We need to talk about the bad science being funded
By Simon Gandevia | The Conversation | July 18, 2016
Spectacular failures to replicate key scientific findings have been documented of late, particularly in biology, psychology and medicine.
A report on the issue, published in Nature this May, found that about 90% of some 1,576 researchers surveyed now believe there is a reproducibility crisis in science.
While this rightly tarnishes the public belief in science, it also has serious consequences for governments and philanthropic agencies that fund research, as well as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors. It means they could be wasting billions of dollars on research each year.
One contributing factor is easily identified. It is the high rate of so-called false discoveries in the literature. They are false-positive findings and lead to the erroneous perception that a definitive scientific discovery has been made.
This high rate occurs because the studies that are published often have low statistical power to identify a genuine discovery when it is there, and the effects being sought are often small.
Further, dubious scientific practices boost the chance of finding a statistically significant result, usually at a probability of less than one in 20. In fact, our probability threshold for acceptance of a discovery should be more stringent, just as it is for discoveries of new particles in physics.
The English mathematician and the father of computing Charles Babbage noted the problem in his 1830 book Reflections on the Decline of Science in England, and on Some of Its Causes. He formally split these practices into “hoaxing, forging, trimming and cooking”.
‘Trimming and cooking’ the data today
In the current jargon, trimming and cooking include failing to report all the data, all the experimental conditions, all the statistics and reworking the probabilities until they appear significant.
The frequency of many of these indefensible practices is above 50%, as reported by scientists themselves when they are given some incentive for telling the truth.
The English philosopher Francis Bacon wrote almost 400 years ago that we are influenced more by affirmation than negatives and added:
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true.
Deep-seated cognitive biases, consciously and unconsciously, drive scientific corner-cutting in the name of discovery.
This includes fiddling the primary hypothesis being tested after knowing the actual results or fiddling the statistical tests, the data or both until a statistically significant result is found. Such practices are common.
Even large randomised controlled clinical trials published in the leading medical journals are affected (see compare-trials.org) – despite research plans being specified and registered before the trial starts.
Researchers rarely stick exactly to the plans (about 15% do). Instead, they commonly remove registered planned outcomes (which are presumably negative) and add unregistered ones (which are presumably positive).
Publish or perish
We do not need to look far to expose the fundamental cause for the problematic practices pervading many of the sciences. The “publish or perish” mantra says it all.
Academic progression is hindered by failure to publish in the journals controlled by peers, while it is enhanced by frequent publication of, nearly always positive, research findings. Does this sort of competitive selection sound familiar?
It is a form of cultural natural selection – natural, in that it is embedded in the modern culture of science, and selective in that only survivors progress. The parallels between biological natural selection and selection related to culture have long been accepted. Charles Darwin even described its role in development of language in his The Descent of Man (1871).
Starkly put, the rate of publication varies between scientists. Scientists who publish at a higher rate are preferentially selected for positions and promotions. Such scientists have “children” who establish new laboratories and continue the publication practices of the parent.
Good science suffers
In another study published in May, researchers modelled the intuitive but complex interactions between the pressure and effort to publish new findings and the need to replicate them to nail down true discoveries. It is a well-argued simulation of the operation and culture of modern science.
They also conclude that there is natural selection for bad scientific practice because of incentives that simply reward “publication quantity”:
Scrupulous research on difficult problems may require years of intense work before yielding coherent, publishable results. If shallower work generating more publications is favored, then researchers interested in pursuing complex questions may find themselves without jobs, perhaps to the detriment of the scientific community more broadly.
The authors also reiterate the low power of many studies to find a phenomenon if it was truly there. Despite entreaties to increase statistical power, for example by collection of more observations, it has remained consistently low for the last 50 years.
In some fields, it averages only 20% to 30%. Natural academic selection has favoured publication of a result, rather than generation of new knowledge.
The impact of Darwinian selection among scientists is amplified when government support for science is low, growth in the scientific literature continues unabated, and universities produce an increasing number of PhD graduates in science.
We hold an idealised view that science is rarely fallible, particularly biology and medicine. Yet many fields are filled with publications of low-powered studies with perhaps the majority being wrong.
This problem requires action from scientists, their teachers, their institutions and governments. We will not turn natural selection around but we need to put in place selection pressures for getting the right answer rather than simply published.
Simon Gandevia is Deputy Director of Neuroscience Research Australia.
July 31, 2016 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment
War with Russia
Irrussianality | July 11, 2016
As NATO wraps up its summit meeting in Warsaw, it will no doubt be patting itself on the back for displaying ‘unity’ and ‘resolve’ in the face of ‘Russian aggression’, in particular by agreeing to station a semi-permanent garrison of four battalions in Poland and the Baltic States. If we are to believe NATO’s former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Sir Richard Shirreff, such displays of strength are exactly what are needed to ‘deter’ Russia and prevent war. That is the message of a novel he has just published, entitled 2017. War with Russia. An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command.

Shirreff’s book tells the story of a war between Russia and NATO in 2017. It comes with a foreword by former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Admiral James Stavridis, who states that, ‘Of all the challenges America faces … the most dangerous is the resurgence of Russia under President Putin.’ In his own preface, Shirreff states that ‘Russia is now our strategic adversary’, due to Putin’s ‘self proclaimed intention in March 2014 of reuniting ethnic Russian speakers under the banner of Mother Russia’. ‘The president’s vow to reunite “Russian speakers” … was little different from Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938’, says Shirreff, who denounces the West’s ‘failure to understand the realities of dealing with bullies.’ His book advertises itself as a warning of what could happen if Western countries fail to increase their defence spending.
War with Russia begins with Russian special forces abducting some American soldiers in Kharkov, where the Americans have been training Ukrainian forces. They then take the Americans back to Russia, where they are displayed on TV and accused of having crossed Russia’s border. Russian fighters then shoot down an American plane over Ukraine, again falsely claiming that it had crossed the frontier. The purpose is to provide an excuse to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. A false-flag operation in which the Russian Army fires artillery on a school in rebel-controlled Donbass, killing 80 children, and blames it on the Ukrainians, provides the final pretext for the invasion. Within a few days, Russian forces have swept the Ukrainian Army aside and established a land-bridge to Crimea.
Shirreff never refers to the Russian president by name, but some of the Russians in the book call him ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich’, so he is obviously meant to be Putin. One might wonder why Putin would launch an unprovoked war. According to Shirreff’s scenario, the answer is that his poll ratings are falling and he thinks that a short, successful war will restore his popularity. Shirreff also believes that Putin has long been yearning to reunite Eastern Ukraine and the Baltic States with Russia, and all that has been stopping him is fear of the consequences. Believing that NATO lacks the will to react, in Shirreff’s book Putin decides to seize the opportunity. Before his war in Ukraine is even over, he starts a second war, invading the Baltic States.
As a pretext for this invasion, Russian special forces carry out another false flag operation, using a sniper to kill some Russian speaking Latvians marching in a demonstration in Riga. Soon afterwards, Russian forces assault Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia in order to ‘protect Russian speakers’. In the process they attack an airbase manned by American servicemen, and bomb British and German ships docked in Latvia. Annoyed by the British, the Russian president then orders his troops to take action against the United Kingdom. As a result, a Russian submarine sinks the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth, killing 900 people. All-out war between Russia and NATO erupts.
If we are take this scenario seriously, Russia’s leaders are idiotic, reckless and, quite frankly, psychopathic. Shirreff’s Putin is a cold-hearted villain, devoid of all humanity. After conquering the Baltics, for instance, he tells his staff:
Russian speakers must, of course, stay and are to be the basis of their new security forces. Any – and that includes Russian speakers – not prepared to swear the oath of allegiance to me as President are to be deported to the gulags.
The Russian president, says one of Shirreff’s characters, is ‘a ruthless predatory bastard’. ‘It’s long been obvious that he’s a self-obsessed nutter’, says another. Russians as a whole aren’t much better. ‘All knew that when the Russians exacted revenge, they did so with total ferocity’, we read. The commander of the Russian forces in Kaliningrad is described as having been famous for the ‘scorched earth approach he had taken to root out the Mujahidin in the Panjshir valley, regardless of the casualties to the civilian population … [he used] equally brutal tactics in the Chechen wars … which left thousands of men, women, and children dead. … [He] was now doing much the same in the Baltics.’ In general, as one of the Latvians in the book says,
You’ll never have a better friend than a Russian. And I have a number. They’ll give you their last kopek if you need it. They’ll laugh with you, cry with you, and drink with you to the end of time. But as a nation … as a neighbour … they’re horrible.
