Saturday 30th of March 2024

the pentagon goes undercover...

 

sock puppet

So how will the Pentagon succeed where the State Department has apparently failed? No one really knows. "There's not a lot you can do to message against that kind of enemy," says Will McCants, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who researches Islamic extremist groups. "A big part of their recruiting pitch is that they've been successful in creating a state in Syria and Iraq, and until that disappears, they continue to have a big talking point that no amount of tweeting or Facebooking is going to refute."

Army General Joseph Votel, the Special Operations commanding general, admitted in his letter to Congress that the Pentagon doesn't currently have much built-up skill or personnel to wage the propaganda war.

And the Pentagon has actually tried to play this game before, just in a covert setting rather than its now-public role: in 2011, the Guardian newspaper discovered the DOD planned to create a covert network of "sock puppets," or false online identities, to argue against jihadists and their sympathizers. A spokesman at the US Central Command, which runs US military operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan, told the Guardian the program would include "classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable CENTCOM to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US."

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/pentagon-plans-for-war-with-isis-on-twitter

 

when the CIA looked into the crystal ball...

 

London:  Back in the futuristic year 2000, the CIA convened a group of experts from outside the Agency. Their mission: to gaze into the near future and predict 2015 would look like.

The result was a 70-page report covering everything from the rise of nanotechnology through oil shocks and demographic change to the fate of the global economy. You can read the full document here.

Fifteen years later, how right were they about the future we are living through now?

Many of their conclusions were uncontroversial: water would still be wet, sugar would still be sweet, and ethnic and religious tensions would continue to drive conflict in nations where governance is poor.

But other predictions have fallen flat – such as the notion we'd all be eating cloned beef burgers, or that North and South Korea would be unified.

Read on to find out just what they got right and wrong about the world of today.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/fifteen-years-ago-the-cia-tried-to-predict-the-world-in-2015-heres-what-they-got-wrong-20151222-gltquh.html

 

 

see also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/28201 and especially: 

 

prediction 1959: self-driving cars and fishy walls by 1984...

 

drug and weapons dealer to daesh, for the CIA...

The best-kept secrets must be revealed in the end.  The mafia cartel which governs Bulgaria has been caught supplying drugs and weapons to Al-Qaïda and Daesh, at the demand of the CIA, both in Libya and Syria.  The affair is all the more serious since Bulgaria is a member of NATO and the European Union.

Boiko Borissov
Head of one of the two Bulgarian mafia cartels, the SIC, Boïko Borissov has occupied the post of Prime Minister since 2014. While his country was a member of both NATO and the European Union, he supplied drugs and weapons to Al-Qaïda and Daesh in Libya and Syria.

It seems that everything began by accident.  For about thirty years, fenetylline was used as a performance-enhancing drug in the West German sports world.  According to trainer Peter Neururer, more than half of the athletes took it regularly [1].  Bulgarian drug dealers spotted an opportunity in this situation, and from the dissolution of the Soviet Union until Bulgaria’s entry into the European Union, they began to produce it and illegally export it to Germany under the name of Captagon.

Two mafia groups were locked in serious competition – Vasil Iliev Security (VIS), and Security Insurance Company (SIC), the company which employed the karateka Boïko Borissov.  This high-level athlete, professor at the Police Academy, created a company supplying protection for important personalities, and became the body-guard for pro-Soviet ex-President Todor Jivkov as well as for pro-US Simeon II Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha.  As soon as Simeon II became Prime Minister, Borissov was named as the central Director of the Ministry of the Interior, then was elected mayor of Sofia.

In 2006, the United States ambassador in Bulgaria (and future ambassador to Russia), John Beyrle, sketched his character in a confidential cable which was revealed by Wikileaks.  He presented Borissov as being connected to two major mafia bosses, Mladen Mihalev (alias «Madzho ») and Roumen Nikolov (alias « The Pacha ») [2], the founders of SIC.

In 2007, basing its article on a report drawn up by a large Swiss company, the U.S. Congressional Quarterly claimed that he had smothered a number of enquiries at the Ministry of the Interior, and was himself implicated in 28 mafia murders.  He apparently became a partner of John E. McLaughlin, Deputy Director of the CIA.  He is said to have set up a secret prison for the Agency in Bulgaria, and helped to provide a military base in the context of the project for an attack on Iran, the Quarterly continued [3].

