Times reported, “In addition to the Times, the documents were made available to the Guardian newspaper in London, the French newspaper Le Monde, Al Jazeera and the German magazine Der Spiegel, on an embargoed basis.

The New York Times said it had edited or withheld any documents that would “put lives in danger or jeopardize continuing military operations.” It said it redacted the names of informants, a particular concern of the Defense Department

The Pentagon had been bracing for the release for months. Fearing more compromises of national security and more embarrassment for practices they wanted hidden, they had set up a Wikileaks war room staffed with 120 operatives in anticipation. The Central Command in Tampa Florida has been fully engaged in trying to get newspapers not to run “stolen” documents.

A special intelligence unit called the Red Cell was involved. The task has been to prod the American spy networks to operate in a cleverer and more intelligent manner. (Ironically, Wikileaks had leaked some of their internal reports earlier.)

One report dealt with perceptions abroad that the US supported terrorists. Another was oriented toward how to sell support for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Western Europe, counseling that “counting on apathy is not enough.”

I can testify to their savvy. I met members of the unit at a University of Westminister conference in London in September on war and terrorism.  There were three of them. Two stood out because of their crew cuts and military demeanor. A third was a Muslin woman. They were clearly on a reconnaissance mission probably linked to Wikileaks detection since it been reported that English students were helping the covert citizens agency target covert government activities.

I spoke at some length with their leader, an active duty Army Major in plain clothers, who told me that his unit in Iraq handled high value prisoners including Saddam Hussein. (They escorted him to the hangman, he revealed.) He was very friendly, made no secret of his affiliation but clearly was not at a leftist academic conference to collect footnotes.

As we know now, the Pentagon were unable to stop the release but may have pressured Wikileaks not to name names. We may never know what happened until Wikileaks finds some document about their anti-wikileaks operations.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange accused the Pentagon or more than document editing. CNN reported, “The founder of Wikileaks was denied a Swedish residency permit on Monday and said his whistleblowing website had been cut off by a company that handled many of its donations. Julian Assange blamed the financial cutoff on the U.S. government, which denied any involvement.” Reports of Death Squads have received little pick up even as they were routinely reported during wars in Central America.

He had earlier intimated the U.S. might have been behind the other incidents in Sweden that led to his being accused of sexual harassment, So called   “honey pot” traps  used in seduction scenarios have always been part of espionage operations.

It’s not just the government that’s been out to discredit Ausaage or perhaps try to prosecute/persecute him. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a front page “profile” of the leader of WikiLeaks that many reders in the comment session saw as a hit job because it insinuated a mass defection in his organization and painted him as arrogant and unstable. It spoke of his problems in Sweden where he was threatened with arrest without noting no charges were filed. Later, CNN seemed to take its cue to go on the offensive and grilled him more on his personal life than the issues the new Wikileaks disclosures raised. He ended up walking off the set in the middle of the tabloid-style “interview.”

A week earlier, an American veteran of the Iraq “surge” published an open letter urging the Administration to heed the revelations and change its policies.

Josh Stieber wrote,

“Dear members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and other willing parties,
This is an anticipatory letter aimed to advise you on your response and responsibility for the coming Wikileaks release, expected on October 23rd. Based on the White House’s response to the last leak about Afghanistan, the temptation seems strong to once again divert attention away from accountability.

I write as a young veteran who once fully embraced the concept of a preemptive war to keep my fellow citizens safe and, as President Bush declared, because “America is a friend to the people of Iraq.” I now hope to preempt your response to the information regarding that war in which I fought”

The full brunt of the US response has yet to be felt. The media outlets that worked with Wikileaks have a new scoop of unprecedented depth and dimension. Yet, the different ways media outlets reported the disclosures reveals continuing media biases against allegations of torture. Few newspapers reported that the documents about civilian deaths minimized the total or that it was U.S. troops that trained Iraqis now accused of abuse.

The New York Times played up the revelations in a page one spread but downplayed their meaning, writing, “…the Iraq documents provide no earthshaking revelations, but they offer insight, texture and context from the people actually fighting the war.”

Not surprisingly, reports of widespread torture that American forces knew about, and in some cases reported with nothing done,  is not “earthshaking.” 15,000 unreported civilian deaths are also minimized.  The Times devoted more ink to evidence of abuses by Iraqi forces without mentioning most were trained by Americans who were the occupying power. It fleshes out US military allegations of Iranian intervention more than reports of killings by American soldiers, an emphasis that conveniently contributes to the demonization of Iran by American politicians.