In short, Russia is just looking for the chance to invade its neighbours. Any sign of weakness on NATO’s behalf is potentially fatal. Shirreff’s characters give regular, and rather repetitive, lectures about the harm done by defence cuts and about how the war he describes is a direct result. The lesson of the book is clear: everything he describes could really happen unless we buck up and start spending more on defence right now.
Shirreff’s novel claims to present a genuine near-term possibility. In truth, it is a fantasy, as there is no evidence that Putin really is a reckless psychopath, and beggars belief that he would launch a full-scale invasion of the Baltic states out of the blue in the manner Shirreff describes. In any case, Shirreff’s belief that weakness invites invasion and that only powerful displays of strength can prevent it is based on a highly selective view of history in which we are always confronting Adolph Hitler in 1938. In 1914, war did not begin because the Austrians lacked resolve in the face of Serbian provocation, or because the Russians failed to show strength after Austria declared war on Serbia, or because Germany chose the path of weakness following Russia’s decision to mobilize its army. Quite the contrary – it was the obsessive belief that only strength could preserve peace that led to war.
Despite all this, Shirreff’s book does serve a useful purpose. As an analysis of the probable future or as a description of how the Russians think and behave, it is woefully wide of the mark. But as a depiction of the warped worldview of some of the Western world’s most senior military officers it is quite enlightening. It justifies its subtitle ‘An urgent warning’; just not quite in the way that its author imagines.
July 31, 2016 Posted by aletho | Book Review, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, United States | Leave a comment
Middle East prepares for Hillary’s war
By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | July 28, 2016
The big question this week ought to be about Hillary Clinton’s wars, if she gets elected as the next US president. Her hawkish temperament and her bandwagon comprising neoconservative ideologues, Israeli-Saudi lobbies, military-industrial complex and so on brings us to the epilogue of the ‘Obama Doctrine’ in US foreign policies.
Where will it be that Hillary will choose to wage her war? The high probability is that she will choose the Middle East – not Eurasia or Asia-Pacific. Why is it so?
For a start, Hillary Clinton, unlike her predecessor Barack Obama will not seek indeterminate wars. She will calculate how a war in her first term would help her win a second term in the 2020 election. Neither Russia nor China can be defeated in a short, swift war, while on the contrary, there is the real danger of her triggering World War III with horrific consequences that are impossible to predict.
It is in the Middle East that the neo-conservatives in the US will look for action, given their unfinished agenda of sending Iran to the Stone Age, an outcome without which the destruction of Iraq and Syria hasn’t ensured Israel’s regional hegemony.
Israel and Saudi Arabia, estranged allies of the US, are expecting a Middle Eastern war under Hillary. Last week, a former Saudi general visited Tel Aviv and held discussions with Israeli officials. (Times of Israel ) See an analysis by Simon Henderson at the Washington Institute titled Riyadh’s Diplomatic Dance with Israel.
The bottom line is, Israel and Saudi Arabia feel regional isolation. They failed to entrap Iran in a quagmire in Syria and/or Iraq. With Turkey’s course correction on Syria, Iran’s position further strengthens. The Islamic State and the extremist organizations, which Israel and Saudi Arabia covertly supported, are in retreat.
The latest incident of a Hezbollah drone flying over Israeli skies, photographing military deployments on the Golan Heights dramatically highlights that regional military balance is shifting. Meanwhile, Russia also refuses to ‘moderate’ Iran or Hezbollah, contrary to Israeli expectations.
Similarly, Turkey’s course correction following the July 15 coup attempt is a devastating blow to Saudi hopes of challenging Iran in Syria and Iraq. Saudi Arabia also cannot expect Israel to come and fight its war in Yemen or suppress the uprising in Bahrain. Israel knows it will get overstretched in any such misadventure in a Muslim country. Alas, Saudi Arabia cannot count on Egypt’s support, either. Egypt is a much weakened country and is also having serious problems in the Sinai region, apart from domestic political disarray.
In such a bleak scenario, how will Hillary manage to start a war in the Middle East? By the time she settles down in the White House, the ‘moderate’ rebel groups in Syria may have become an extinct species. Besides, without access to Turkey’s territory, the US will be had-pressed to stoke the fires of renewed conflict in Syria and Iraq.
Therefore, all things taken into account, Hillary may have to settle for a war directly involving Iran. Of course, that will also be the preferred choice and demand of her Saudi Arabian and Israeli friends.
But, how can Hillary provoke Iran into a war? Tehran has the intellectual resources and diplomatic acumen to avoid fighting wasteful wars to secure its interests.
However, there is one way out of this strategic dilemma – ratchet up tensions by undermining the 2015 nuclear deal, notwithstanding Iran’s compliance with its terms. If the US undermines the deal, that is sure to provoke Iran to retaliate by reviving its nuclear program. There is a powerful lobby in the US Congress that favors a return to confrontation with Iran.
Of course, if Iran retaliates by restarting its nuclear program, that can be the perfect alibi for Hillary to clamp sanctions and revert to the ‘containment strategy’. There is speculation that a Saudi-Iranian conflict is also within the realms of possibility. The Saudis are also coordinating with Israel. (New York Times )
Make no mistake, Iran will defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity with all the force at its command. It may even seek the help of Hezbollah. The recent appearance of a Hezbollah drone on Israeli skies could have been a display of capability. (See my blog Hezbollah thumbs the nose at Israel.)
Indeed, the US would have the perfect excuse to get involved militarily in the event of such a conflict affecting Saudi-Israeli security. Weakening Iran and setting it back by a few years will immensely help restore Israel’s regional supremacy, apart from removing from the Middle East region an insufferable thorn in the American flesh. An outright invasion is not necessary for that purpose. In geopolitical terms, it is a double whammy insofar as Russia will also be deprived of an irreplaceable ally without which its effective role on the Middle Eastern chessboard is unsustainable.
July 31, 2016 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Hillary Clinton, Iran, Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Syria, United States, Zionism | Leave a comment
Facing defeat, US threatens to balkanise Syria
By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | July 31, 2016
The acerbic remarks calling into question Syria’s future as a sovereign country by the CIA chief John Brennan at the Aspen Security Forum meet in Colorado on Saturday betray a very high level of US frustration over emergent ground realities. (Reuters ) The Syrian government forces, supported by Russian forces and Iranian and Hezbollah fighters have encircled the strategic northern city of Aleppo. The extremist groups supported by the US and its allies are trapped in the city.
Meanwhile, Russia has announced the opening of ‘humanitarian corridors’ to facilitate civilians to leave the city and for terrorists to surrender. The Russian announcement makes the US look very foolish regionally for having been outwitted comprehensively.
Secretary of State John Kerry thought he’d engage Moscow on the diplomatic track by discussing a ceasefire and a tantalizing proposal to undertake joint operations in Syria, while on parallel track gain respite for opposition groups to recover lost ground in Aleppo. As the recent announcement on Nusra Front snapping links with Al-Qaeda exposes, the US game-plan was to gain time to legitimise its support for Nusra and insulate the group from Russian air attacks. On their part, the Russians simply played along, while allowing joint military operations with Damascus and Tehran for capturing Aleppo to continue.
The ‘humanitarian corridor’ is a double-edged sword. The humanitarian situation is indeed critical and Russian relief supplies convey a political message of reconciliation. Having said that, the refugees coming out of Aleppo would have eyes set on European destinations and they could include terrorists, too.
The following excerpts of a commentary by FARS news agency (which is linked to the IRGC) would give a sense of the triumphalism in Tehran that the US and Saudi Arabia have lost the war:
- The foreign-backed attempt to regime change Syria and establish an ‘American Caliphate’ in the Levant has failed and is now history…. A large number of terrorists from Al-Nusra, Noureddin Al-Zinki, Free Syrian Army, Ahrar al-Sham and other groups have laid down their arms and surrendered to the Syrian Army in Aleppo province as allied forces (Syrian soldiers backed by Hezbollah, Iranian military advisors and Russian airstrikes) are racing towards Aleppo after completing siege of the city.
- President Bashar Assad has offered an amnesty for rebels who surrender within three months. The Syrian Army has dropped thousands of leaflets over militant-held districts in Aleppo, asking residents to cooperate with the military and calling on militants to surrender.
- Well, the party is clearly over and the foreign-backed terror machine seems to be a doomed project. This is the historical moment we are in… Those who backed ISIL and many other terror outfits are just going to have to own up to what Syria and Iraq have become… On the other hand, the trend lines on the War on Terror, refugee crisis, anti-Islam and anti-Muslim propaganda, failure of Western democracy and the vast militarised police and security system all point toward deep trouble in Europe as well. On refugee and humanitarian issues alone the crisis will deepen and most likely in a dramatic way. Recent terror attacks in France and Germany suggest they are woefully unprepared for what lies ahead.
