Public Intelligence Blog

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?  We do not make this stuff up.  CIA’s Covert Action Staff is evidently having a ball, and David Ignatius has no problem playing the bimbo.  Note the built-in pre-excuse on poor syntax.  Note the pretense that incoherence was connected to long periods of time between sending, receiving, and responding.  The hit on Fox is some kid [or geriatric annuitant]‘s idiot idea of being clever — when Bin Laden was alive, he knew full well there is no substantive difference between CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox [or the two political parties in the US that exclude everyone else from access to the public treasure].

All of this is beyond belief for anyone with BOTH intelligence and integrity.  When all of the documents are released (after the November elections, of course), they will be torn apart.

The bin Laden plot to kill President Obama

David Ignatius

The Washington Post, 16 March 2012

Before his death, Osama bin Ladenboldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

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Patrick Meier

#UgandaSpeaks: Al-Jazeera uses Ushahidi to Amplify Local Voices in Response to #Kony2012

Invisible Children’s #Kony2012 campaign has set off a massive firestorm of criticism with the debate likely to continue raging for many more weeks and months. In the meantime, our colleagues at Al-Jazeera have repurposed our previous #SomaliaSpeaks project to amplify Ugandan voices responding to the Kony campaign: #UgandaSpeaks.

Together with GlobalVoices, this Al-Jazeera initiative is one of the very few seeking to amplify local reactions to the Kony campaign. Over 70 local voices have been shared and mapped on Al-Jazeera’s Ushahidi platform in the first few hours since the launch. The majority of reactions submitted thus far are critical of the campaign but a few are positive.

Read full post with graphics and many links.

Who, Me?

“Media Is More Than Business”

Syria- Arab Red Crescent: Over the past few days, the Syrian Arab Red Crescent has distributed aid provided by the ICRC to the Bab Amr district of Homs, to Hama, Idlib, Deraa, rural Damascus and the eastern city of Raqqa, a spokesman said. “The situation as we see it today is that unrest is still taking place mainly in Hama, Deraa, Rural Damascus, Homs and Idlib,” Hassan said.

Opposition spokespeople said fighting was continuing in Homs, but a Red Crescent spokesman said that it was not. The Red Crescent teams found that the population had evacuated the Baba Amr district of Homs and the rest of the city was quiet.

Comment: The arrival of Red Crescent teams has provided some much needed ground truth reporting. The fighting in Homs has been concentrated in the Baba Amr district, which the government seized, but the residents apparently  had already left along with the fighters. It remains difficult to develop a relatively unbiased view of the struggle. The Red Crescent statements suggest actual confrontations are occuring in neighborhoods of five towns and cities. That is far more limited than international media suggest.

Syria-UK: British Prime Minister David Cameron told a hearing at the House of Commons Liaison Committee on 6 March that his government provided cash and equipment to foreign-backed rebels in Syria under such names as “aid agencies” operating on the ground to help deliver food and emergency medical supplies, Press TV reported.

Comment: Cameron’s admission in conjunction with the capture of the 13 French officers tends to confirm the Syrian government’s consistent contention that the opposition is made up of outside troublemakers. The Syrian situation in no way resembles Libya and accurate information is just not available, except one fact. There are no significant and sustained operations in Damascus. Until they occur, the regime will survive.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

See Also:

NIGHTWATCH on Syria at Phi Beta Iota

Search: map of sunni and shiite muslim groups

Syria:  Special comment: Over the weekend, news video footage from Homs, the so-called center of the opposition uprising, raised questions about the actual effectiveness of the opposition. The videos showed Syrian police, firefighters and militia using fire hoses to disperse a major opposition rally in Homs. So who controls Homs? Apparently the government does, with the exception of a few photogenic neighborhoods.

A European news outlet published a city map that shows the neighborhoods of Homs based on sectarian residence patterns. The map shows that most of the videos of violent confrontations have been taken in two or three mostly Sunni neighborhoods in the south of the city.

Homs is a large city and most of it appears to experience little to no violence, based on the video footage and the map of neighborhoods. The vast majority of Sunni neighborhoods and the Christian and Alawite neighborhoods report no violence. Life goes on in most of Homs.

If the Homs firefighters and police retain the capability to use fire hoses against demonstrators, then the government remains in control in that city. That is a basic precept of internal instability analysis. Homs still has a functioning government that responds to orders from Damascus.

The point of this comment is that most US news reporting on the struggle in Syria appears aimed at grabbing headlines rather than at providing a balanced view of both sides of the struggle.  Non-US news sources present a different view of the unrest. For example, it is difficult to maintain that the opposition dominates Homs, when the fire brigade is secure enough to turn hoses on an opposition rally there.  US news analysts completely missed the significance of the fire brigade operations shown in their own videos..

The bottom line is that the opposition holds no ground that it does not physically occupy and then only when government forces are not present or chasing it. Homs does not appear to be under siege or under opposition control, based on German news reporting.  Some neighborhoods are and that is worth further research. It also helps explain why the al Asad government exhibits no signs of panic or severe stress commensurate with the urgent statements by the UN, Arab League and US officials. More on this topic later.

Phi Beta Iota:  The truth at any cost lowers all other costs.  The US media is 65-95% owned by Wall Street, with the bulk of their revenues coming from advertising by corporations that profit from war and instability.

