Public Intelligence Blog

Syria: Special comment. Readers are rightly perplexed about conditions in Syria. Syrian press restrictions inhibit any neutral or balanced coverage. Everything reported from opposition sources and activists is biased and some reports of massacres include manufactured images, according to eyewitnesses.

International news descriptions of a worsening crisis receive no offsetting coverage of testimony from non-Sunni and non-opposition sources that little is occurring. The massacres are not taking place, occurring to sources that receive messages from Orthodox Christians living in Homs, for example. Life goes on in all of the towns and ports.

Skirmishes at checkpoints are the most common form of clash. That means four or five people fire a few rounds at four or five soldiers or policemen. Defectors are Sunni conscripts. The Syrian Army is about 60% conscript. Desertion is common in conscript armies. Defectors from the professional, full-time, non-conscript core of the force, most of whom are Alawites, have not been reported.

The point is that western media present one side of the struggle — that of the exiled Sunni politicians and activists with cell phones. Clips from social networking media are heavily one-sided and some are not authentic.

Limited communications from people caught in the middle, non-Muslims, suggest there is a lot less fighting and fewer deaths. Reports of carnage and massacres of hundreds do not seem to be accurate, except in opposition propaganda media.

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John Steiner

Check out the video the mining industry never expected you to see:

http://www.getup.org.au/minersmediaplan

You simply have to see this video to believe it.

This week mining billionaire Gina Rinehart became the largest shareholder in Fairfax, having already bought a stake in Channel Ten. But this new video reveals this move is bigger than one woman’s ambition – it’s part of a coordinated and very deliberate strategy, with climate skeptic ‘Lord’ Monkton seen here advising a room full of mining executives on how the industry must gain control of Australia’s media.

Can you help share this video so all Australians understand what’s really going on in the mining industry?

http://www.getup.org.au/minersmediaplan

We’ve seen what happened in the USA when coordinated, super-wealthy corporate interests set about deliberately reshaping the media landscape to suit their agendas. It’s bad news for democracy and it’s bad news for the issues we care about. And while this most recent purchase was a brazen move, it’s hardly the first time a mining industry executive has used their vast wealth to push an agenda.

Last year, Rinehart helped set up a new lobby group calling for a special ‘Northern Economic Zone’ demanding lower tax, government concessions and cheap migrant labor from Asia. She helped bankroll the campaign against Government efforts to ask the mining industry to pay their fair share of tax through the Mining Super Profits tax and she’s been actively sponsoring prominent climate skeptics like Monckton, Ian Plimer and Andrew Bolt, who got his own TV show weeks after she invested in Channel Ten.

Phi Beta Iota:  The Internet, the schools, and how the general public is informed are the battleground for 21st century peace and prosperity.  All are rotten to the core right now, but all signs point to a global public rebellion that is insistent on getting back to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

See Also:

Note: this book will NOT be available free online.  Pre-orders are offered by Amazon at a $5 discount.

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust

Robert David STEELE Vivas

Warning: This Site Contains Conspiracy Theories

Does Google have a responsibility to help stop the spread of 9/11 denialism, anti-vaccine activism, and other fringe beliefs? 

Killing Obama – Andrew Adler in an Emotional Video Apology

Update: Atlanta Jewish Times Editor Andrew Adler – a Victim of Israeli Iran Threat Hype – Classic Game Theory Warfare on Steroids

Jim W. Dean

Veterans Today, 24 January 2012

Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasters got an exclusive interview with  Andrew Adler, below.  They are a long time non profit broadcast booster to the Atlanta faith community, providing a pooled resource platform. VT is happy to offer you a front row seat to hear his story.

What you are about to view is a classic broken man…with no acting going on.  Those of us who have seen this numerous times, you can always tell. So I think now that we have a true blue believer here that got wound up a little too tight. More on that later.

Please pay close attention to the part where he let says that in an interview show he had with the Deputy Israeli General Consul for the Southeast, that he was upset by her description of the dire threat that Israel was living under…the 15,000 rockets.

This is pure Israeli-Iran threat hype, of course.  It should be prosecutable under the Nuremberg precedents, ‘waging an offensive war’, and all of us here look forward to the day where we can watch the trials online.