The mother of all ironies will be that European countries face the spectre of terrorists knocking at the gates, who were trained and equipped by the CIA. Brennan’s threat to balkanize Syria is bravado, since any such misadventure will be opposed not only by Tehran, Damascus and Moscow but also by Ankara. (Al-Arabiya )
Tehran has announced that a delegation led by the chief of the foreign and security policy commission of Majlis, a key figure in the Iranian foreign-policy establishment, will go to Damascus on a 5-day mission to discuss with President Bashar Al-Assad the political and diplomatic trajectory ahead to garner the ‘peace dividend’. (Tehran Times )
Read a Russian commentary Four Reasons Why Liberation of Aleppo Would Mean an End to the Syrian War.
July 31, 2016 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Hezbollah, Iran, Islamic State, Middle East, Russia, Syria, United States | Leave a comment
After 100 years World War I battlefields are poisoned and uninhabitable
By Shelby Elphick | We Are The Mighty | July 27, 2016
No war in recent memory can compare to the meat grinder of World War I. Europe still bears the scars of the war, even almost a century later. The gruesome and terrifying type of warfare typical of the Great War had a lasting impact on those who witnessed and experienced it. It also created such carnage on the land where it was fought that some of those areas are still uninhabitable to this day.

The Battlefield at The Somme (Imperial War Museum photo)
The uninhabitable areas are known as the Zone Rouge (French for “Red Zone”). They remain pock-marked and scarred by the intense fighting at places like Verdun and the Somme, the two bloodiest battles of the conflict.
During the Battle of Verdun, which lasted over 300 days in 1916, more than 60 million artillery shells were fired by both sides – many containing poisonous gases. These massive bombardments and the brutal fighting inflicted horrifying casualties, over 600,000 at Verdun and over 1 million at the Somme. But the most dangerous remnants of these battles are the unexploded ordnance littering the battlefield.

The Battlefield of Verdun in 2016 (French Government photo)
Immediately after the war, the French government quarantined much of the land subjected to the worst of the battles. Those areas that were completely devastated and destroyed, unsafe to farm, and impossible for human habitation became the Zone Rouge. The people of this area were forced to relocate elsewhere while entire villages were wiped off the map.
Nine villages deemed unfit to be rebuilt are known today as the “villages that died for France.” Inside the Zone Rouge signs marking the locations of streets and important buildings are the only reminders those villages ever existed.

Photo by Olivier Saint Hilaire
Areas not completely devastated but heavily impacted by the war fell into other zones, Yellow and Blue. In these areas, people were allowed to return and rebuild their lives. This does not mean that the areas are completely safe, however. Every year, all along the old Western Front in France and Belgium, the population endures the “Iron Harvest” – the yearly collection of hundreds of tons of unexploded ordnance and other war materiel still buried in the ground.
Occasionally, the Iron Harvest claims casualties of its own, usually in the form of a dazed farmer and a destroyed tractor. Not all are so lucky to escape unscathed and so the French and Belgian governments still pay reparations to the “mutilée dans la guerre“– the victims of the war nearly 100 years after it ended.

Photo by Olivier Saint Hilaire
To deal with the massive cleanup and unexploded ordnance issues, the French government created the Département du Déminage (Department of Demining) after World War II. To date, 630 minesweepers died while demining the zones.
An estimated 720 million shells were fired during the Great War, with approximately 12 million failing to detonate. At places like Verdun, the artillery barrages were so overwhelming, 150 shells hit every square meter of the battlefield. Concentrated barrages and driving rains turned the battlefield into a quagmire that swallowed soldiers and shells alike.

Photo by Olivier Saint Hilaire
Further complicating the cleanup is the soil contamination caused by the remains of humans and animals. The grounds are also saturated with lead, mercury, and zinc from millions of rounds of ammunition from small arms and artillery fired in combat. In some places, the soil contains such high levels of arsenic that nothing can grow there, leaving haunting, desolate spaces.

Photo by Olivier Saint Hilaire
Though the Zone Rouge started at some 460 square miles in size, cleanup efforts reduced it to around 65 square miles. With such massive amounts of explosives left in the ground, the French government estimates the current rate of removal will clear the battlefields between 300 and 900 years from now.
July 30, 2016 Posted by aletho | Environmentalism, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | France | Leave a comment
Hillary’s Convention Con
By Ralph Nader | July 29, 2016
The 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia was a multi-layered, raucous display of political theater. A host of delegates loyal to Senator Bernie Sanders were inside in large numbers exclaiming “No more war” during former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s speech and raising all kinds of progressive, rebellious signs and banners against the Hillary crowd. Although Hillary addressed them directly in her acceptance speech, “Your cause is my cause,” those dissatisfied delegates in the hall saw her rhetoric for what it was: insincere and opportunistic.
She said she’d tax the wealthy for public necessities, but declined to mention a sales tax on Wall Street speculation that could bring in as much as $300 billion a year to support such initiatives. She opposed “unfair trade agreements,” but remarkably omitted saying she was against the TPP (the notorious pending Trans Pacific Trade Agreement backed by Obama that is receiving wide left/right opposition).
She paid lip service to a “living wage” but avoided endorsing a $15 an hour minimum wage, which would help single moms and their children – people she wants us to believe have been her enduring cause. Few people know that it took until the spring of 2014 before candidate Clinton would come out for even a $10.10 minimum wage. News reports noted that Clinton, a former member of Walmart’s board of directors and Arkansas corporate lawyer, was wrestling with how to support $10.10 per hour without alienating her Wall Street friends.
“Caring for kids” doesn’t extend to encircled Gaza’s defenseless children, hundreds of whom were killed by American-made weapons wielded by the all powerful Israeli military. Gaza is the the world’s largest open air prison and under illegal blockade. Remember, as Secretary of State, Hillary fully backed war crimes, condemned by almost all countries in the world. On the stage in Philadelphia, she spoke of backing Israel’s security without any mention of Palestinian rights or the need to end Israel’s illegal occupation of the territories.
It is true, as numerous speakers repeated, Clinton is “most qualified and experienced,” but her record shows those qualities have led to belligerent, unlawful military actions that are now boomeranging against U.S. interests. The intervention she insistently called for in Libya, with Obama’s foolish consent, over-rode the wiser counsel of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (and his generals), who warned of the chaos that would follow. He was proven right, with chaotic violence now all over Libya spilling into other African countries. This is but one example of what Bernie Sanders meant during the debates when he referenced her “poor judgement.”
The media coverage of political conventions tends to sink to the level of the circus. The PBS/NPR coverage with some half dozen reporters and two commentators proved to be thin, light, soft and superficial. Otherwise smart media communicators were reduced to very heavy focus on exactly what the Party’s manipulators wanted. “What is Hillary really like?” Of course the stage was filled with frothy admiration, awe and acclamation. But why didn’t the media point out some of the factual omissions, the contradictions to the endless sugarcoating of the nominee?
To her credit, NPR/PBS reporter, Susan Davis, did blurt out that the Convention program was mostly about personality and character with little policy. Reporters did, however, point out that unlike all other candidates, Hillary Clinton has not had a news conference since last December to showcase her supposed experience, qualifications and knowledge!
Why wouldn’t Hillary Clinton, in her attack on Donald Trump, demand the release of his tax returns? Hillary and Bill have regularly released their tax returns. Maybe because Trump would demand Hillary release her secret Wall Street transcripts of her $5,000-a-minute paid speeches to big bankers and other businesses.
To her verbal credit, Hillary Clinton raised the “unpatriotic” charge against too many U.S. corporations (not all she added) when it comes to our country. Born in the U.S.A, grown to profit on the backs of American workers, bailed out by American taxpayers and occasionally by the U.S. Marines overseas, these giant companies have no allegiance to country or community. They are, with trade agreements and other inducements, abandoning America’s workers and escaping America’s laws and taxes.
Hearing the word “unpatriotic” applied to those companies I could imagine these firms’ executives and P.R. flacks shuddering for the only time during her 55-minute address. The stigma of being “unpatriotic” to their enabling native country can have consequential legs for turning public opinion even more deeply against these monetized corporate Goliaths.
