Ray Locker, “Is Pentagon paying for study it can get for free?,” USA TODAY, 6 November 2013
Is the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon’s futurist think-tank, paying $184,000 to a conservative Washington research group for a study on nuclear deterrence that has already been published and is available for free?
Continue reading
Trevor Timm, “Will the US State Dept Condemn UK’s Attempt to Use ‘Terrorism’ Laws to Suppress Journalism?,” Freedom of the Press Foundation, 3 November 2013
In a shocking court filing this week, the UK government accused journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda of “terrorism” for allegedly transporting leaked (and heavily encrypted) NSA documents from documentarian Laura Poitras in Germany to Greenwald in Brazil, on a journalistic mission paid for by the Guardian newspaper.
In a statement that should send chills down the spine of every reporter, the government made the unbelievable claim that merely publishing information that has nothing to do with violence still “falls within the definition of terrorism.”
“Additionally the disclosure, or threat of disclosure, is designed to influence a government and is made for the purpose of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism…”
Katrina vanden Heuvel, “Why It’s Always Been Time to Legalize Marijuana,” The Nation, 30 October 2013
“Marijuana is indeed a gateway drug,” quips Sanho Tree of the Institute for Policy Studies. “It’s a gateway drug to the Oval Office!” Indeed. From Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale it” through George W. Bush’s “I was young and foolish” to Barack Obama’s teen years in the Choom Gang (“I inhaled frequently—that was the point”), the last three presidents have more or less owned up to breaking America’s drug laws.
Continue reading
Hayes Brown, “Defense Contractors Profit Despite Sequestration And Shutdown,” Think Progress, 24 October 2013
Defense contractors have managed to not only stay afloat but also thrive in a climate of government closure and massive cuts to the Pentagon’s budget, continuing to rake in billions upon billions of dollars in profits. Continue reading
W.J. Hennigan, “Army lets air out of battlefield spyship project,” Los Angeles Times, 23 October 2013
After spending $297 million to develop a craft that could hover over an area as long as three weeks, the Pentagon quietly sold it for $301,000 to its maker. Continue reading
“China-India reach border defence pact,” Al Jazeera, 23 October
China and India have signed a deal aimed at soothing tension on their contested border, as the two countries try to break a decades-old stalemate on overlapping claims to remote stretches of the Himalayas. …
Continue reading
Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer, “War Pay,” TomDispatch, 22 May 2012
Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?
In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion — a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.
Continue reading
Michael Shank and Elizabeth Beavers, “The militarization of U.S. police forces,” Reuters, 22 October 2013
Police departments in Boise and Nampa, Idaho, each acquired an MRAP, as did the force in High Springs, Florida. The offer of war-ready machinery, at practically no cost, has proven hard to resist for local police departments. Increasingly, they are looking like soldiers equipped for battle.
The growing similarity between our domestic police forces and the U.S. military is a result of the Pentagon’s 1033 Program. This allows the Defense Department to donate surplus military equipment and weapons to law enforcement agencies. In addition to the frightening presence of paramilitary weapons in American towns, the program has led to rampant fraud and abuse. …
Continue reading
Craig Whitlock, “Drone strikes killing more civilians than U.S. admits, human rights groups say,” The Washington Post, 22 October 2013
Two influential human rights groups say they have freshly documented dozens of civilian deaths in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, contradicting assertions by the Obama administration that such casualties are rare.
Continue reading
Cora Currier, “In Big Win for Defense Industry, Obama Rolls Back Limits on Arms Exports,” ProPublica, 14 October 2013
The United States is loosening controls over military exports, in a shift that former U.S. officials and human rights advocates say could increase the flow of American-made military parts to the world’s conflicts and make it harder to enforce arms sanctions.
Come tomorrow, thousands of parts of military aircraft, such as propeller blades, brake pads and tires will be able to be sent to almost any country in the world, with minimal oversight – even to some countries subject to U.N. arms embargos. U.S. companies will also face fewer checks than in the past when selling some military aircraft to dozens of countries. …
Continue reading
Edward Wong And Nicola Clark, “China’s Arms Industry Makes Global Inroads,” New York Times, 20 October 2013
Industry executives and arms-sales analysts say the Chinese probably beat out their more established rivals by significantly undercutting them on price, offering their system at $3 billion. Nonetheless, Turkey’s selection of a Chinese state-owned manufacturer is a breakthrough for China, a nation that has set its sights on moving up the value chain in arms technology and establishing itself as a credible competitor in the global weapons market.
