Public Intelligence Blog

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Citation:  “Graphic” Really Simple Guide to Syrian-Centered WWWIII Starting Line-Up,” Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, 18 May 2013.

See Also:

Berto Jongman: Assad Moving Missiles to Target Tel Aviv?

Neal Rauhauser: Syria, Regional War, The Only Red Line That Matters + Syria Meta-RECAP

Neal Rauhauser

The Only Red Line That Matters

Conclusion:

Here are what I hope are a fairly complete laundry list of the issues:

• NATO member Greece has collapsed, triggering regional banking meltdown concerns
• Banks of Cyprus collapsed, Russian offshore banking haven taken out by Greek troubles
• Russian ally Assad’s Syria is failing, loss of Tartus would exclude them from the Med
• Assad regime is the only Iran friendly outpost in the area
• Syrian revolt is funded in part by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, other Sunni majority regimes
• KSA & Qatar funds come /w Salafist radicalization built into the deal
• NATO members Greece & Turkey are at odds over Cyprus partition
• Syrian instability is spilling into Iraq, fueling Sunni/Shia violence, some refugees
• Syrian instability is spilling into U.S. ally Jordan, many refugees
• Syrian instability is spilling into NATO member Turkey, many refugees
• Israel is concerned over weapons transport to Hezbollah in Lebanon

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The Syrian civil war has been metastasizing into all of its immediate neighbors – Iraq, Turkey, and Lebanon have all seen violence precipitated by this festering conflict. Regional powers Iran and Russia have connections to the failing Assad regime and have taken indirect steps to protect the status quo. Regional Salafist funders Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funneling support and pushing ideology on Sunni Syrian rebels. I do not envy Israeli policy makers and the menu of unpleasant options that reality has provided them.

Russia has drawn a red line of their own – no NATO intervention in Syria. They’ve backed it up with a naval presence and the transfer of advance anti-aircraft systems to the Assad regime. The Syrian civil war is a multifaceted, multipolar regional issue and there are no soundbite sized prescriptions that will end it.

Read full post with maps.

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This is good news. The military, perhaps because it is a centralized command structure, often adopts progressive positions before general society. The military integrated long before the rest of America. It became a gender, race, and religion neutral meritocracy — an evolution in which I played a role — well before this was the norm. So the military’s adaptation of noncarbon energy is the latest in a line of accomplishments.

The Army Goes Off the Grid
Jim Hightower – Nation of Change

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Michael Ostrolenk

Meanwhile, 22 veterans a day (up from 18) commit suicide and this is beneath notice by the President of the United States of America.

Phi Beta Iota:  Complete story below the line.

VA Whistleblower Ignites Firestorm Over Vets’ Illnesses 

It’s not every day that a scientist creates such intense drama on Capitol Hill.

Kelly Vlahos

The American Conservative, 10 May 2013

Veterans of War Betrayed by Their Own Government

But Dr. Steven S. Coughlin’s charges that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials hid, manipulated, and even lied about research pertaining to Gulf War Illness (GWI) and health problems plaguing Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are still causing fallout a month after his stunning testimony before a key House subcommittee.

“The implications of his testimony are profound,” declared Anthony Hardie, 45, a Gulf War veteran who serves on the congressionally appointed Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans’ Illnesses (RAC).

Veterans and their advocates, as well as many in the scientific community, have long believed that the VA avoids responsibility for veterans’ care by downplaying or outright ignoring evidence linking wartime experiences—such as exposure to Agent Orange, chemical weapons, or toxic pollution—to veterans’ chronic medical issues back home.

Coughlin, a senior epidemiologist with the VA’s Office of Public Health (OPH), gave the VA’s critics what they say is a smoking gun: after conducting major surveys of 1991 Gulf War veterans and “New Generation” veterans from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom-Afghanistan, Coughlin told the committee he quit his post in December. He claims the VA is hiding important survey results about the health of veterans and that his colleagues watered-down analysis that might have shed light on whether recent vets got sick from open-air trash-burning pits on overseas bases.