Stung by the consistently high “untrustworthy” ratings since polling started asking that question (only Trump exceeds her in most polls), she declared again that no one achieves greatness alone, that it takes us working together, that it “Takes a Village,” alluding to her earlier book. If that is true, then Together must have more power than the Few. “Together” should include workers, consumers, small taxpayers, voters and communities who are excluded from power, from the tools of democracy – electoral reforms and clean elections, more unions and cooperatives, access to justice for wrongful injuries and against crony capitalism and corporate crime and greater citizen empowerment. Does she have an agenda for a devolution of power from the few to the many so that we can be “stronger together,” (her slogan for 2016)? No way. Mum’s the word!
This immense gap has been the Clinton duo’s con job on America for many years. Sugarcoating phrases, populist flattery, getting the election over with and jumping back into the fold of the plutocracy is their customary M.O.
An anti-Hillary campaign button sums it up. Imagine a nice picture of Hillary with the words “More Wall Street” above her head and the words “More War” below her head.
Alert voters could see it coming at the Convention: the militarism for Hillary the Hawk on day four in Philadelphia and the arrival of the corporate fat cats. Or, as the New York Times headlined: “Top Donors Leave Sidelines, Checkbooks in Hand.”
The best thing Hillary Clinton has going for her is the self-destructive, unstable, unorganized, fact and truth-starved, egomaniacal, cheating, plutocratic, Donald Trump (See my column “Cheating Donald”).
That’s where our nation’s two-party political leadership is today. When will the vast left/right majority rise to take over and reverse the eviscerating policies and practices of this political duopoly?
July 30, 2016 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | Hillary Clinton, United States | Leave a comment
Long Live the Queen of Chaos
By Rob Urie | CounterPunch | July 29, 2016
For those to whom this hasn’t yet occurred, if Hillary Clinton is elected President she will be President. The Democratic Party platform, Bernie Sanders’ program proposals and Mrs. Clinton’s theorized move Left will be but distant memories. If Mrs. Clinton brings with her a Democratic Congress (or not) she will use it to pass the TPP and TTIP ‘trade’ agreements, to launch ‘liberal’ wars across the Middle East and rattle sabers against Russia, she will re-launch the ‘Grand Bargain’ to cut Social Security and Medicare under the pretext of a fiscal crisis and should Wall Street falter, she will ‘hold her nose’ and once again bail out her benefactors. This is the program her supporters are voting for.
By analogy, when Barack Obama entered office with a Democratic Congress in 2009 he had the best opportunity since the early 1930s to enact a new New Deal in favor of social justice and against the forces of neoliberal militarism. After bailing out Wall Street and institutionalizing the worst ‘unitary President’ excesses of the George W. Bush administration Mr. Obama ran and won again in 2012 on the well-instantiated delusion that once freed from having to run for office again he would be the ‘progressive’ his supporters always thought him to be. This despite his self-description as a ‘moderate Republican’ and his actual record at the center of the Democrats’ three decade turn to the political hard-right.
The Democratic Party line that a vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or a write-in vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote for Donald Trump overlooks that establishment Democrats rigged the primary process in favor of Mrs. Clinton and that it is their policies that are responsible for widespread political disaffection. The odds have it that if a vote were taken to exile both Party establishments to poorly provisioned outposts on Mars they would be on the way there now. What is so frighteningly irresponsible about Mrs. Clinton’s insertion / assertion as the Democratic Party candidate is the same problem posed by Barack Obama’s posture as a ‘progressive’ President— it leaves the radical right as the only alternative for disaffected voters.

Graph: prime-age employment— jobs for those who must work to live, have been declining since 2000. Each subsequent economic ‘recovery’ has proceeded from a lower, and more desperate, base. Democrats had available to them the New Deal economic template to work from. But they chose restoration of the unstable, destabilizing neoliberal project instead. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The illusion of political choice only works as long as the status quo functions in some basic sense. The recurring financial bubbles from Savings and Loan deregulation (1980s), privatization and equitization of government-funded research in the tech boom – bust (late 1990s) and the housing boom – bust demonstrated the fleeting nature of Wall Street fueled ‘prosperity.’ With the Middle Class on the ropes, the working class all but disappeared and the poor desperately clinging to the few crumbs that fall to them, the U.S. is but one recession away from being economically (and politically) untenable. The only programs that Democrats have— ‘free-trade,’ private debt fueled consumption, deregulation, privatization and Wall Street bailouts, are proven losers for all but a few in 2016.
One of the reasons the American political leadership needs foreign ‘enemies’ is to divert attention away from the damage that nominal Americans do— Wall Street, corporate executives, the NSA and carceral state, trade deals that act as firewalls against social and environmental resolution and local government actors for corporate power (ALEC-American Legislative Exchange Council). Another is the ‘business’ of nominal governance, the nexus of state and corporate interests that promotes geopolitical tensions, fear and paranoia as business ventures from which profits are earned through mass destruction (Vietnam, Iraq). As the most despised candidate for U.S. President in recent history, Hillary Clinton needs foreign enemies.
Flip the Democratic Party script for a moment to consider that Vladimir Putin might have a point. Hillary Clinton is the most dangerous person on the planet because she is a neoliberal militarist who is absolutely immune from the consequences of the crises she creates. Armed with nuclear weapons freshly ‘upgraded’ by Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton and the neocon cabal she hopes to lead have destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, have surrounded Russia with NATO troops and weapons, staged a neo-fascist coup in Ukraine, supported a right-wing coup in Honduras and have indicated their intentions to proceed apace turning entire regions of the planet into chaotic rubble with body-counts already in the millions.
This isn’t speculation about some future state of affairs. Hillary Clinton sold U.S. sanctions against Iraq in which one-half million of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens were starved and denied life-saving medicines to ‘teach Saddam Hussein a lesson.’ And the Clinton-Bush war against Iraq cost one million more innocent lives and created chaos across the Middle East. ISIS is a direct result of Clinton-Bush policies. The liberal pretense that the U.S. War of Aggression against Iraq was ‘Bush’s war’ requires overlooking the eight years of liberal bombing and sanctions that preceded it and that Bill Clinton gave Mr. Bush political cover for the war as his wife voted for it. The U.S. war against Iraq— catastrophe that it was / is, was as bi-partisan as they come.
The system that Mrs. Clinton and Donald Trump— past friends who attend each other’s public functions and private affairs and whose children thrive together in the closed lootocracy of officialdom, are vying against one another to ‘lead’ a spoils system where ‘leadership’ means the ability to arrange profitable outcomes for private interests through ‘public’ means. Neoliberal militarism is private profits created through public death, destruction and misery. The profits explain why Hillary Clinton is never held to account for deadly sanctions, gratuitous wars that turn into geopolitical catastrophes, social policies that turned the poorest 40% of the country into a beggar class and racist strategies like mass incarceration to divide the working class. Given her actual record, Black support for Mrs. Clinton is akin to choosing between AIDS and cancer.
Americans exhibit near-heroic aversion to history and the consequences of American policies that now constitute the core of the Democratic Party’s domestic agenda. The IMF has been pushing these policies on ‘client’ (victim) states for the last half-century. The capitalist lootocracy that the Democrats (and Republicans) serve has long installed puppet governments to reign with impunity as long as they deliver local wealth to back ‘up’ to it. The Clintons are corrupt puppets who serve this system of un-enlightened self-interest as domestic agents of international capital. The sooner the youth of America and the residual Left realize that there is no hope for a better, or even livable, future through establishment politics the sooner we can get to the task at hand: a (real) political revolution.
The title of this piece is taken from Diana Johnstone’s book Queen of Chaos.
July 30, 2016 Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Hillary Clinton, Obama, United States | Leave a comment
Gaddafi’s Ghosts: Return of the Libyan Jamahiriya
By Dan Glazebrook | RT | July 30, 2016
When NATO murdered Gaddafi and blitzed his country in 2011, they hoped the socialist ‘Jamahiriya’ movement he led would be dead and buried. Now his son has been released from prison to a hero’s welcome with his movement increasingly in the ascendancy.
There were various moments during NATO’s destruction of Libya that were supposed to symbolically crown Western supremacy over Libya and its institutions (and, by implication, over all African and Arab peoples): the ‘fall of Tripoli’ in August 2011; Cameron and Sarkozy’s victory speeches the following month; the lynch-mob execution of Muammar Gaddafi that came soon after. All of them were pyrrhic victories – but none more so than the death sentence handed down to Gaddafi’s son (and effective deputy leader) Saif al-Gaddafi in July 2015.
Saif had been captured by the Zintan militia shortly after his father and brother were killed by NATO’s death squads in late 2011. The ‘International’ Criminal Court – a neocolonial farce which has only ever indicted Africans – demanded he be handed over to them, but the Zintan – fiercely patriotic despite having fought with NATO against Gaddafi – refused. Over the next two years the country descended into the chaos and societal collapse that Gaddafi had predicted, sliding inexorably towards civil war.