We have written many times that Iran is of no offensive threat to the U.S. or Israel, with their military totally deployed in a defensive mode which it has to be from the threat of Israel’s Weapons of Mass Destruction umbrella.

Read full article with many links.

Phi Beta Iota:  Fascinating at multiple levels, including the exploration of current best-selling book in Israel, Israeli political crime families, and more.

Who, Me?

Read this at least three times.  This is a talking points memorandum for the Empire cabal, which is now ready to take on the white guys (including the white guys with guns).  They believe blacks and hispanics are cowed, “weed and seed” has been a success story (in their view).  This is a subtle hit job that sets the stage for treating white guys as failures who lost their cultural compass and must now be treated with the same federalization of state and local force and ultimate incarceration that has been used so extensively on blacks.

The Rodney King riots were the beginning of the breakdown of US Government legitimacy in the eyes of its own public.  The economy is being juiced and the Republicans are playing along with the fiction that the economy is getting better.  It is not.  Unemployment is at 22.4% and 2013 is going to be catastrophic.  Now imagine the Rodney King riots, this time with while guys who are armed to the teeth and very very pissed off, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a populist revolution.

The New American Divide

The ideal of an ‘American way of life’ is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what’s cleaving America, and why.

Charles Murray

Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2012

EXTRACT

Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

. . . . . . .

As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

. . . . . . .

Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody’s fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won’t make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won’t make a difference.

Read full article.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010″ (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.

Phi Beta Iota:  The eight stages of genocide established by Dr. Greg Stanton are as follows:  1) Classification (us versus them); 2) Symbolization (codewords–e.g bums); 3) Dehumanization (equated with animals, eugenics applies); 4) Organization (federalization of state and local police, opening of the Halliburton-build civil disturbance camps now ready for use); 5) Polarization (attack all independent and centrist movements and leaders); 6) Preparation (use NDAA to incarcerate without due process those who object to the nazification of the USA); 7) Extermination (through a mix of precision kills and “accidental” epidemics, gut the white middle class now diving into poverty); Denial (already taking place at Davos 2012 – capitalism failed, not the elite).

Patrick Meier

How Crisis Mapping Proved Henry Kissinger Wrong in Cambodia

Crisis Mapping can reveal insights on current crises as well as crises from decades ago. Take Dr. Jen Ziemke‘s dissertation research on crisis mapping the Angolan civil war, which revealed and explained patterns of violence against civilians. My colleague Dr. Taylor Owen recently shared with me his fascinating research, which comprises a spatio-historical analysis of the US bombardment of Cambodia. Like Jen’s research, Taylor’s clearly shows how crisis mapping can shed new light on important historical events.

. . . . . . .

In particular, Owen’s analysis shows that:

Click on Image to Enlarge

“… the total tonnage dropped on Cambodia was five times greater than previously known; the bombing inside Cambodia began nearly 4 years prior to the supposed start of the Menu Campaign, under the Johnson Administration; that, in contradiction to Henry Kissinger’s claims, and over the warning of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Base Areas 704, 354 and 707 were all heavily bombed; the bombing intensity increased throughout the summer of 1973, after Congress barred any such increase; and, that despite claims by both Kissinger and Nixon to the contrary, there was substantial bombing within 1km of inhabited villages.”

Phi Beta Iota:  This is very exciting stuff.  The public does not read nor think well, in large part because the rote “teaching” was designed by Carnegie and Rockfeller to create obedient factory workers able to follow instructions.  Visualization–including spatio-historical analysis but also including advanced visualization as well as the simple visualization for flag officers (red, yellow, green), could be the next revolution in education.  At a minimum it will demonstrate that experts know nothing and elites cannot be trusted.

Chuck Spinney

On 12 December, I described a concatenation of warmongering pressures that were shaping the popular psyche in favor of bombing Iran.  Now, in a 21 December essay [also attached below], Steven Walt describes a further escalation of these pressures — in this case, via the profoundly flawed pro-bombing analysis, Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike is the Least Bad Option, penned by Matthew Kroenig in January/February 2012 issue of the influential journal Foreign Affairs.

