Obama: Attacking Libya Is Not War, Because Americans Are Not Dying
How did the Obama administration authorize military action in Libya without congressional approval? Via a novel redefining of “war”, the Nation reports:
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.…
The Secret History of Iraq’s Invisible War
Noah Shachtman writes in Wired’s Danger Room:
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…
How The Top 10 Military Contractors Lobby In Tandem
Irregular Times discovers the beautiful geometry of evil cronyism:
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:
Pentagon Admits $6 Billion In Cash Was Stolen In Iraq
They shouldn’t beat themselves up over it — just yesterday it took me twenty minutes to find my keys. The Los Angeles Times reports:
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…
Pentagon To Consider Cyberattacks As Act Of War
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…
U.S. Military Orders Millions of Employees to Spy on Each Other
Had to imagine there would be drastic action taken. Sam Biddle writes on Gizmodo:
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.”
5,200 Pentagon Employees Bought Child Pornography, Investigation Halted After 8 Months
Mark Crispin Miller writes on News from Underground:
Here’s one I missed completely, and it’s likely you did, too. It aired on CNN last January.
Pentagon Contractor Blames Financial Crisis On Terrorists
Does the author of this report really expect anyone to believe that the never-ending financial crisis was caused by “outside forces” rather than the very obvious culprits on Wall Street and in Washington? The Washington Times has obtained a Pentagon contractor report suggesting exactly that, however unlikely it may seem:
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…
I Have a Dream … To Go To War?
The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to end it must be ours. — Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking of Vietnam.
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 – Invited To Pentagon After 9/11 – Terrorist? Or Pentagon / CIA Asset?
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…
Pentagon Spends $19 Billion To Discover That The Best Bomb-Detector Is A Dog
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…
The Secret War Between Wikileaks And The Pentagon (And Some Media Outlets)
It happened on a Friday, the anniversary of the first U.S. casualties of the Vietnam War, way back in 1957. It was also the anniversary, in 1964, of French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s announcement that he was turning down the Nobel Prize. He later sat as a judge on Bertrand Russell’s Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, which indicted that conflict’s carnage and lies.
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’),…
The War Addicts: The Pentagon and Military Would Do Almost Anything to Continue A Never-Ending War
Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch via Alternet:
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…
Pentagon Tries To Stop Book By Buying All Copies
Thanks to Isaac Hils for this. As publishers, this story definitely appeals to us at disinformation: Authors with books the Pentagon wants to stop, take note! From the Guardian:
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…
Pentagon: Taliban Can Read WikiLeaks, U.S. Troops Can’t
Noah Shachtman writes on the always interesting WIRED’s Danger Room:
Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks website, and download detailed information about how the U.S. military waged war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents. “Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks,” according to one directive issued by the armed forces.
That cry you hear? It’s common sense, writhing in pain.
There was a time, just a few months ago, when the Pentagon appeared to be growing comfortable with the emerging digital media landscape. Troops were free to blog and tweet, as long as they used their heads and didn’t disclose secrets. Thumb drives and DVDs could be employed, as long as they didn’t carry viruses or classified information. But the WikiLeaks disclosures…
Pentagon Workers Found To Have Downloaded Child Pornography
Ewen MacAskill writes for the Guardian:
Dozens of Pentagon staff and contractors with high-level security clearance have been found by US federal investigators to have downloaded child pornography.
A spokesman said the defence department takes such matters seriously but would not comment on specific cases.
The Pentagon concern is not just that crimes have been committed, though that alone would be grounds for dismissal, but that it makes those involved security risks.
One of those charged was a contractor who had security clearance at the National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications worldwide. He fled the US and is thought to be hiding in Libya.
Details about links between the Pentagon and child pornography were disclosed yesterday in the Boston Globe.
The paper quotes an internal report from the defence criminal investigative service in 2009 which says that though the number found to be involved is small compared with the number employed by the defence department…
Pentagon Asks Troops How Gross It Would Be To Shower With A Gay Person
Alex Pareene writes on Salon.com:
The Pentagon is surveying 400,000 active troops on how they would handle a potential repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” It is kind of a mess.
Some gay rights groups are concerned that the gay and lesbian service members could inadvertently out themselves by filling it out. The survey is sorta-mostly anonymous, but the Defense Department will not provide immunity to anyone outed. On the other hand, if LGBT service members don’t fill it out, the results could be weighted in favor of semi-anonymous homophobia.
As for the content of the survey? Well, it’s got questions like this:
“If Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed and you are assigned to bathroom facilities with an open bay shower that someone you believe to be a gay or lesbian Service member also used, which are you most likely to do? Mark 1.”
- “Take no action;
- “Use the shower at a different time than the…
Holy DARPA, Batman! Pentagon’s BaTMAN and RoBIN Projects Attempt to Master Biology
Who knew that reading comic books or watching the classic ’60s Batman TV show would lead to this? Katie Drummond writes in WIRED’s Danger Room:
The Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm has outdone itself this time. Darpa’s got two new projects that are ambitious in scope, even by their standards. So maybe that explains why the agency opted to enlist some awesomely bad superhero acronyms to characterize the way-out endeavors.
At least, that’s the best explanation Danger Room can come up with. Because it’s tough to see a connection between the fundamental nature of time, biological design … and Gotham City’s Caped Crusader and Boy Wonder.
Leave it up to the prodigious acronym artists at the Pentagon — responsible for gems like RESURRECT, NIRVANA and DUDE — to go for it anyway. Darpa’s launching Biochronicity and Temporal Mechanisms Arising in Nature (BaTMAN), in an effort to better understand “the spatio-temporal universe,” and, from there, “transform…
The Pentagon’s New Map on The Black Fridays
The Black Fridays Episode 21 — Dr. Thomas Barnett
Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS
The Black Fridays proudly welcome Dr. Thomas Barnett to the show. Dr. Barnett earned his Masters and PhD at Harvard, and is a much sought after Public Speaker, Author, and Blogger.
From 1998 through 2004, Dr. Barnett was a Senior Strategic Researcher and Professor in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College, Newport RI, where he taught and served in a senior advisory role with military and civilian leaders in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, and Joint Forces Command.
Dr. Barnett has written for Esquire, Wired, National Review, and the Washington Post, and has been interviewed by Rolling Stone, the Economist, Time, BBC World Service, CNN, Fox News and numerous foreign media. Tom Barnett has been described by U.S. News & World…
U.S. Military Lost In A Sea Of PowerPoints
The New York Times reports on our military’s obsession with PowerPoint presentations — and suggests that overuse of the alternately vague, simplistic, and confusing slide shows contributes to questionable decision-making and a separation from reality. Does PowerPoint hold some small share of blame for the Iraq War?
“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina.
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Image: U.S. military slide presentation via New York Times