By 2014, the country’s militias had coalesced around two main groupings – the Libyan National Army, composed of those who supported the newly elected, and mainly secular, House of Representatives; and the Libya Dawn coalition, composed of the militias who supported the Islamist parties that had dominated the country’s previous parliament but refused to recognize their defeat at the polls in 2014. After fierce fighting, the Libya Dawn faction took control of Tripoli. It was there that Saif, along with dozens of other officials of the Jamahiriya – the Libyan ‘People’s State’ which Gaddafi had led – were put on trial for their life. However, once again the Zintan militia – allied to the Libyan National Army – refused to hand him over. After a trial condemned by human rights groups as “riddled with legal flaws”, in a court system dominated by the Libya Dawn militias, an absent Saif was sentenced to death, along with eight other former government officials. The trial was never recognized by the elected government, by then relocated to Tobruk. A gloating Western media made sure to inform the world of the death sentence, which they hoped would extinguish forever the Libyan people’s hopes for a restoration of the independence, peace and prosperity his family name had come to represent.
It was a hope that would soon be dashed. Less than a year later, the France 24 news agency arranged an interview with Saif Al Gaddafi’s lawyer Karim Khan in which he revealed to the world that Saif had in fact, “been given his liberty on April 12, 2016″, in accordance with the amnesty law passed by the Tobruk parliament the previous year. Given the crowing over Saif’s death sentence the previous year, and his indictment by the International Criminal Court, this was a major story. Yet, by and large, it was one the Western media chose to steadfastly ignore – indeed, the BBC did not breathe a single word about it.
What is so significant about his release, however, is what it represents: the recognition, by Libya’s elected authorities, that there is no future for Libya without the involvement of the Jamahiriya movement.
The truth is, this movement never went away. Rather, having been forced underground in 2011, it has been increasingly coming out into the open, building up its support amongst a population sick of the depravities and deprivations of the post-Gaddafi era.
Exactly five years ago, following the start of the NATO bombing campaign, Libyans came out onto the streets in massive demonstrations in support of their government in Tripoli, Sirte, Zlitan and elsewhere. Even the BBC admitted that “there is no discounting the genuine support that exists”, adding that “’Muammar is the love of millions’ was the message written on the hands of women in the square”.
Following the US-UK-Qatari invasion of Tripoli the following month, however, the reign of terror by NATO’s death squad militias ensured that public displays of such sentiments could end up costing one’s life. Tens of thousands of ‘suspected Gaddafi supporters’ were rounded up by the militias in makeshift ‘detention camps’ where torture and abuse was rife; around 7,000 are estimated to be there still to this day, and hundreds have been summarily executed.
Black people in particular were targeted, seen as symbolic of the pro-African policies pursued by Gaddafi but hated by the supremacist militias, with the black Libyan town of Tawergha turned into a ghost town overnight as Misratan militias made good on their promise to kill all those who refused to leave. Such activities were effectively legalised by the NATO-imposed ‘Transitional National Council’ whose Laws 37 and 38 decreed that public support for Gaddafi could be punished by life imprisonment and activities taken ‘in defence of the revolution’ would be exempt from prosecution.
Nevertheless, over the years that followed, as the militias turned on each other and the country rapidly fell apart, reports began to suggest that much of southern Libya was slowly coming under the control of Gaddafi’s supporters. On January 18th 2014, an air force base near the southern city of Sabha was taken by Gaddafi loyalists, frightening the new government enough to impose a state of emergency, ban Libya’s two pro-Gaddafi satellite stations, and embark on aerial bombing missions in the south of the country.
But it was, ironically, the passing of the death sentences themselves – intended to extinguish pro-Gaddafi sentiment for good – that triggered the most open and widespread demonstrations of support for the former government so far, with protests held in August 2015 across the country, and even in ISIS-held Sirte. Middle East Eye reported the following from the demonstration in Sabha (in which 7 were killed when militias opened fire on the protesters):
Previous modest pro-Gaddafi celebrations in the town had been overlooked by the Misratan-led Third Force, stationed in Sabha for over a year – originally to act as a peacekeeping force following local clashes. ‘This time, I think the Third Force saw the seriousness of the pro-Gaddafi movement because a demonstration this big has not been seen in the last four years,’ said Mohamed. ‘There were a lot of people, including women and children, and people were not afraid to show their faces … IS had threatened to shoot anyone who protested on Friday, so there were no green flags in towns they control, apart from Sirte, although there are some green flags flying in remote desert areas,’ he said. ‘But if these protests get stronger across the whole of Libya, people will become braver and we will see more green flags. I know many people who are just waiting for the right time to protest.’
In Sirte, demonstrators were fired at by ISIS fighters, who dispersed the group and took away seven people, including four women. The same Middle East Eye report made the following comment:
The protests have been a public representation of a badly kept secret in Libya, that the pro-Gaddafi movement which has existed since the 2011 revolution has grown in strength, born out of dissatisfaction with the way life has worked out for many ordinary citizens in the last four years… [Mohamed] added that some people who had originally supported the 2011 revolution had joined the protests. Most Libyans just want a quiet life. They don’t care who takes over or who controls Libya’s money, they just want a comfortable life. That’s why Gaddafi stayed in power for 42 years. Salaries were paid on time, we had good subsidies on all the essentials and living was cheap.
Mohammed Eljarh, writing in the conservative US journal Foreign Policy, added that,
These pro-Qaddafi protests have the potential to turn into a national movement against the 2011 revolution, not least because a growing number of Libyans are deeply disillusioned by its outcome… there is now a building consensus that the atrocities and abuses committed by post-Qaddafi groups since the revolution exceed by far those committed by the Qaddafi regime during its rule.
At the same time, the Green resistance is becoming an increasingly influential force within the Libyan National Army, representing the country’s elected House of Representatives. Earlier this year, the Tobruk parliament allowed Gaddafi’s widow back into the country, whilst the LNA entered into an alliance with pro-Gaddafi tribes in the country’s East, and began to recruit open supporters of Gaddafi into its military structures. Gaddafi’s Tuareg commander General Ali Kanna, for example, who fled Libya following Gaddafi’s fall in 2011, has now reportedly been welcomed into the LNA. The policy is already bearing fruit, with several territories near Sirte already seized from ISIS by the new allies.
The Jamahiriya, it seems, is back. But then, it never really went away.
Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and ‘austerity’. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.
July 30, 2016 Posted by aletho | Timeless or most popular | Africa, Libya, NATO | Leave a comment
Hillary Clinton and Her Hawks
By Gareth Porter | Consortium News | July 29, 2016
As Hillary Clinton begins her final charge for the White House, her advisers are already recommending air strikes and other new military measures against the Assad regime in Syria.
The clear signals of Clinton’s readiness to go to war appears to be aimed at influencing the course of the war in Syria as well as U.S. policy over the remaining six months of the Obama administration. (She also may be hoping to corral the votes of Republican neoconservatives concerned about Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.)
Last month, the think tank run by Michele Flournoy, the former Defense Department official considered to be most likely to be Clinton’s choice to be Secretary of Defense, explicitly called for “limited military strikes” against the Assad regime.
And earlier this month Leon Panetta, former Defense Secretary and CIA Director, who has been advising candidate Clinton, declared in an interview that the next president would have to increase the number of Special Forces and carry out air strikes to help “moderate” groups against President Bashal al-Assad. (When Panetta gave a belligerent speech at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday night, he was interrupted by chants from the delegates on the floor of “no more war!”
Flournoy co-founded the Center for New American Security (CNAS) in 2007 to promote support for U.S. war policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then became Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Obama administration in 2009.
Flournoy left her Pentagon position in 2012 and returned to CNAS as Chief Executive Officer. She has been described by ultimate insider journalist David Ignatius of the Washington Post, as being on a “short, short list” for the job Secretary of Defense in a Clinton administration.
Last month, CNAS published a report of a “Study Group” on military policy in Syria on the eve of the organization’s annual conference. Ostensibly focused on how to defeat the Islamic State, the report recommends new U.S. military actions against the Assad regime.
Flournoy chaired the task force, along with CNAS president Richard Fontaine, and publicly embraced its main policy recommendation in remarks at the conference.
She called for “using limited military coercion” to help support the forces seeking to force President Assad from power, in part by creating a “no bombing” zone over those areas in which the opposition groups backed by the United States could operate safely.
