Octafish
Octafish's JournalThe Intelligence-Industrial Complex
The intelligence-industrial complex
Joseph Kishore
WSWS.org 15 July 2013
An important aspect of the spying operations that have been exposed over the past month by National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden is the collusion of giant telecommunications and technology companies with the Obama administration and US intelligence agencies in the systematic violation of democratic rights.
SNIP...
PRISM itself is only part of an even more expansive program, in which the NSA taps directly into the “Internet backbone”—the system of fiber optic cables through which most telecommunications and Internet communications pass. These cables are run and controlled by large corporations, including the same telecommunications giants that hand over data on phone records, as well as companies such as 3 Communications and CenturyLink. In this way, the NSA can monitor in real time much of the world’s Internet traffic and reroute it for permanent storage.
Bloomberg News reported last month that “thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with US national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified information.” In exchange for their secret collaboration with the government, the companies often receive documents guaranteeing immunity for their actions.
The programs cited by Bloomberg are diverse and far-reaching. They include an agreement with Microsoft to inform the NSA of bugs in its operating systems before they are publicly released—giving the agency an opportunity to exploit the information to infiltrate computers in the US and abroad. McAfee, which makes Internet security software and is a subsidiary of Intel, also partners with intelligence agencies on a regular basis.
The corporate-intelligence collaboration is global. Over the weekend, newspapers in Australia reported on a partnership between US spy agencies and Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia, to hand over data to the US government. Telstra controls the bulk of the Internet backbone in Australia and routes much of the communications traffic from Asia.
CONTINUED...
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/15/pers-j15.html
Seeing how these private intel companies probably privatize the best of the take, too, makes clear how the very rich keep getting richer and the rest of us not only poorer, but catalogued.
(Read in Greg Allman singing on "Whipping Post"
: Sometimes I feel like an attention whore. Then I remember why I do it.
Gen. Clapper is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
NSA, the Agency That Could Be Big Brother
NSA, the Agency That Could Be Big Brother
by James Bamford
New York Times, December 25, 2005
www.truthout.com
Washington - Deep in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another NSA listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the NSA has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the NSA to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the NSA was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the CIA and other spy organizations.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/NSA_Could_Be_Big_Brother.html
Gen. Clapper is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life
McCoy kicked CIA in the nuts with his book on the Company's role in the international drug trade.
Drug Fallout
by Alfred McCoy
Progressive magazine, August 1997
Throughout the forty years of the Cold War, the CIA joined with urban gangsters and rural warlords, many of them major drug dealers, to mount covert operations against communists around the globe. In one of history's accidents, the Iron Curtain fell along the border of the Asian opium zone, which stretches across 5,000 miles of mountains from Turkey to Thailand. In Burma during the 1950s, in Laos during the 1970s, and in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA allied with highland warlords to mobilize tribal armies against the Soviet Union and China.
In each of these covert wars, Agency assets-local informants-used their alliance with the CIA to become major drug lords, expanding local opium production and shipping heroin to international markets, the United States included. Instead of stopping this drug dealing, the Agency tolerated it and, when necessary, blocked investigations. Since ruthless drug lords made effective anti-communist allies and opium amplified their power, CIA agents mounting delicate operations on their own, half a world from home, had no reason to complain. For the drug lords, it was an ideal arrangement. The CIA's major covert operations-often lasting a decade-provided them with de facto immunity within enforcement-free zones.
In Laos in the 1960s, the CIA battled local communists with a secret army of 30,000 Hmong-a tough highland tribe whose only cash crop was opium. A handful of CIA agents relied on tribal leaders to provide troops and Lao generals to protect their cover. When Hmong officers loaded opium on the ClA's proprietary carrier Air America, the Agency did nothing. And when the Lao army's commander, General Ouane Rattikone, opened what was probably the world's largest heroin laboratory, the Agency again failed to act.
"The past involvement of many of these officers in drugs is well known," the ClA's Inspector General said in a still-classified 1972 report, "yet their goodwill . . . considerably facilitates the military activities of Agency-supported irregulars."
