Army Info War Division Wants Social Media Surveillance to Protect “NATO Brand”
An Army Cyber Command official sought military contractors that could help “attack, defend, influence, and operate” on global social media.

The U.S. Army Cyber Command told defense contractors it planned to surveil global social media use to defend the “NATO brand,” according to a 2022 webinar recording reviewed by The Intercept.

The disclosure, made a month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, follows years of international debate over online free expression and the influence of governmental security agencies over the web. The Army’s Cyber Command is tasked with both defending the country’s military networks as well as offensive operations, including propaganda campaigns.

The remarks came during a closed-door conference call hosted by the Cyber Fusion Innovation Center, a Pentagon-sponsored nonprofit that helps with military tech procurement, and provided an informal question-and-answer session for private-sector contractors interested in selling data to Army Cyber Command, commonly referred to as ARCYBER. (...)

 R_P wrote:


Where's the darn like-button on this forum?

Obituaries for Nuremberg Prosecutor Erase His Beliefs About the U.S.
Benjamin Ferencz repeatedly said George W. Bush and his administration should be tried for the Iraq War.

The media’s erasure of Ferencz’s views is especially distressing given his lifelong emphasis on the importance of remembering the past. In a speech just as the Iraq War commenced, Ferencz reminded the audience that the United Nations charter is “international law binding on all nations. We owe it to the memory of the dead to honor these commitments to peace.”

One thing worth remembering in this context are the famous opening remarks at Nuremberg by Robert Jackson, the chief justice:

If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them. And we are not prepared to lay down the rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.

Sadly, by the end of Ferencz’s life, he understood why Jackson’s confidence was misplaced and might not be surprised by the glaring omissions in his obituaries. “No country that prefers to use its power rather than the rule of law will vote for the rule of law, it’s logical,” he said in a recent documentary. “There are some people who do not trust the rule of law, and they prefer to use military power to achieve their goals as they decide, when they decide. That’s led by the United States. … War will make mass murderers out of otherwise decent people. … It’s inevitable, whether they are Americans, or they’re Germans, or anybody else.”

 R_P wrote:

Oof - nailed it.

Hegemonic containment of allies

Mr. Yoon’s secretary for foreign affairs, Yi Mun-hui, told his boss, National Security Adviser Kim Sung-han, that the government “was mired in concerns that the U.S. would not be the end user if South Korea were to comply with a U.S. request for ammunition,” according to a batch of secret Pentagon documents leaked through social media.

The secret report was based on signals intelligence, which meant that the United States has been spying on one of its major allies in Asia.

Both Mr. Yi and Mr. Kim stepped down last month for unclear reasons. Neither man could be reached for comment.

(...)

Instead, according to the document, Mr. Kim “suggested the possibility” of selling 330,000 rounds of 155-mm artillery shells to Poland, since “getting the ammunition to Ukraine quickly was the ultimate goal of the United States.”

Mr. Yi agreed that it might be possible for Poland to agree to being called the end user and send the ammunition on to Ukraine, but that South Korea would need to “verify what Poland would do.” It is unclear exactly what he meant by this, since South Korea’s export control rules stipulate that its ​weapons or weapon parts sold to a foreign country should not be resold or transferred to a third country without Seoul’s approval.

The senior South Korean official on Sunday declined to reveal details of what he called “internal discussions” within Mr. Yoon’s government. But he added that “nothing has been finalized” and that there was still “no change” in Seoul’s policy on Ukraine. South Korea has been shipping humanitarian aid to Ukraine but has insisted that it would not directly provide any lethal weapons.

“South Korea’s position has been that it will cooperate with the United States while not clashing with Russia,” said Yang Uk, a weapons expert at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul. “The documents leaked put South Korea in a more difficult position.”

And the mere fact of the spying taking place, leaving aside what it might uncover, is a damaging revelation, he said.

“It’s reasonable to suspect that the United States spies on top defense and security officials in Seoul, but it’s bad news for the general public ahead of the South Korea-U.S. summit,” he added. “People will ask, ‘We have been allies for seven decades, and you still spy on us?’”

"The focus now is on this being a U.S. leak, as many of the documents were only in U.S. hands," Michael Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official, told Reuters in an interview.

China is ghosting the United States

The response of the American public to the cognitive dissonance between our wrong assumptions about the world and the real world they keep colliding with has been to turn inward and embrace an ethos of individualism. This can range from New Age spiritual disengagement to a chauvinistic America First attitude. Whatever form it takes for each of us, it allows us to persuade ourselves that the distant rumble of bombs, albeit mostly American ones, is not our problem.

The U.S. corporate media has validated and increased our ignorance by drastically reducing foreign news coverage and turning TV news into a profit-driven echo chamber peopled by pundits in studios who seem to know even less about the world than the rest of us.

 Welly wrote:

It's astonishing to me that we 'the greatest country' can let this happen. There are many studies that clearly define the issues - Gun suicides in the southwest, diabetes in the southeast, social isolation and access to care everywhere. The number of people who die before age 40 is so high that ~1 person in every kindergarten class is likely to die before they can even plan for retirement.  Meanwhile, other civilized nations (and many less civilized as well) march on with steady improvements, while the US screams "rugged individualism" before swerving into the ditch. I just don't get it.