One would think that our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan and our growing strategic problems in Pakistan, not to mention our economic problems and political paralysis at home, would temper our enthusiasm for launching yet another so-called preventative war.  But that is not the case, as Kroenig’s analysis and the growing anti-Iran hysteria in the debates among the the Republican running for president show (Ron Paul excepted) show.  Moreover, President Obama’s Clintonesque efforts to triangulate the pro-war political pressures of the Republicans, while appeasing the Israelis, may be smart domestic politics in the short term, but they add fuel to the pro-war fires shaping the popular psyche. Finally, as I wrote last January, lurking beneath the fiery anti-Iran rhetoric are more deeply rooted domestic political-economic reasons for promoting perpetual war — reasons that have more to do with sustaining the money flowing into the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex in the post-Cold War era than in shaping a foreign policy based on national interests.

While it is easy to whip up popular enthusiasm for launching a new war, our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that successfully prosecuting wars of choice are quite another matter.  Nevertheless, as my good friend Mike Lofgren explains in his recent essay, Propagandizing for Perpetual War, devastating rebuttals like Walt’s are likely to have little effect on the course of events.

One final point … a surprise attack on Iran would trigger a far tougher war to prosecute successfully that either Iraq or Afghanistan.  If you  doubt this, I suggest you study Anthony Cordesman’s 2009 analysis of the operational problems confronting Israel, should it decide to launch a surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Yet, the beat goes on.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

The worst case for war with Iran

Stephen M. Walt

Foreign Policy, 22 December 2011

If you’d like to read a textbook example of war-mongering disguised as “analysis,” I recommend Matthew Kroenig’s forthcoming article in Foreign Affairs, titled “Time to Attack Iran: Why a Strike Is the Least Bad Option.” It is a remarkably poor piece of advocacy, all the more surprising because Kroenig is a smart scholar who has done some good work in the past. It makes one wonder if there’s something peculiar in the D.C. water supply.

There is a simple and time-honored formula for making the case for war, especially preventive war. First, you portray the supposed threat as dire and growing, and then try to convince people that if we don’t act now, horrible things will happen down the road. (Remember Condi Rice’s infamous warnings about Saddam’s “mushroom cloud”?) All this step requires is a bit of imagination and a willingness to assume the worst. Second, you have to persuade readers that the costs and risks of going to war aren’t that great. If you want to sound sophisticated and balanced, you acknowledge that there are counterarguments and risks involved. But then you do your best to shoot down the objections and emphasize all the ways that those risks can be minimized. In short: In Step 1 you adopt a relentlessly gloomy view of the consequences of inaction; in Step 2 you switch to bulletproof optimism about how the war will play out.

Kroenig’s piece follows this blueprint perfectly.

Read full article.

CNN has done a very good job at framing how Ron Paul is drawing out the anti-government / anti-establishment vote.

They have done less well at using the talking points they were obviously given by a Zionist group, attacking Ron Paul for appearing on the Alex Jones show, for commenting immediately after 9/11 that the Bush Administration was over-joyed because it gave them a pretext for war on Iraq, and–from the Wall Street Journal but clearly part of some talking points paper–for connecting 9/11 and attacks on the US to what the US has done in the Middle East [to which we would add, US support for all but  two dictators for the past fifty years].

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with Republican candidates and a Democratic incumbent unable to discern the truth, much less articulate it.  To have a broad attack unleashed against Ron Paul–one with enough money behind it to draw in CNN and the Wall Street Journal, is of grave concern.  He speaks truth–those that seek to diminish him profit from lies.

Sample Headlines [Clearly an Orchestrated Funded Campaign]

2011-12-22 What Ron Paul Thinks of America [WSJ, Dorothy Rabinowitz]

It seemed improbable that the best-known American propagandist for our enemies could be near the top of the pack in the Iowa contest, but there it is. [Dorothy Rabinowitz]

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Marcus Aurelius

Feds involved in Manning prosecution enter hackers’ crosshairs

David Swanson

70 Years of Lying About Pearl Harbor