He told the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on March 13 that millions of dollars are invested in veterans’ heath studies each year, yet “if the studies produce results that do not support [OPH’s] unwritten policy, they do not release them.” And “on the rare occasions when embarrassing study results are released, data are manipulated to make them unintelligible.”

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Marcus Aurelius

Camp Nama: British personnel reveal horrors of secret US base in Baghdad

Detainees captured by SAS and SBS squads subjected to human-rights abuses at detention centre, say British witnesses

EXTRACT

However, one peculiarity of the way in which UK forces operated when bringing prisoners to Camp Nama suggests that ministers and senior MoD officials may have had reason to know those detainees were at risk of mistreatment. British soldiers were almost always accompanied by a lone American soldier, who was then recorded as having captured the prisoner. Members of the SAS and SBS were repeatedly briefed on the importance of this measure.

It was an arrangement that enabled the British government to side-step a Geneva convention clause that would have obliged it to demand the return of any prisoner transferred to the US once it became apparent that they were not being treated in accordance with the convention. And it consigned the prisoners to what some lawyers have described as a legal black hole.

Read full article (long  with photos and links).

See Also:

Camp Nama Overhead Imagery Close-Ups

Cruel Britannia by Ian Cobain – A history of Britain’s involvement with torture is essential reading. By Clive Stafford Smith

Mongoose

I don’t read much but this has a very strong feeling of authenticity — certainly enough to warrant a Truth & Reconciation Commission before Papa Bush dies.    The photos and graphics in this account, two included below, are best I have seen.

Did George H.W. Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team?

by Richard Hooke (with Jim Fetzer)

Veterans Today, 30 March 2013

This is not the first time and surely will not be the last that George H.W. Bush, former Director of the CIA and the 41st President of the United States, has been implicated in the death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, our 35th president.  In an earlier study, for example, “Was George H.W. Bush involved in the assassination of JFK?”, John Hankey and I both address this question, where he provides a great deal of evidence supporting a role for GHWB in the Dealey Plaza turkey shoot. In this new study, Richard Hooke substantiates that claim and advances additional proof of his own.  I believe that they are right.

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Full Briefing:  2013-03-11 HIST 2012-06-10 Jeff Prager WTC Nuclear Dust Study

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Full Briefing:  2013-03-11 HIST 2012-06-10 Don Fox Vancouver Mini-Nukes and WTC

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

The truth about homosexuality and the Nazi Party

In his book, The Pink Swastika, Lively exposes a secret homosexual activists don’t want you to know about Nazi Germany: that although the Nazis did persecute homosexuals, the homosexuals the Nazis persecuted were almost exclusively the effeminate members of the gay community in Germany, and that much of the mistreatment was administered by masculine homosexuals who despised effeminacy in all its forms.

Ludwig Lenz worked at the Sex Research Institute in Berlin, which was destroyed by Hitler’s Brown Shirts in 1933 likely because its records, including 40,000 confessions from members of the Nazi Party, would have exposed the sexual perversions of Nazi leadership. Lenz said that “not ten percent of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands, were sexually normal.”

In fact, the Nazi Party began in a gay bar in Munich, and Ernst Roehm, Hitler’s right hand in the early days of Nazism, was well-known for his taste in young boys. William Shirer says in his definitive “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” not only that Roehm was “important in the rise of Hitler,” but also “like so many of the early Nazis, (he was) a homosexual.”

Read full article.

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Berto Jongman

“The Terror Courts”: An Inside Look at Rough Justice, Torture at Guantánamo Bay

Wall Street Journal journalist Jess Bravin reports on the controversial military commissions at Guantánamo. Describing it as “the most important legal story in decades,” Bravin uncovers how the Bush administration quickly drew up an alternative legal system to try men captured abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. Soon evidence obtained by torture was being used to prosecute prisoners, but some military officers refused to take part. We speak to Jess Bravin, author of The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, and to Lt. Col. Stuart Couch, a former Guantánamo prosecutor featured in the book. [includes rush transcript]

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