“This is a remarkable win for the Chinese arms industry,” said Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms sales and transfers. …
Continue reading
Douglas Birch, “Blowing Up Asteroids: The Latest Excuse to Keep Nuclear Stockpiles?,” Center for Public Integrity, 16 October 2013
“It was a really bizarre thing to see that these weapons designers were willing to work together—to build the biggest bombs ever,” said Melosh, an expert in space impacts who has an asteroid named after him.
Ever since, he has been pushing back against scientists who still support the nuclear option, arguing that a non-nuclear solution—diverting asteroids by hitting them with battering rams—is both possible and far less dangerous.
But Melosh’s campaign suffered a setback last month when Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz signed an agreement with Russia that could open the door to new collaboration between nuclear weapons scientists in everything from plutonium-fueled reactors to lasers and explosives research. Continue reading
Ryan Gallagher, “The World’s Policeman Is Looking Mighty Guilty,” Slate, 17 October 2013
Participating in the session was a judge who has served in the European Court of Human Rights for 15 years, a former United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, and a London-based international law professor. All three agreed that the scope of the surveillance revealed in the Snowden leaks constituted violations of both European and international laws and treaties.
Continue reading
John Reed, “Pentagon Spent $5 Billion on Weapons on the Eve of the Shutdown,” The Washington Post, 01 October 2013
The Pentagon pumped billions of dollars into contractors’ bank accounts on the eve of the U.S. government’s shutdown that saw 400,000 Defense Department employees furloughed.
All told, the Pentagon awarded 94 contracts yesterday evening on its annual end-of-the-fiscal-year spending spree, spending more than five billion dollars on everything from robot submarines to Finnish hand grenades and a radar base mounted on an offshore oil platform. To put things in perspective, the Pentagon gave out only 14 contracts on September 3, the first workday of the month.
Continue reading
Juan Cole, “The American Genocide Against Iraq: 4% of Population Dead as result of US sanctions, wars,” 10/17/2013
So the US polished off about a million Iraqis from 1991 through 2011, large numbers of them children. The Iraqi population in that period was roughly 25 million, so the US killed or created the conditions for the killing of 4% of the Iraqi population.
Continue reading
Liu Chang, “U.S. fiscal failure warrants a de-Americanized world,” Xinhua, 13 october 2013
As U.S. politicians of both political parties are still shuffling back and forth between the White House and the Capitol Hill without striking a viable deal to bring normality to the body politic they brag about, it is perhaps a good time for the befuddled world to start considering building a de-Americanized world. …
Continue reading
Nafeez Ahmed, “How the World Health Organisation covered up Iraq’s nuclear nightmare,” The Guardian, 13 October 2013
Ex-UN, WHO officials reveal political interference to suppress scientific evidence of postwar environmental health catastrophe. Continue reading
David Sirota, “GOP’s massive fraud: The shutdown isn’t really a shutdown!,” Salon, 06 October 2013
Of course, there is an insidious method to the madness of government shutdowns. In general, the dividing line between what gets shut down and what doesn’t is a similar dividing line between what America’s political culture typically venerates as The State and what that culture lambasts as The Government. Consider what will not be shut down: Continue reading
Ben Quinn, “MoD study sets out how to sell wars to the public,” The Guardian, 26 September 2013
The armed forces should seek to make British involvement in future wars more palatable to the public by reducing the public profile of repatriation ceremonies for casualties, according to a Ministry of Defence unit that formulates strategy.
Other suggestions made by the MoD thinktank in a discussion paper examining how to assuage “casualty averse” public opinion include the greater use of mercenaries and unmanned vehicles, as well as the SAS and other special forces, because it says losses sustained by the elite soldiers do not have the same impact on the public and press.
Continue reading
Harry Browne, “‘Factivism’ and Other Fairytales from Bono,” CounterPunch, 19 March 2013
So what on earth is the Beshaded One talking about this time? Only the TED blurb (almost certainly penned by the man himself) can begin to do justice to Bono’s message: “Human beings have been campaigning against inequality and poverty for 3,000 years. But this journey is accelerating. Bono ‘embraces his inner nerd’ and shares inspiring data that shows the end of poverty is in sight… if we can harness the momentum.”
Bono, who is accelerating humanity toward the end of its long anti-poverty journey, allegedly loves data. He called his first lobbying organisation DATA (Debt Aids Trade Africa), and told the appreciative California audience that he’s a “factivist” who gets sexually aroused by numbers. But Bono’s “inner nerd” really needs to meet my outer skeptic, because in fact his optimistic message about the trajectory of poverty eradication, and the reasons for it, is a flimsy tissue of truths, half-truths and statistics, conveniently skewed to suggest that he and his Western partners in Africa (governments, corporations, foundations) have been doing a great job entirely.
Continue reading