Indeed, the CIA had a detailed know ledge of drug trafficking in the Golden Triangle-that remote, rugged corner of Southeast Asia where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge. In June 1971, The New York Times published extracts from an other CIA report identifying twenty-one opium refineries in the Golden Triangle and stating that the "most important are located in the areas around Tachilek, Burma; Ban Houei Sai and Nam Keung in Laos; and Mae Salong in Thailand." Three of these areas were controlled by CIA allies: Nam Keung by the chief of CIA mercenaries for northwestern Laos; Ban Houei Sai by the commander of the Royal Lao Army; and Mae Salong by the Nationalist Chinese forces who had fought for the Agency in Burma. The CIA stated that the Ban Houei Sai laboratory, which was owned by General Ouane, was ' believed capable of processing 100 kilos of raw opium per day," or 3.6 tons of heroin a year-a vast output considering the total yearly U.S. consumption of heroin was then less than ten tons.
By 1971, 34 percent of all U.S. soldiers in South Vietnam were heroin addicts, according to a White House survey. There were more American heroin addicts in South Vietnam than in the entire United States-largely supplied from heroin laboratories operated by CIA allies, though the White House failed to acknowledge that unpleasant fact. Since there was no indigenous local market, Asian drug lords started shipping Golden Triangle heroin not consumed by the GIs to the United States, where it soon won a significant share of the illicit market.
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIAdrug_fallout.html
Odd how know the CIA, NSA and the rest of the secret government are gaining power to protect their secrets while simultaneously authorized to spy on American citizens, the famous We the People who are supposed to be their bosses.
Surveillance Blowback: The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020
By Alfred W. McCoy
July 15, 2013 by TomDispatch.com
The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.
SNIP...
Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state seems to be breaking down. Despite talk about ending the war on terror one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of “wartime” at home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain U.S. global dominion in peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control. The White House shows no sign -- nor does Congress -- of cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications.
Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in office, I suggested that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’"
SNIP...
During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America. In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Indeed, just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime.
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/15
PS: Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a TomDispatch regular, and author most recently of the book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (University of Wisconsin, 2012) which explores the American experience of torture during the past decade. Previous books include: A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project); Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, and The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. He has also convened the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State.
PPS: IMO, this is a must-read, download and pass-around. Please let me know your thoughts or rat me out to Erik Prince and whatever his old Blackwater's called these days. The corporation's name and amounts owed by the U.S. taxpayer are certainly on an invoice that will be paid, sequester or no sequester, and classified above this civilian's need-to-know.
Anyone remember the undercover Army interns at CNN and NPR?
Good training for the boys. They were psyops specialists.
At CNN, they learned how the newsroom works.
NPR never heard of them, at first.
The powers-that-be have become desperate now that the enemies of secret government, or We the People if you still belive in democracy, are on to their gangster arses.
JFK tried.
JFK CRIED FOR CONGO
(JFK receives the news of Lumumba's murder)
The caption for the photo above, by Jacques Lowe, personal photographer to JFK, reads:
"On February 13 1961, United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson came on the phone. I was alone with the President; his hand went to his head in utter despair, "On, no," I heard him groan. The Ambassador was informing the President of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, an African leader considered a trouble-maker and a leftist by many Americans. But Kennedy's attitude towards black Africa was that many who were considered leftists were in fact nationalists and patriots, anti-West because of years of colonialization, and lured to the siren call of Communism against their will. He felt that Africa presented an opportunity for the West, and, speaking as an American, unhindered by a colonial heritage, he had made friends in Africa and would succeed in gaining the trust of a great many African leaders. The call therefore left him heartbroken, for he knew that the murder would be a prelude to chaos in the mineral-rich and important African country, it was a poignant moment."
(end quoting from 1983 book "Kennedy A Time Remembered" by Jacques Lowe)
As news stories describe the massacre of thousands in the Congo (April 2003) I remember Orwell and JFK, two of my favourite people. In 1984 Orwell told us that once Big Brother took control of the world (One World Government) it was divided into three Super-States and the Disputed Territories, over which the Super-States waged continuous war. The people of the Disputed Territories (including equatorial Africa) were "expended like so much coal or oil". Their nations were gutted for their "valuable minerals and important vegetable products".
