And Snowden's hits just keep on comin'! The Washington Post has a nifty analysis interactive info-graphic here or if you want to do the digging yourself you can find the full downloadable previously Top Secret text on scribd here. It's pretty disturbing to me that since all the activities this massive amount of previously undisclosed cash goes to is overseen in its legality by a court with no oversight that operates under secret definition of law, not only can we never really know what they're doing (like unconstitutionally collecting 3-hop data sets regardless of suspicion or citizenship,) but we can't hold them accountable even after a flurry of leaks like this since no one other than the congressional intelligence committees and the president are allowed to understand the legal framework that they're operating under in order to challenge the validity of the legal assertions through which they rationalize seemingly blatantly unconstitutional activities. To add insult to injury, those people (Obama & the committees,) could very well be spied on and blackmailed into succumbing to these agencies' wills. We know from James Bamford or Mark Tice and Edward Snowden that they have the capability to do this. What's even more infuriating in this current Syrian situation is that the administration is saying the eavesdropping programs are the means through which they've determined that Syrian Generals were discussing using chemical weapons instead of getting verification from inspectors. It makes me chuckle though... Obama ran on a platform of transparency, and because of Snowden and others, even though he's trying as hard as possible to go back on campaign promises, his administration is being forced into the light. It makes me want to plater this image everywhere: (Click to enlarge
Well, if you consider that Al Qaeda is a CIA organization formed in Afghanistan by Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrokotos, and that Al Qaeda is behind the trouble in many countries like Libya and Syria, and that the CIA Al Qaeda thugs probably orchestrated the chemical attacks in Syria, then it isn't too hard to understand why the black ops CIA Al Qaeda thugs need all that money, and what they are using it for. Plus, the opium production went from almost nothing under the Taliban, to about 100 billion a year after the CIA ousted the Taliban. Makes you wonder why they do all that, huh. Well, President Eisenhower warned us about the American Military Industrial Complex, they start wars to make money and gain power and influence. For some reason unbeknownst to me, people like power and influence to get their jollies. Money I can understand, but for greedy people, they can never have enough. And some people just looooooove to kill people. It is worth noting that televangelists take in billions every year, and don't have to account for it, and you know that they are working behind the scenes to cause divisions and strife over in the middle east. Muslims know they are fakes with no connection to God, nor do they have any real spiritual power that they claim to have, so if you can't convert muslims, rule over them, and use money to do it. Yahushua told his followers "in the last days, wicked men will kill you and think they are doing God a favor", and you see what he was talking about over there in the middle east nowadays.
@ badlandsleprechaun: No offense intended here, but... While I respect your right to your own religious beliefs and your right to an opinion on others, I would really hope you'd respect my desire for some restraint on the subject in kind, since this topic really doesn't have anything to do with religion without a painfully long reach. I'm new here as of yesterday, but I've already seen how quickly some threads devolve into zealously under-toned (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)-fests, and this is a topic I hope to save from that fate. I could go on for days about organized religion in general, and I was tempted for a moment when reading what you said about televangelists, but I think there are more pertinent angles to explore here...
A good on-topic angle to focus on is the CIA/Al Qaeda connection, and how that relates to the current macro geo-strategical viewpoint held by the United States. (Bear with me now, this is going to take a little while...) When Al Qaeda was given its name it was a list of Middle Eastern and West Asian assets (many of them Mujahadeen) that western intelligence agencies had trained in Pakistan and China during the USSR's campaign in Afghanistan from '79-89, and back then, as now, the US' global strategy was to harass and isolate any possible threat to US hegemony. At the time the focus was to degrade the Soviets' ability to expand their overall sphere of influence in the region and cause them to focus on their land war so that the US could continue to develop stronger relationships with resource rich countries in the like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Iraq which would raise it's influence within OPEC. The support of the “Al Qaeda” assets not only worked to harass the USSR, but it also helped to keep them from devoting their focus toward diplomatic efforts in OPEC nations hostile to the US like Libya and Iran, which was important since the US had been dealt a pretty severe blow during the '73 oil crisis for supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur war. By the time the Soviets exited the Afghan conflict in 1989, the US influence peddling had done its job in OPEC and Glasnost had already begun, spelling the end of the USSR and giving rise to the US as the world's only superpower... The plan of combining isolation and influence peddling with arming, training, and funding proxy asymmetric battle forces and semi-allied nations had worked in combination with internal struggles to collapse the US' only impediment to its march toward imperialism. All of these methods relied heavily on Intelligence budgets rather than exerting military might. The era of giant military machines as the main course of exerting control had ended, for the most part. Similar scenarios to the ones in the Mid-East/Central Asia had played out in Central and South America with less fervor and