 Welly wrote: 
That was what the life expectancy was for someone born in 1952 in the US at the time of birth according to the posted chart.  The next highest age was for Europe which was 64.0 years.  According to this chart, the life expectancy for someone born in Canada in 1952 was 68.8 years

The Tragic U.S. Choice to Prioritize War Over Peacemaking
Medea Benjamin and Nicholas Davies explain how American ignorance and
jingoism, even at supposedly elite levels, allow neocons to continue to
foment war, despite their record of failure.

Why are Americans dying so young?
US life expectancy is in freefall as the young and the poor bear the brunt of struggles for shared prosperity

Centrist DC think tank: US should threaten war, regime change in Iran
The Center for a New American Security suggests this can all be done through ‘private messages’ to Tehran’s leaders. Like texts?

The Iran policy debate in Washington suffers from a poverty of ideas. Despite the trail of failures left behind by policies based on coercion and threats over the last two decades, the debate over Iran’s nuclear program usually comes back to some combination of backfiring sanctions and reckless proposals for war and regime change.

A new report by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is just the most recent example of this. The report describes the findings of exercises that the think tank conducted, and it concludes by recommending that the U.S. broaden its threats of military action to include targeting the Iranian political and military leadership as well as their nuclear facilities. Nothing could be worse for the cause of nonproliferation or for U.S. interests than to seek regime change again.

It seems incredible that anyone in Washington still floats the options of war and regime change 20 years after the invasion of Iraq showed how disastrous these policies are, but there has been no real learning from the crime of the Iraq war. One of the main reasons why Washington hasn’t learned from the Iraq war is that there was never any accountability for any of its architects and cheerleaders, and the incentives in our debates still tend to favor aggressive and militarized policies. Instead of repudiating wars for regime change, many people in Washington have no problem using the same fatally flawed policies against other countries.

Investigators skeptical of yacht’s role in Nord Stream bombing

(...)

‘Don’t talk about Nord Stream’
For all the intrigue around who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find out. At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: “Don’t talk about Nord Stream.” Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer, the diplomat said, echoing sentiments of several peers in other countries who said they would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were involved.

 kurtster wrote:

Wow - that's ten years less than Canada.

 R_P wrote:

Further to this, I'm in the midst of reading The Nutmeg's Curse by Ahmitav Ghosh. You might enjoy it. Here's a link to a recent interview with him: https://emergencemagazine.org/...

Guess who continued to buy Israeli spyware through a shell company right after the public ban?
That's right! The US government!
Hey, do you actually understand where this disenchantment with politics comes from? Me neither!

More than 40 years later, a Texan reveals a secret that may have swayed an election
Ben Barnes went to the Middle East with John Connally to delay the release of American hostages in Iran – and potentially help Ronald Reagan win the presidency.

On April 25, 1980, President Jimmy Carter gave a televised address to update the nation on the 52 American hostages at the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran. The day before Carter’s speech, U.S. army special forces attempted to rescue them. But the mission failed, and eight U.S. servicemen died in a helicopter crash. President Carter took responsibility and vowed not to give up on the captive Americans.

“Throughout this extraordinarily difficult period, we have pursued and will continue to pursue every possible avenue for the release of the hostages,” Carter said.

The Carter administration faced more opposition than the president knew, though.

The hostage crisis was a key issue in the 1980 presidential election, in which Carter faced a re-election challenge from Republican Ronald Reagan. If the hostages were released before the election, Carter would get a big boost in the polls. (...)

A Short History of Everyone Who Confirmed Reagan’s October Surprise Before the New York Times
A lot of people beyond Ben Barnes have said that Reagan’s 1980 election campaign conspired to keep American hostages in Iran.

(...) All this is powerful evidence that the Reagan campaign did — as has been alleged for decades — strike a deal with the Iranian government to prevent the hostages from being released. While that has never been proven, what’s known beyond a shadow of a doubt is that the Reagan campaign was deeply worried that Carter might get the hostages out before November and thereby give a big boost to his prospects.

You might understandably ask: If this actually happened, how could it have been kept secret? Why hasn’t anyone with knowledge of it spoken up before? The answer is that it hasn’t been kept secret, and many, many people have said it occurred. But most of the people doing so have been foreigners. Barnes is merely the most important American to finally come out and support the story.

The 1980 October Surprise theory has always been plausible on its face. Casey had worked on Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign (and was later named head of the Securities and Exchange Commission by Nixon). It’s since been proven that the Nixon’s presidential campaign secretly collaborated with the government of South Vietnam to prevent President Lyndon Johnson from striking a peace deal ending the Vietnam War. The Nixon campaign was concerned that peace would help his opponent in the race, Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Nixon’s cynicism can be measured by the fact that thanks to his gambit, 20,000 additional American soldiers, plus unknown hundreds of thousands of other people, died as the war continued for many years.

The concept of the October Surprise seems almost benign in comparison. A mere 52 American hostages had been seized by Iranian revolutionaries at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and all the scheme required was keeping them there for another few months. (...)