In 2008, the German specialist in organised crime, Jürgen Roth, qualified Boïko Borissov as a « Bulgarian Al Capone » [4].

Having himself become Prime Minister, and while his country was already a member of NATO and the EU, he was solicited by the Agency to help in the secret war against Mouamar el-Kadhafi.  Boïko Borissov supplied Captagon, manufactured by the SIC, to the al-Qaïda jihadists in Libya.  The CIA rendered this synthetic drug more attractive and more powerful by mixing it with a natural drug, hashish, which made it easier to manipulate the fighters and make them more terrifying, in line with the work of Bernard Lewis [5].  Following that, Borissov extended this market to Syria.

But most importantly, the CIA, using the profile of an ex-Warsaw Pact member which had recently joined NATO, bought from him 500 million dollars’ worth of Soviet-type weaponry and transported it to Syria — mainly 18,800 portable anti-tank grenade launchers and 700 Konkurs anti-tank missile systems.

When Hezbollah sent a team to Bulgaria to gather information about this traffic, a bus-load of Israeli holiday-makers were the object of a terrorist attack in Burgas, leaving 32 wounded.  Immediately, Benjamin Netanyahu and Boïko Borissov accused the Lebanese resistance, while the Atlantist Press spread a number of allegations about the supposed Hezbollah kamikaze.  Finally, the forensic scientist, Dr. Galina Mileva, noticed that the corpse did not correspond to the witness descriptions – while a counter-intelligence chief, Colonel Lubomir Dimitrov, noted that he was not a kamikaze, but a simple carrier, and that the bomb had been triggered from a distance, probably without his knowledge.  The press accused two Arabs of Canadian and Australian nationality, but the Sofia News Agency quoted a US accomplice known by the pseudonym of David Jefferson.  The outcome was that when the European Union sought to use the affair in order to classify Hezbollah as a             « terrorist organisation », the Minister for Foreign Affairs – during the short period when Borissov was excluded from executive power – Kristian Vigenine, made it clear that in reality, nothing was found that could tie the attack to the Lebanese resistance [6].

From the end of 2014, the CIA ceased its orders and was replaced by Saudi Arabia, who were thus able to buy weapons which were no longer ex-Soviet left-overs, but modern NATO material, such as the wire-guided anti-tank BGM-71 TOW missiles.  Soon, Riyadh was supported by the United Arab Emirates [7].  The two Gulf states themselves handled the deliveries to Al-Qaïda and Daesh, via Saudi Arabian Cargo and Etihad Cargo, either at Tabuk, on the Saudi-Jordanian border, or the Emirati-Franco-US base at Al-Dhafra.

In June 2014, the CIA turned up the pressure.  This time, they forbade Bulgaria to allow access to the Russian gas pipeline South Stream, which could have supplied Western Europe [8].  This decision, which deprived Bulgaria of some very important income, not only helped to slow down the growth of the European Union, as described in the Wolfowitz plan [9], but also to apply the European sanctions against Russia which had been implemented under the pretext of the Ukranian crisis, to develop the exploitation of shale gas in Eastern Europe [10], and finally, to maintain the interest of overthrowing the Syrian Arab Republic, a possible major gas exporter [11].

The latest news is that Bulgaria – a member-state of NATO and the European Union – continues to illegally supply drugs and weapons to Al-Qaïda and Daesh, despite the recent Resolution 2253, which was unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council.

http://off-guardian.org/2016/01/18/how-bulgaria-supplied-drugs-and-weapons-to-al-qaida-and-daesh/

fighting with ones and zeros..

 

LONDON — The United States has opened a new line of combat against the Islamic State, directing the military’s six-year-old Cyber Command for the first time to mount computer-network attacks that are now being used alongside more traditional weapons.

The effort reflects President Obama’s desire to bring many of the secret American cyberweapons that have been aimed elsewhere, notably at Iran, into the fight against the Islamic State — which has proved effective in using modern communications and encryption to recruit and carry out operations.

The National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic surveillance, has for years listened intensely to the militants of the Islamic State, and those reports are often part of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. But the N.S.A.’s military counterpart, Cyber Command, was focused largely on Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — where cyberattacks on the United States most frequently originate — and had run virtually no operations against what has become the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/us/politics/us-directs-cyberweapons-at-isis-for-first-time.html?_r=0