In an interview with Defense One, Flournoy described the no-bomb zone as saying to the Russian and Syrian governments, “If you bomb the folks we support, we will retaliate using standoff means to destroy [Russian] proxy forces, or, in this case, Syrian assets.” That would “stop the bombing of certain civilian populations,” Flournoy said.
In a letter to the editor of Defense One, Flournoy denied having advocated “putting U.S. combat troops on the ground to take territory from Assad’s forces or remove Assad from power,” which she said the title and content of the article had suggested.
But she confirmed that she had argued that “the U.S. should under some circumstances consider using limited military coercion – primarily trikes using standoff weapons – to retaliate against Syrian military targets” for attacks on civilian or opposition groups “and to set more favorable conditions on the ground for a negotiated political settlement.”
Renaming a ‘No-Fly’ Zone
The proposal for a “no bombing zone” has clearly replaced the “no fly zone,” which Clinton has repeatedly supported in the past as the slogan to cover a much broader U.S. military role in Syria.
Panetta served as Defense Secretary and CIA Director in the Obama administration when Clinton was Secretary of State, and was Clinton’s ally on Syria policy. On July 17, he gave an interview to CBS News in which he called for steps that partly complemented and partly paralleled the recommendations in the CNAS paper.
“I think the likelihood is that the next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the ground,” Panetta said, “to try to assist those moderate forces that are taking on ISIS and that are taking on Assad’s forces.”
Panetta was deliberately conflating two different issues in supporting more U.S. Special Forces in Syria. The existing military mission for those forces is to support the anti-ISIS forces made up overwhelmingly of the Kurdish YPG and a few opposition groups.
Neither the Kurds nor the opposition groups the Special Forces are supporting are fighting against the Assad regime. What Panetta presented as a need only for additional personnel is in fact a completely new U.S. mission for Special Forces of putting military pressure on the Assad regime.
He also called for increasing “strikes” in order to “put increasing pressure on ISIS but also on Assad.” That wording, which jibes with the Flournoy-CNAS recommendation, again conflates two entirely different strategic programs as a single program.
The Panetta ploys in confusing two separate policy issues reflects the reality that the majority of the American public strongly supports doing more militarily to defeat ISIS but has been opposed to U.S. war against the government in Syria.
A poll taken last spring showed 57 percent in favor of a more aggressive U.S. military force against ISIS. The last time public opinion was surveyed on the issue of war against the Assad regime, however, was in September 2013, just as Congress was about to vote on authorizing such a strike.
At that time, 55 percent to 77 percent of those surveyed opposed the use of military force against the Syrian regime, depending on whether Congress voted to authorize such a strike or to oppose it.
Shaping the Debate
It is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for figures known to be close to a presidential candidate to make public recommendations for new and broader war abroad. The fact that such explicit plans for military strikes against the Assad regime were aired so openly soon after Clinton had clinched the Democratic nomination suggests that Clinton had encouraged Flournoy and Panetta to do so.
The rationale for doing so is evidently not to strengthen her public support at home but to shape the policy decisions made by the Obama administration and the coalition of external supporters of the armed opposition to Assad.
Obama’s refusal to threaten to use military force on behalf of the anti-Assad forces or to step up military assistance to them has provoked a series of leaks to the news media by unnamed officials – primarily from the Defense Department – criticizing Obama’s willingness to cooperate with Russia in seeking a Syrian ceasefire and political settlement as “naïve.”
The news of Clinton’s advisers calling openly for military measures signals to those critics in the administration to continue to push for a more aggressive policy on the premise that she will do just that as president.
Even more important to Clinton and close associates, however, is the hope of encouraging Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which have been supporting the armed opposition to Assad, to persist in and even intensify their efforts in the face of the prospect of U.S.-Russian cooperation in Syria.
Even before the recommendations were revealed, specialists on Syria in Washington think tanks were already observing signs that Saudi and Qatari policymakers were waiting for the Obama administration to end in the hope that Clinton would be elected and take a more activist role in the war against Assad.
The new Prime Minister of Turkey, Binali Yildirim, however, made a statement on July 13 suggesting that Turkish President Recep Yayyip Erdogan may be considering a deal with Russia and the Assad regime at the expense of both Syrian Kurds and the anti-Assad opposition.
That certainly would have alarmed Clinton’s advisers, and four days later, Panetta made his comments on network television about what “the next president” would have to do in Syria.
July 29, 2016 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Center for New American Security, CNAS, Hillary Clinton, ISIS, Michele Flournoy, Syria, United States | Leave a comment
Pokémon Go, the CIA, “Totalitarianism” and the Future of Surveillance
By Steven MacMillan – New Eastern Outlook – 29.07.2016
If anyone doubted that a percentage of the global population are akin to zombies, the incidents following the release of Pokémon Go have surely convinced you. Despite the game only being released in early July, we have already seen a man driving into a tree and a women getting locked in a graveyard whilst chasing these furry little creatures.
Pokémon describes the game on their website in the following way:
“Travel between the real world and the virtual world of Pokémon with Pokémon GO for iPhone and Android devices. With Pokémon GO, you’ll discover Pokémon in a whole new world—your own! Pokémon GO is built on Niantic’s Real World Gaming Platform and will use real locations to encourage players to search far and wide in the real world to discover Pokémon… In Pokémon GO, the real world will be the setting!”
Pokémon Go, Google, the State Department, the CIA and the DoD
The company behind Pokémon Go is a San Francisco software developer called Niantic, Inc, which was formed in 2010 as an internal startup at Google. The founder and current CEO of Niantic is John Hanke, a man who has connections both to the State Department and the CIA.
Before moving to San Francisco to study at the University of California, Hanke previously worked for the US State Department in Myanmar. Hanke also founded Keyhole, Inc in 2001, a company which specialized in geospatial data visualization applications. Google acquired the company in 2004, with many of the applications developed by Keyhole being instrumental in Google Maps and Earth. In 2003, the CIA’s venture-capitalist firm, In-Q-Tel, invested in Keyhole, with the CIA’s own website proudly detailing this investment:
“The CIA-assisted technology probably most familiar to you is one many of us use on a regular basis: Google Earth. In February 2003, the CIA-funded venture-capitalist firm In-Q-Tel made a strategic investment in Keyhole, Inc., a pioneer of interactive 3-D earth visualization and creator of the groundbreaking rich-mapping EarthViewer 3D system. CIA worked closely with other Intelligence Community organizations to tailor Keyhole’s systems to meet their needs. The finished product transformed the way intelligence officers interacted with geographic information and earth imagery.”
One of the other intelligence organizations the CIA worked alongside was the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which is partly under the control of the US Department of Defense (DoD).
So we have a somewhat enigmatic former State Department employee with connections to the CIA and the DoD, being the CEO of a company that created what seems to be a silly, harmless game. What’s going on?
Selling and Sharing Your Data
Like so many new technologies in our digital age, Pokémon Go is constantly gathering information on the user and then openly admitting that they will share this data with anyone who wants it.
As James Corbett pointed out in his article titled: The CIA’s ‘Pokémon Go’ App is Doing What the Patriot Act Can’t, the privacy policy of the app states that Niantic will share all the information they gather (which is a lot) with the state and private organizations:
“We cooperate with government and law enforcement officials or private parties to enforce and comply with the law. We may disclose any information about you (or your authorized child) that is in our possession or control to government or law enforcement officials or private parties as we, in our sole discretion, believe necessary or appropriate.”
Corbett also details how the game requires the user to give excessive access to Niantic/CIA/NGA/DoD (including access to the users Google account and camera).
Oliver Stone on PG: “Totalitarianism” and a “New Level of Invasion”
Speaking at this year’s Comic-Con, Oliver Stone – the award winning filmmaker and director of the new film on Edward Snowden – had some very insightful views on the new craze and the growing business of data-mining. As Vulture magazine reported in a recent article, Stone denounced the game as a “new level of invasion” and a new form of “totalitarianism:”
“I’m hearing about it too; it’s a new level of invasion. Once the government had been hounded by Snowden, of course the corporations went into encryption, because they had to for survival, right? But the search for profits is enormous. Nobody has ever seen, in the history of the world, something like Google – ever! It’s the fastest-growing business ever, and they have invested huge amounts of money into what surveillance is; which is data-mining.”
Stone continues:
“They’re data-mining every person in this room for information as to what you’re buying, what it is you like, and above all, your behavior. Pokémon Go kicks into that. It’s everywhere. It’s what some people callsurveillance capitalism; it’s the newest stage. You’ll see a new form of, frankly, a robot society, where they will know how you want to behave and they will make the mockup that matches how you behave and feed you. It’s what they call totalitarianism.”