See Also:

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

NIGHTWATCH on Syria at Phi Beta Iota

Search: map of sunni and shiite muslim groups

Gordon Duff

American Poverty, What the Brits Don’t Understand

Panorama Special on American Poverty A Delusional Tale

by  Gordon Duff,  Senior Editor

Last week, the BBC news show, Panorama, supposedly told the story of America’s poor. 

Moments of the story were right, they certainly picked one or two of those responsible for America’s economic collapse out, although not a single cogent idea was expressed on the show.

Panorama simply doesn’t get it. 

They aren’t slow witted, they are simply more of the same, controlled news, taking the focus from the magician and putting it on the pigeon.

Read full article with various media clips and links.

Patrick Buchanan

The New Blacklist

Patrick J. Buchanan

EXTRACT:

Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture and ideology, and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century’s end.

. . . . . .

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, “so long as reason is left free to combat it.” What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.

Phi Beta Iota:  Below the line is the complete essay by Buchanan with points that we find compelling.  He is articulate, and however much some may dislike delivery, he represents a point of view — and a demographic — whose silence spells death to the Republic as we know it.  What is really at issue here is the legitimacy of the two-party bi-opoly and the various levels of government — they have substituted ideology for intelligence, corruption for integrity.  Under such a system, the Constitution has been trashed and the Republic dismembered.

- – - – - – -

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

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High-Tech Trickery in Homs?

by Sharmine Narwani

VeteransToday, 16 February 2012

What was surely meant to be a clever display of media-friendly visuals to illustrate Syrian regime violence in Homs, has instead raised more questions than answers.

US State Department satellite images of the embattled city were posted on Facebook last Friday by US Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, who complains: “A terrible and tragic development in Syria is the use of heavy weaponry by the Assad regime against residential neighborhoods.”

The “satellite photos,” says Ford, “have captured both the carnage and those causing it — the artillery is clearly there, it is clearly bombing entire neighborhoods…We are intent on exposing the regime’s brutal tactics for the world to see.”

But within 24 hours, the blog Moon of Alabama had taken a hammer to the ambassador’s claims. A detailed examination of satellite imagery by the bloggers revealed numerous discrepancies in Washington’s allegations. Mainly, their investigations point to the fact that Ford’s satellite images were “of guns training within military barracks or well known training areas and not in active deployment.”

Moon of Alabama posts its own satellite images, graphics and diagrams to bolster its argument – and these are well worth a look.

The US envoy’s questionable claims don’t stop at satellite images, however. In his Facebook post, Ford insists: “There is no evidence that the opposition — even those opposition members who have defected from the military — has access to or has employed such heavy weapons. “ By this, he means the “artillery” used “to pound civilian apartment buildings and homes from a distance.”

Then why is there satellite photo evidence of destruction in pro-regime Alawi areas?

Fast-forward to CNN’s very own Jonathan King, who broadcast satellite images of Homs on February 9, the day before the State Department loaded their photos on the web. King’s images of Homs are dated February 5, two days after violence erupted in the city, focusing heavily in the Baba Amr neighborhood where opposition gunmen are allegedly present:

See compared images and read full story.

See Also:

Syria is Not Tunisia or Libya (2 July 2012)

Who, Me?

“Or Your Lying Eyes…” Truth and Fiction in the News Business

Alex Cockburn

Counterpunch, Weekend Edition February 10-12, 2012

If you want a sense of what could well lie in store for Syria, go no further than Anthony Shadid’s report from Libya in the New York Times for February 9. Shadid, a good reporter, describes a dismembered country, rent by banditry.

EXTRACT:

As Byrne reported,

“Of the three main sources for all data on numbers of protesters killed and numbers of people attending demonstrations – the pillars of the narrative – all are part of the ‘regime change’ alliance.
The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights, in particular, is reportedly funded through a Dubai-based fund with pooled (and therefore deniable) Western-Gulf money (Saudi Arabia alone has, according to Elliot Abrams allocated US$130 billion to ‘palliate the masses’ of the Arab Spring).

What appears to be a nondescript British-based organization, the Observatory has been pivotal in sustaining the narrative of the mass killing of thousands of peaceful protesters using inflated figures, ‘facts’, and often exaggerated claims of ‘massacres’ and even recently ‘genocide’.”

And from the Arab League Report:

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Gordon Duff

Independent Report Contradicts Western Portrait of Syria

Arab League Report Shows that Syria Has Been Mischaracterized

While the Western media act like the Syrian government is wantonly and indiscriminately killing its own people without provocation, an independent investigation has found a different reality on the ground.

Specifically, over 160 monitors from the Arab League – comprised of both allies and mortal enemies of Syria – toured Syria and published a report on January 27th showing that the situation has been mischaracterized.

Initially, the report noted general cooperation by the Syrian government:

The Mission [i.e. the Arab League investigative team] noted that the Government strived to help it succeed in its task and remove any barriers that might stand in its way. The Government also facilitated meetings with all parties. No restrictions were placed on the movement of the Mission and its ability to interview Syrian citizens, both those who opposed the Government and those loyal to it.

The report noted that the media has greatly exaggerated the amount of violence in Syria:

The Mission noted that many parties falsely reported that explosions or violence had occurred in several locations. When the observers went to those locations, they found that those reports were unfounded.

The Mission also noted that, according to its teams in the field, the media exaggerated the nature of the incidents and the number of persons killed in incidents and protests in certain towns.

***

Since it began its work, the Mission has been the target of a vicious media campaign. Some media outlets have published unfounded statements, which they attributed to the Head of the Mission. They have also grossly exaggerated events, thereby distorting the truth.

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