Contrast this with the Guardian coverage which called its package “Iraq: The War Logs”, and goes high with revelations of “serial detainee abuse” and “15,000 [previously] unknown civilian deaths.”

The Times approach infuriated writer Rob Beschizza who came up with what he called “The New York Times Torture Euphemism Generator!”

“Reading the NYT’s stories about the Iraq War logs, I was struck by how it could get through such gruesome descriptions ­ fingers chopped off, chemicals splashed on prisoners ­ without using the word ‘torture.’ For some reason the word is unavailable when it is literally meaningful, yet is readily tossed around for laughs in contexts where it means nothing at all.”

Oddly,  the New York Times-owned Boston Globe had no reservations in using ‘torture’ in its headline.

The New York-based Columbia Journalism Review surveyed global coverage and, weirdly, criticized Al Jazeera for a video it produced, “All in all, Al Jazeera’s coverage of the secret files is straightforward, “except perhaps” (my emphasis) for a six-and-a-half minute documentary video posted prominently throughout the site, a video that is awkwardly edited and features weird, cable-TV-style reenactments and dramatic readings of some of the reports.” This condescending comment betrays a lack of insight into the differences between TV coverage and newspaper formulas.

While all of the press seems to be reporting the story, few media outlets are going back to their own coverage and acknowledging how they had failed.at the time, to report many of the atrocities we now know the US military knew about, and covered up. One glaring example: The killings that took place in Falujah where Al Jazeera correspondents were banned.

Much of the media, as we now see, especially leading American media outlets, were complicit in a multi-year cover-up of truths and crimes that continue to this day, not just in Iraq or Afghanistan,  but in our living rooms at home.

Much of this commentary first appeared on the Al Jazeera website.

Filmmaker and News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org.

For more on his film Plunder: The Crime of Our Time and companion book The Crime Of Our Time: Why Wall Street Is Not Too Big To Jail, visit plunderthecrimeofourtime.com.

Sometimes it’s the little things in the big stories that catch your eye. On Monday, the Washington Post ran the first of three pieces adapted from Bob Woodward’s new book Obama’s Wars, a vivid account of the way the U.S. high command boxed the Commander-in-Chief into the smallest of Afghan corners.

As an illustration, the Post included a graphic the military offered President Obama at a key November 2009 meeting to review war policy. It caught in a nutshell the favored “solution” to the Afghan War of those in charge of fighting it — Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General David Petraeus, then-Centcom commander, General Stanley McChrystal, then-Afghan War commander, and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, among others.

Labeled “Alternative Mission in Afghanistan,” it’s a classic of visual wish fulfillment. Atop it is a soaring green line that represents the growing strength of the notoriously underwhelming “Afghan Forces,” military and police, as they move toward a theoretical goal of 400,000 — an unlikely “end state” given present desertion rates. Underneath that green trajectory of putative success is a modest, herky-jerky blue curving line, representing the 40,000 U.S. troops Gates, Petraeus, Mullen, and company were pressuring the president to surge into Afghanistan.

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It’s every author’s dream – to write a book that’s so sensationally popular it’s impossible to find a copy in the shops, even as it keeps climbing up the bestseller lists.

And so it is for Anthony Shaffer, thanks to the Pentagon’s desire to buy up all 10,000 copies of the first printing of his new book, Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan — and The Path to Victory. And then pulp them.

The US defence department is scrambling to dispose of what threatens to be a highly embarrassing expose by the former intelligence officer of secret operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and of how the US military top brass missed the opportunity to win the war against the Taliban.

The department of defence is in talks with St Martin’s Press to purchase the entire first print run on the grounds of national security.

The publisher is content to sell the books but the two sides are in a grinding dispute over what should appear in a censored version and when it should be released.

Now St Martin’s Press says it will put the partly redacted manuscript on sale next week whether or not the defence department likes it – and there doesn’t appear much the authorities can do.

The army had cleared the book by Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, about “black ops” in the Afghan war when he was based at Bagram in 2003, for publication after relatively minor changes.

But when the intelligence services and defence department officials saw it they were alarmed.

They said it contained highly classified material including the names of American intelligence agents and accounts of clandestine operations, and demanded the book be withdrawn on the grounds it “could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to national security”…

[continues at the Guardian]