Predicting Human Behavior
It is interesting that Stone doesn’t just warn about the commercial aspect of data-mining, but the fact that the more data governments and private corporations collect on the citizens of the world, the easier it becomes to predict their behavior. It is not just Stone that is warning about this reality however. At the start of last year, the UK governments own surveillance commissioner, Tony Porter, revealed how data obtained from CCTV cameras can be used to “predict behavior.”
As we progress through the 21st century and more advanced algorithmic systems are developed to process the tsunami of data, intelligence agencies and governments will increasingly be able to predict (and manipulate) the behavior of their populations and the populations of foreign countries. We are already far along this path, will the trajectory for the future heading straight towards levels of surveillance far beyond even what George Orwell envisaged; with the fight for digital privacy being a major battleground in this century for those who value freedom.
Pokémon Go looks more like a Trojan horse of the CIA and the wider intelligence-security-data-mining-Big-Brother complex, than just a silly, innocent game. With all these connections to the State Department, the CIA and the DoD, no wonder some countries are reportedly considering banning the game.
July 29, 2016 Posted by aletho | Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, DoD, United States | Leave a comment
Three Steps To Reverse A “Doomsday” Clock
By Vladimir KOZIN | Oriental Review | July 28, 2016
The recent book review “A Stark Nuclear Warning” by Jerry Brown, in which he has shared views on William J. Perry’s memoirs “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink”, raises a lot of questions and concerns.
Jerry Brown unequivocally describes Perry, who held many important positions in the past, including the U.S. Secretary of Defense in 1994-1997, as a double-hated man.
On the one hand, as the U.S. Secretary of Defense he helped to build a formidable U.S. nuclear arsenal several decades ago, being responsible for important technological advances with respect to U.S. nuclear forces, like launching the B-2 a heavy strategic bomber; revitalizing the aging B-52, a bomber from the same category as SOA (Strategic Offensive Arms) inventory; putting the Trident submarine program back on track; and making an ill-fated attempt to bring the MX ICBM, a ten-warhead missile, into operation.
On the other, William J. Perry has been identified as a staunch proponent of avoiding nuclear danger, nowadays, when he has retired and embarked “on an urgent mission to alert us to the dangerous nuclear road we are travelling.” He is clearly calling American leaders to account for what he believes “are very bad decisions”, such as the precipitous expansion of NATO right up to the Russian border (William J. Perry was a very brave man when he became the lone Cabinet member who opposed President Bill Clinton’s decision to give Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic immediate membership in the Alliance). William J. Perry has also not been supportive of President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002.
It is interesting to note that a person who took an active part in the continuous U.S. SOA and TNW (tactical nuclear weapons) build-up today has concluded that there could be no acceptable defence against a massive-scale nuclear attack. According to him, the great paradox of the nuclear age is that deterrence of nuclear war is sought by building ever more lethal and precise weapons. For the sake of reality it should be underscored that this notion has to be attributed exclusively to the USA, who has a long time ago embarked upon an “offensive unconditional nuclear deterrence strategy” which has not practically been changed so far.
Jerry Brown observes that William J. Perry is convinced that parity is “old thinking” because nuclear weapons can’t actually be used – the risk of uncontrollable and catastrophic escalation is too high. Seemingly, he shares the earlier maxim once articulated by President Ronald Reagan: “A nuclear war cannot be fought, because it can never be won.”
Unfortunately, in his remarks Jerry Brown has made a number of inaccuracies in describing some facts of the immediate past and the present-day military-political environment.
He writes that: “…both the Soviet Union and the United States had developed hydrogen bombs”. In reality, the USA was the first state that produced H-bomb (1952), the USSR responded lately (1953). As is known, the USA was the first one who has produced an A-bomb; while the Soviet Union did so only in 1949. The USA was the first one who has created a classic SOA triad (ICBM, SLBM and heavy bombers), and MIRV ICBM. The USSR followed suit.
That is why it is irrelevant to claim that “the Soviets just stepped up their nuclear efforts and so did the U.S.”
Jerry Brown reminds about the Cuban missile crisis, but does not clarify that it has been initiated by Washington who unilaterally has deployed medium-range nuclear missiles “Jupiter” with 1 megaton each in Italy and Turkey, and at a time when the USA had nuclear warheads superiority over the Soviet Union as 17:1 (revelation by Robert McNamara). Only after that dangerous action Moscow has decided to move its SNF to Cuba (note: before the Cuban missile crisis has been resolved, the Soviet leaders have not even authorized to install nuclear warheads upon the missiles and combat aircraft brought to Cuba).
Jerry Brown is of opinion that the Cold War was over, and the nuclear weapons of the former Soviet Union were located not only in Russia, but also in three new republics that “were not capable of protecting them.” After the demise of the USSR, Russia has brought all SOA and TNW from these republics back to its territory, despite the fact that all these nuclear assets have been strongly protected. This measure has been agreed upon between Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus and the Western nuclear powers.
I do not believe that the Cold War is over despite the Paris Charter for a New Europe heralded that in 1990. The Cold War has entered a new phase – qualitatively more dangerous that its first phase. Cold War 2.0 is characterized by a vast military build-up of NATO near the Russian borders, and a complete stalemate in arms control: currently there are 15 unresolved issues in this domain between the USA and Russia. In the first stage of Cold War Moscow and Washington signed 7 nuclear arms control accords, CWC and BWC, CFE-1 and CFE-1A treaties, a number of CBM arrangements. Since 2010 nothing has been done in this sphere.
So, it is incorrect to state that “the leaders of the Soviet Union and the United States did not make any effort to slow nuclear competition; they did just the opposite.”
The reaction of Moscow to the fielding of the U.S. ground-based BMD assets in Europe was portrayed by Jerry Brown inaccurately. Such elements plus sea-based components of the U.S BMD “shield” really create formidable threat to Russia and its allies because of two major reasons:
(a) the launching tubes of the U.S. BMD system Mk-41 can house not only defensive interceptors, but also offensive cruise missiles and other war-fighting means in the framework of the “Prompt Global Strike” which can be used as a first-strike weapon versus Russia;
(b) the U.S. and NATO BMD system has been tied up to their nuclear and conventional forces – such “appropriate mix” has been stamped up at the three recent NATO Summits in Chicago (2012), Newport (2014) and Warsaw (2016).
Washington still does not want to abrogate its Cold War thinking: to cancel its first use of nuclear weapons’ concept. All U.S. Administrations have declined to accept several Soviet and Russian initiatives on that issue.
President Barack Obama failed to ratify the CTBT (1996), though he has promised to do it during his presidency.
Recently, in the framework of NATO the debates on the further strengthening of this largest military bloc reliance on nuclear weapons have intensified.
The talk is about expanding the geographic scope and the total number of military exercises conducted with simulated use of bombs equipped with mock nuclear warheads, carrying military computer games on the use of nuclear weapons on the European continent, as well as the development of special scenarios on transformation of hypothetical conflict involving the general conventional forces into the conflicts with the use of nuclear weapons.
Suggestions have been made that in the course of combined command and staff games of a “new type” with the help of computer simulation while resolving non-nuclear and nuclear tasks in the scenario of the regional and global environment the condition of the “use of Russian strategy of nuclear escalation” as a counterweight to the “nuclear counter-escalation” to NATO is included. The idea of involving in such games not only representatives of the military, but also high-ranking civilian government officials participating in making the important decisions of national importance is articulated.
On June 25, 2015, during a hearing before the Committee on Armed Services of the US Congress devoted to the prospective role of nuclear weapons the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work called to oppose to the Russian nuclear doctrine by the U.S. nuclear capabilities with the aim to launch a strategy of “de-escalation of escalation.” In other words, it is interpreted in Washington in such a way that an escalation of threats of the limited use of nuclear weapons should be used to de-escalate conflicts fought with conventional weapons.
Commenting on the debate that took place during the meeting of the defense ministers of the member countries’ of the “transatlantic solidarity” in Brussels on 8 October 2015, the Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to NATO Adam Thomson has publicly complained that before the Alliance held separate military exercises with the use of conventional and nuclear weapons, but has never tested the transformation of the first type of exercises in the second ones. But he further recognized with appreciation that the recommendation of the “transformation of NATO military exercises with the use of conventional weapons into nuclear drills” became the focus of attention within the Alliance.
Pentagon chief Ashton Carter on the same day told a news conference that the transatlantic pact should prepare an “updated instructions on the use of nuclear weapons” in order to adapt to new threats and challenges of the 21st century and, in particular, called for “better integrate non-nuclear and nuclear deterrence.” His compatriot Alexander Vershbow, NATO Deputy Secretary General, said at the Berlin Security Conference November 17, 2015, the Alliance also must “modernize nuclear deterrence, strengthening his best means of early warning and intelligence.”