much more effective results in the areas of installing puppet regimes and securing more encompassing access to natural resources. Asia's economic and military power centers had been decimated and locked down during and after of WWII and were clamped down on again in the Korea and Viet Nam eras to the point where East Asian countries didn't really see the point in developing advanced naval capabilities. As of the early 90's, the age of American empire had begun, and it had happened mostly through the tentacles of western intelligence agencies. Now, as any good empire realizes, once you have a network of intelligence assets and proxy forces established there's no good reason to disband them after they've accomplished a mission, since they can be used to lay the groundwork for you to move in solidifying forces in those regions, and they can be called upon to move on any new possible threats to the empire's encroachment so that the Empire can have “plausible deniability” and remain mostly untarnished in the eyes of the rest of the world while its goals are achieved. So, even though information about total US global intelligence activity is hard to come across on a broad scale, it's likely continued to expand in scope and nature, as that's what its mission is – to know everything about as many people as possible in every area it can infiltrate. There were blips on the radar here and there throughout the post-Soviet era when a certain operation is uncovered by the media or foreign governments that proved the network was still out there, expanding worldwide... From Columbia to Venezuela, to collusion with the ISI and organized crime in drug trafficking in Pakistan, to activities in concert with Mossad in the Middle East. These are in addition to the obvious “peace-keeping” efforts in Iraq, Somalia, and Bosnia. No one without high security clearance in the 90's can say for sure, but if the unclassified pentagon budget numbers can be used as a barometer, one can easily conclude that even in times of relative peace, intelligence budgets only grew. The two go hand in hand, although I expect that intelligence budgets have a more steady yet incremental increase, where as military budgets will grow at a much higher rate in certain years and much slower in others, depending on whether or not the US deems it necessary to blow large holes in one country or another at any given time. It was possible during this period for the US to invest heavily in just about everything since it maintained the worlds largest economy by exponential factors even with the 1.3% slump in 90-91... Interestingly enough, this growth in the 90's combined with America's insatiable hunger for cheap Chinese goods and a push within the National Communist Party Congress late in the decade to privatize under-performing state owned enterprises, China became a serious economic player in the global marketplace. It had been the world's fastest growing economy for the previous two decades. Gradually, from around '95-2000, the US realized it had a whole new breed of contender to deal with... One that it was inextricably bound to economically, yet in competition with for dwindling global resources, and one that because of proximity, was also helping to prop up its old rival Russia. Russia was never knocked out because of its internal stores of oil and natural gas which most of the EU couldn't survive without and continued to import through the lean years after the dissolution of the USSR. The exceedingly resource hungry and quickly growing Chinese economy was creating a symbiotic growth spurt for them both... China had the world's largest army by count of personnel and the Russian military, even though a shadow of its former self, was still the second most powerful in the world and still capable of threatening Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). An ideological shift began gaining momentum in the Military Industrial Complex, Zionist, and Oil Interest circles of power within the US, and a think tank was founded by US foreign policy hawk Robert Kagan and second-generation standard-bearer for Neoconsevatism, William Kristol. It was called The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and was the defining breeding ground for foreign policy of the entire George W Bush presidency. Its membership included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Scooter Libby, Jeb Bush, Steve Forbes, Dan Quayle, Zalmay Khalilzad, Paul Wofowitz, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, and John McCain and other prominent neo-cons that helped shape how the policy decisions were absorbed by the public and private sectors in the US and abroad as they were instituted. The organization published a 90 page strategy report around a year before 9/11 entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century (the embedded link is for the full report, which is worth a read, but a good summary can be found here.) For the purposes of this post, there are a few key points you need to know about the paper. Before Bush was even “elected,” the think tank had laid down a plan to refocus the US military, particularly its navy, around Southeast Europe (bordering Russia,) Asia and the Pacific (around China), and exert dominant force in the Middle East. It also stated these as as core missions and essential actions, (I'm quoting here) “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars,” “perform the 'constabulary' duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions,” & “CONTROL THE NEW “INTERNATIONAL COMMONS” OF SPACE AND “CYBERSPACE,” (emphasis theirs.) What's perhaps most shocking about this document is a sentence in section V that states “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor." A year later 9/11 happened... I'm not going to go into depth here about that specific incident, but only point out two things - one, most the hijackers were Saudi nationals where Bush and co. had influence, military and intelligence presence for decades, and two, that once it happened, all these Neoconservative strategic objectives were able to be enacted with a focus on having a massive, advanced military presence surrounding and intersecting the areas around Russia and China. The