Like so much else of what Orwell told us, he was accurate about the fate of Africa. Its nations have never had a chance to survive on their own without interference. However, had President Kennedy been allowed to live and enact his policies for Africa, that continent could be equal today to Europe and America.
CONTINUED...
http://www.orwelltoday.com/jfkcongo.shtml
Like in Vietnam, policy toward Congo and the rest of Africa did a 180.
Dodd and Dulles vs. Kennedy in Africa
“In assessing the central character ...
Gibbon’s description of the Byzantine general
Belisarius may suggest a comparison:
‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times;
his virtues were his own.’”
— Richard Mahoney on President Kennedy
By Jim DiEugenio
CTKA From the January-February 1999 issue (Vol. 6 No. 2)
As Probe has noted elsewhere (especially in last year’s discussion of Sy Hersh’s anti-Kennedy screed, The Dark Side of Camelot), a clear strategy of those who wish to smother any search for the truth about President Kennedy’s assassination is to distort and deny his achievements in office. Hersh and his ilk have toiled to distort who Kennedy really was, where he was going, what the world would have been like if he had lived, and who and what he represented. As with the assassination, the goal of these people is to distort, exaggerate, and sometimes just outright fabricate in order to obfuscate specific Kennedy tactics, strategies, and outcomes.
This blackening of the record—disguised as historical revisionism—has been practiced on the left, but it is especially prevalent on the right. Political spy and propagandist Lucianna Goldberg—such a prominent figure in the current Clinton sex scandal—was tutored early on by the godfather of the anti-Kennedy books, that triple-distilled rightwinger and CIA crony Victor Lasky. In fact, at the time of Kennedy’s death, Lasky’s negative biography of Kennedy was on the best-seller lists. Lately, Christopher Matthews seemed to be the designated hitter on some of these issues (see the article on page 26). Curiously, his detractors ignore Kennedy’s efforts in a part of the world far from America, where Kennedy’s character, who and what he stood for, and how the world may have been different had he lived are clearly revealed. But to understand what Kennedy was promoting in Africa, we must first explore his activities a decade earlier.
SNIP...
To say the least, this is not what the Dulles brothers John Foster and Allen had in mind. Once the French empire fell, they tried to urge upon Eisenhower an overt American intervention in the area. When Eisenhower said no, Allen Dulles sent in a massive CIA covert operation headed by Air Force officer Edward Lansdale. In other words, the French form of foreign domination was replaced by the American version.
SNIP...
1964: LBJ reverses Kennedy’s policies
In 1964, the leftist rebellion picked up strength and began taking whole provinces. President Johnson and National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy decided that a weakened Adoula had to be strengthened with a show of American help. The CIA sent Cuban exile pilots to fly sorties against the rebels. When the UN finally withdrew, the US now became an ally of Belgium and intervened with arms, airplanes and advisors. Incredibly, as Jonathan Kwitny notes, Mobutu now invited Tshombe back into the Congo government (p. 79). Further, Tshombe now blamed the revolts on China! To quote Kwitny:
In a move suspiciously reminiscent of a standard US intelligence agency ploy, Tshombe produced what he said were some captured military documents, and a Chinese defector who announced that China was attempting to take over the Congo as part of a plot to conquer all of Africa. (p. 79)
With this, the Mobutu-Tshombe alliance now lost all semblance of a Gullion-Kennedy styled moderate coalition. Now, rightwing South Africans and Rhodesians were allowed to join the Congolese army in the war on the “Chinese-inspired left”. Further, as Kwitny also notes, this dramatic reversal was done under the auspices of the United States. The UN had now been dropped as a stabilizing, multilateral force. This meant, of course, that the tilt to the right would now go unabated. By 1965, the new American and Belgian supplemented force had put down the major part of the rebellion. General Mobutu then got rid of President Kasavubu. (Adoula had already been replaced by Tshombe.) In 1966, Mobutu installed himself as military dictator. The rest is a familiar story. Mobutu, like Suharto in Indonesia, allowed his country to be opened up to loads of outside investment. The riches of the Congo, like those of Indonesia, were mined by huge western corporations, whose owners and officers grew wealthy while Mobutu’s subjects were mired in abject poverty. As with the economy, Mobutu stifled political dissent as well. And, like Suharto, Mobutu grew into one of the richest men in the world. His holdings in Belgian real estate alone topped one hundred million dollars (Kwitny p. 87). Just one Swiss bank account was worth $143 million. And like Suharto, Mobutu fell after three decades of a corrupt dictatorship, leaving most of his citizenry in an anarchic, post-colonial state similar to where they had been at the beginning of his reign.