In 2014-2016 in order to develop new nuclear posture the U.S. strategic nuclear forces held several military exercises in Central and Eastern Europe, and North Africa, employing heavy strategic bombers B-52H and B-2A, capable of carrying nuclear weapons.
In March 2004 Washington initiated on the constant basis a large-scale NATO air patrol operations in the airspace of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, code-named “Baltic Air Policing”. It involves combat aircraft (DCA), which are potential carriers of tactical nuclear weapons. Over the past twelve years, i.e. from March 2004 to July 2016, fifteen countries of the Alliance, that is, more than half of NATO member-states have been participated in this operation near Russian borders, including the three major Western nuclear powers: the USA, the United Kingdom and France. This operation is conducted day-in-day-out, and 365/366 days per annum.
Washington is modernizing its TNW, including those fielded in Europe, and has no intention to pull them back to the CONUS.
Two of the five existing types of nuclear bombs, namely B-61-7 and B-61-11, as well as a new perspective bomb B-61-12 have “of strategic importance”, as may be delivered to targets not only by tactical aircraft but also by heavy strategic bombers B-52H and B-2A: each can carry 16 such bombs. Both types of strategic bombers can to travel the distance of 11,000 km without refueling in the air, and more than 18,000 km with mid-air refueling. For this reason these types of bombs in the documents of the Pentagon and the State Department are labeled as “strategic”.
A new bomb B-61-12 with a pin-point accuracy is a first-strike nuclear weapon.
Hans Kristensen, a Danish researcher, working at FAS, points out that “… it is expected that in the next decade, NATO’s nuclear forces will undergo major improvements that will affect increasing quality performance characteristics of both the nuclear weapons and their means of delivery. The planned modernization will significantly increase the military potential of the Alliance’s nuclear policy in Europe.”
The “doomsday” clock is ticking. Nowadays it shows 23.57. Too alarming.
What to do? Seemingly, three initial steps are badly needed.
First. To make a pledge of no-fist-use of nuclear weapons a universal norm, starting from the USA and Russia. As a preliminary step towards this goal to make a commitment to resort to a defensive unconditional nuclear deterrence that threatens no one. Such notion will require no costs.
Second. The USA should withdraw all its TNW from Europe and the Asian part of Turkey.
Third. A multilateral new ABM Treaty limiting the number of BMD interceptors and their geographical deployments has to be elaborated.
The next U.S. Administration has to seriously consider these steps.
Prof. Vladimir Kozin is Head of Advisers’ Group at the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and Professor of the Academy of Military Sciences of the Russian Federation. More substantial remarks on these topics can be found in his monographs: “Evolution of the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense and Russia’s Stance” (1945-2013); “The U.S. Military Doctrine and its Military Policy Forecasting till 2075: Critical Analysis and Practical Recommendations” (in Russian); “Military policy and strategy of the USA in geopolitical dynamics of the XXI century” (as a co-author; in Russian); “Militarization of Outer Space and Its Impacts on Global Security Environment”; “The U.S. Tactical Nuclear Weapons: Reduction or Modernization?” (in Russian; the English translation ongoing); “Evolution of the U.S. Missile Defense Beyond 2040 and Russia’s Stance”; “The Chicago Triad of the USA and NATO and its Consequences for Russia” (in Russian).
July 28, 2016 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, Russia, United States | Leave a comment
Neo-con West and global destruction

By Mark Taliano | American Herald tribune | July 28, 2016
The neo-con “West” and its allies want to destroy the Middle East so that they can control the Middle East.
Under the auspices of their imperial “New Middle East” project, the criminals (U.S–led NATO, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and Israel, are targeting everything that they falsely profess to cherish.
All of the “values” that the politicians falsely parade as important, even sacrosanct, are instrumentalized as false fronts that belie the dark undercurrents dragging humanity towards a barren “New World Order” of globalized degeneracy and despair.
Nation-state self-determination, sovereignty, territorial integrity – all vital components of world peace, prosperity, and democracy are meaningless to the elites, except for their propaganda value.
A meta-national project of top down control, enforced by anonymous elites, controls how we think, feel, and live.
This dystopian present has rendered political choices moot. Choices are non-choices, puppet shows sold by empty words and conflicting narratives — all bereft of substance.
The real agenda is unspeakable. The real agenda must be unspeakable, because it is poison, a dark distillate of degenerate barbarism, mostly hidden from view.
This real agenda, masked beneath the Big Lies, and the stories told by scripted “politicians”, bares its sanguine teeth, and imposes its dark will with barely a whimper. There are no “mistakes”. It’s all by design.
War planners knew full well that the sanctions imposed prior to the invasion of Iraq were targeting children. They accurately predicted when the plants would fail, and how many lives would be lost.
A Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document accurately predicted that,
“IT PROBABLY WILL TAKE AT LEAST SIX MONTHS (TO JUNE 1991) BEFORE THE (water treatment) SYSTEM IS FULLY DEGRADED.” And that,
“FAILING TO SECURE SUPPLIES WILL RESULT IN A SHORTAGE OF
PURE DRINKING WATER FOR MUCH OF THE POPULATION. THIS COULD LEAD
TO INCREASED INCIDENCES, IF NOT EPIDEMICS, OF DISEASE … “
The end result? Over 500,000 children under the age of five were killed, with intent (murder), in addition to over one million other people, none of whom who had committed a crime.
The “West” regularly targets innocent people, including children, with a view to weakening the morale of countries about to be conquered. Madeleine Albright infamously intoned that the “price (murdering 500,000 children) … is worth it”, in one of the rare moments when dark truths and media messaging intersect.
War planners also knew that they were supporting al Qaeda ground troops in Libya when they exploited the Responsibility To Protect (R2P) clause to bomb the sovereign state of Libya, to assassinate Muammar Gaddafi, to destroy water infrastructure, to loot, to plunder, to commit genocide, and to set up an ISIS strongehold. Prior to the invasion, Libya’s standard of living was the highest in Africa. There were no mistakes.
The weapons ratline from Libya to Syria was not a mistake either. The West intentionally funded its terrorist proxies so that they would be well provisioned to invade Syria. The weaponization and training of its terrorist foot soldiers supplements the terrorists’ now dwindling additional sources of income such as funding from illicit drugs, the plunder of historical Syrian artifacts, the theft of Syrian oil resources, and so on. All planned by the West. Again, no mistakes.
Equally degenerate is the fact that the Western intelligence agencies, allied with Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan’s ISIS, perpetuate the degeneracy by raising new recruits into the culture of the un-islamic, Wahhabi ideology. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky explains in America’s “War on Terrorism” that
“In 1979, the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA was launched in Afghanistan: With the active encouragement of the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, who wanted to turn the Afghan Jihad into a global war waged by all Muslim states against the Soviet Union, some 35,000 Muslim radicals from 40 Islamic countries joined Afghanistan’s fight between 1982 and 1992. Tens of thousands more came to study in Pakistani madrasahs. Eventually, more than 100,000 foreign Muslim radicals were directly influenced by the Afghan jihad. ”
Just as the CIA, through the Pakistani ISI, creates “radicals” by indoctrinating children in “madrasah” schools, so too ISIS indoctrinates Syrian children in the ways of the degenerate Wahhabi ideology in ISIS occupied areas of Syria.
Samuel Westrop writes in “U.K: Jihadists as Charity Workers”, that
“ISIS has supplemented its violence with dawa’h programs – a system of social provision, or ‘soft-power outreach’ – in areas under its control. A key component of this dawa’h … is providing educational outreach initiatives ‘as part of its wider strategy to foster a new generation of Syrians in support of its ideological agenda.’ “
The cancer of this un-islamic ideology is intentionally promoted in occupied areas of secular, pluralist, democratic Syria with a view to “weaponizing” children, and to destroying the country with an internalized cancer of Wahhabism and violence.
None of this is accidental. All of it is the fruit of considerable forethought and pre-planning by the imperial “West”, its allies, and their intelligence agencies.
Whereas the West proclaims that it is spreading democracy, it is spreading terrorism, Wahhabism, death and destruction on each and every one of its pre-planned imperial invasions.
Syria’s stand against the Western agencies of death and destruction is a stand for all of humanity against the dark forces that fester beneath our politician’s empty words and the courtesan media’s toxic lies.
July 28, 2016 Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Afghanistan, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Iraq, Libya, Middle East | Leave a comment
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