strategy of divide, isolate from resources, and fund, arm and train proxy forces and states comes back into play once again, and once again relied heavily on intelligence agencies (forgot to note - HW Bush was the director of the CIA in the lead up to the first Afghani training effort and was VP for the rest of it like Cheney was when his son decided to go "play with his toys in the sand") To put into a clarified perspective, (you might want to pull out a map for this) : Back in the first years of this century, the US had various allies in the middle east - Israel, of course, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Jordan, but It had enemies in both Iraq and Iran, which composed the land mass that connected West/Central Asia to the Arabian Peninsula, and Afghanistan stood between central China and Iran. China, as the fastest growing economy in the world was (and still is) a threat to US/NATO hegemony, and has a shared border, economic interests and political affiliations with Russia which could eventually lead them into an alliance in resistance to the west. China was developing and following through on plans to import vast quantities of natural resources across a wide spectrum to support its ballooning industrial sector and population, which it could then export, along with its own products to Russia and the rest of Asia. It was seeking these resources (particularly gold, other minerals, and fuel sources,) starting in Afghanistan and moving clear across the mid-east, over the gulf of Aden into Africa.... And then 9/11 happened. The US moved into Afghanistan then Iraq, both relatively soft targets militarily but with governments that would not be allowed to continue to exist as well as hostile populations (peppered with intelligence assets cultivated in the two decades prior,) making it "necessary" for US forces, diplomats and intelligence agencies to remain, in force, indefinitely. This effectively canceled any opportunity for a direct pipeline of any fluid or gas resources from western China to the middle east or simple over-ground transit of any resource at all from Africa after crossing the gulf of Aden into Yemen. It then boosted its aid to Pakistan over the 10 billion dollar mark, effectively funding most of its government's day-to-day functions as well as it's military, (which is the actual government of the country and is totally in bed with US intelligence agencies.) Now, the US had a full-scale dependent government in the form of a tentatively stable nuclear state that it could dictate policy to on China's border and that blocked it's access to Iran's border south of Afghanistan. That basically left Turkmeniststan as the only overland route between the mid east and China - we'll get to that in a bit. Once Afghanistan and Iraq settled down a bit, Al Qaeda moved it's main operational headquarters to Yemen which "just happened" to be the last unaligned nation through which African exports could be easily moved over land eastward. The US moved in military advisors and started pumping in More money than the country had EVER SEEN! In 2006. The US gave them $29.14 million in combined military and domestic aid, and the world bank promised 4.7 billion in development funds to be dispersed over the next 5 years. The same year, Turkmenistan's leader who had tepid relations with the west (even though his largest foe had been the Taliban,) died mysteriously. He had kept a very isolationist attitude, but had recently began opening up relations with China relating to natural gas exports. His replacement (who was re-elected in 2012 by 97% of the population,) has a much more open attitude toward the west. [end of history lesson.] Now we hear the drumbeats of US intervention in Syria, which is the last border state to the Mediterranean unaligned with the US/NATO, Should US interests gain influence over a post-Assad Syria, it would completely sever Africa from China and Russia via the mid-east. The only ways for African exports to move to Russia or China would be over land through NATO members or it's allies, or by waters dominated by the US/NATO navy. All of these moves to isolate China and Russia from each other while never directly challenging either were predicated on the actions of groups “extremist militants” who got (at least) their initial military training, funding, and arms from the US, its proxies, allies, or governments that it props up through foreign aid. It would be completely ignorant to assume that the asset list that was named Al Qaeda was not at least partially operational throughout all of the offshoot groups that sprang out of the training regimen provided to the Mujahadeen back in the 80's by the CIA, and were very likely at the core of many of the Arab Spring protests that fomented so much resistance and brought down leader after leader that was not tied to US/NATO interests. Syria, being a close ally with Russia and armed by them would need to cross a Red Line before it could be attacked by the US, and once it is. The severing of China from any easy route to resources necessary to continue its explosive economic growth, effective killing the economic engine for both Russia and themselves. All of this history, right up to the present day wouldn't have been remotely possible without the $52.6 billion in black budget intelligence expenditures, and billions upon billions more before it.
Pure waste. Just more of the trillions of taxpayer dollars the government spend at no benefit to the people.
This article is a NY Times written analisys of cyberwarfare implications of the intelligence black budget. It discusses the different types of activities that the US perpetrates but whines at China to stop. That kind of makes me wonder how confident they are of their capabilities in comparison to China. I'm more used to the pentagon fear mongering against their enemies by exaggerating their capabilities, so it's possible that China's got more developed faculties in cyberwarfare. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/01/w...es&emc=edit_th_20130901&_r=0&pagewanted=print they didn't disclose the documents, but I did in the original post. check it out if you want to. all emphasis in quotes by me, not the original article