The policies before and after Kennedy’s in this tale help explain much about the chaos and confusion going on in Congo today. It’s a story you won’t read in many papers or see on television. In itself, the events which occurred there from 1959 to 1966 form a milestone. As Kwitny writes:
The democratic experiment had no example in Africa, and badly needed one. So perhaps the sorriest, and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in post-colonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America. (p. 75)
CONTINUED...
http://www.ctka.net/pr199-africa.html
Thank you, Heywood J. You should have a Sunday column for The New York Times. Plus, a couple other days of the week, as well.
The Dirty Secrets of George Herbert Walker Bush -- video from 1988...
Info from natsec types that seems not to have made it the people running Corporate McPravda.
Poppy used those very words in his eulogy for Gerald Ford.
It was a telling moment:
Poppy Bush brought up JFK Assassination and ''Conspiracy Theorists'' at Ford Funeral
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3029417
Poppy smirks or laughs or grins at the moment he says "deluded gunman" near the 1:09 mark:
George H.W. Bush’s Eulogy for Gerald R. Ford
The New York Times
Published: January 2, 2007
Following is the transcript of the eulogy for former President Gerald R. Ford delivered today by former President George H.W. Bush in Washington, as recorded by The New York Times.
EXCERPT…
After a deluded gunman assassinated President Kennedy, our nation turned to Gerald Ford and a select handful of others to make sense of that madness. And the conspiracy theorists can say what they will, but the Warren Commission report will always have the final definitive say on this tragic matter. Why? Because Jerry Ford put his name on it and Jerry Ford’s word was always good.
A decade later, when scandal forced a vice president from office, President Nixon turned to the minority leader in the House to stabilize his administration because of Jerry Ford’s sterling reputation for integrity within the Congress. To political ally and adversary alike, Jerry Ford’s word was always good.
SOURCE:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/02/washington/02cnd-ford-ghwb.html
PS: Of course, to Gerald Ford Warren Commission skeptics presented "no problem."
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3772251
PPS: What's even more telling is how there are still people interested in scrubbing the assassination record of any reference to Poppy.
PPPS: For those interested, background...
Know your BFEE: Poppy Bush was in Dallas the day JFK was assassinated.
How about we Democrats just act like concerned citizens? You know, like in a Democracy?
In such a political system, we'd express our opinions to our elected representatives. We could state, write, telephone or email our thoughts, free and unconcerned in the knowledge that our positions were not monitored or recorded. With public opinion being overwhelmingly in favor against NSA spherical spying on the American public, Congress and the President would certainly make changes in the law that We the People demanded. Unless, of course, there was another power we didn't know about, a secret government as it were.
Where did I ''shit on Obama'' SidDithers?
Those are your words, not mine. And the words in the OP are his words, not mine.
In fact, go up and down this thread, or any other OP or reply I've posted since 2004 when I first heard of Barack Obama, and show me where I "shit on Obama." You won't find even one example.
As for Poppy Bush and his crimes, I'll repeat what I wrote to you:
Why you find fun in the BFEE is your own affair, SidDithers.
Bartcop coined the term "Bush Family Evil Empire" to denote the 60-year pre-eminence of one family in the formation of the political philosophy in the United States, that of the War Party. And, yes, personally, I have tried to chronicle their influence on the ascension of the national security state. At least three generations have held high national office, while also making big money off war and looting the public Treasury. The last president of the United States, a man who wasn't elected fair and square by any stretch of the imagination, actually said: "Money trumps peace" at a press conference. For some reason, not a single "journalist" had the guts to ask him what he meant by that.
Why that doesn't bother you is your business. It does bother me.
PS: Something I've notice about you is that you never seem to post anything that adds to what we know about these treasonous warmongers. I do remember that you do like to post emoticons, sorry to say.
BTW: I voted for President Obama, twice in general elections. Please tell DU: How many times have you voted for him?
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