Designed to mask any connection with the US military, The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group’s Iraqi staff or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.
John Rendon is a man who fills a need that few people even know exists. The Pentagon secretly awarded him a $16 million contract to target Iraq and other adversaries with propaganda. He is a leader in the strategic field known as “perception management,” manipulating information—and, by extension, the news media.
WASHINGTON—Legislation moving rapidly through the Senate would create a secretive national research center to respond to bioterror threats and natural disease outbreaks.
But some scientists cautioned Friday that the new agency could draw money away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health and disrupt their work.
The measure, said to be a priority of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., would shift the main responsibility for developing bioterrorism countermeasures out of the Department of Homeland Security and into the Biological Advanced Research and Development Agency in the Department of Health and Human Services.
The agency would be given a first-year budget of $1 billion and some unusually strong powers:
* Authority to shield drug manufacturers from liability lawsuits if a drug used to counteract a bioterrorism event or disease outbreak caused death or injury.
* Exemption from the federal open records law, the Freedom of Information Act.
Dozens of people converged this summer in the high desert town of El Paso, Texas, en route to spending six months in Iraqi prisons. They were going not as prisoners, but as their interrogators, walking a legalistic tightrope stretched across the Geneva Conventions. Just for signing up, they got a $2,000 check from a company that is rapidly becoming one of the key employers in the world of intelligence: Lockheed Martin, the world’s biggest military company, based in Bethesda, Maryland.
The Army now admits that it secretly dumped 64 million pounds of nerve and mustard agents into the sea, along with 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, land mines and rockets and more than 500 tons of radioactive waste—either tossed overboard or packed into the holds of scuttled vessels.
In order to enhance soldiers? memory, a brain implant chip which simulates the hippocampus is being researched by a USC bioengineering team.
Scientists believe the implant will vastly improve the memory of troops so that they can recall every detail of their training and become more effective fighters.
Researchers at the University of Southern California’s bio-engineering department have created the chip, which acts in exactly the same way as the hippocampus – the part of the brain that deals with memory.
In experiments, the team removed that section of the brain of dead rats and inserted the chip in its place. The implant sent exactly the same electronic signals as the real thing.
The next stage of the project is to test the implant on live animals. If this work proves to be as successful, experiments could one day be carried out on soldiers.
Controversial plans to research nuclear ?bunker busters? have been abandoned by the by the US in the country’s 2006?s budget.
In a race that began and ended in a casino parking lot and traversed 132 miles of desert southwest of Las Vegas on Oct. 8, the Stanford Racing Team’s autonomous robotic car, Stanley, won big. The artificially intelligent car traversed the off-road course in a little less than seven hours, yielding both a $2 million payout and a lofty place in the history of robotics and technology.
?The impossible has been achieved,? said team leader Sebastian Thrun, an associate professor of computer science and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Simply by finishing the course, Stanley and four other cars showed that machines can be made to drive safely and speedily over rugged terrain without any human help.
Despite the relatively small number of American armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan (140,000), the war effort is rapidly shaping up to be the third-most expensive war in United States history.
This conflict has already cost each American at least $850 in military and reconstruction costs since October 2001.
If the war lasts another five years, it will cost nearly $1.4 trillion, calculates Linda Bilmes, who teaches budgeting at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. That’s nearly $4,745 per capita. Her estimate is thorough. She includes not only the military cost but also such things as veterans’ benefits and additional interest on the federal debt.
But even in stripped-down terms, looking only at military costs and using current dollars, the war’s cost for the US already exceeds that of World War I.
“In the near future, a soldier who needs a quick look over the next hill will be able to aim his rifle skyward, fire a grenade-sized reconnaissance device and instantly receive imagery on his pocket computer,” writes Defense News’ Barbara Opall-Rome.
“No special training or adaptation equipment is necessary” to fire the Firefly, from Israel’s Rafael Armament Development Authority, or Israel Military Industry’s Reconnaissance Rifle Grenade.
Grunts just fire the disposable “ballistic cameras” from “standard-issue M203 grenade launchers attached to M16 or other assault rifles,” and then wait for the pictures to come back, 8 seconds and 600 meters later.
The terrorist attacks have nothing to do with religious faith and everything to do with genuine injustices. Until the US addresses the root causes and its own double standards, the bombings will increase.
As a Pakistani, it has been a bad week to be in London. Not only could one’s relations or friends have been blown up, but those who committed those hideous crimes justified them in the name of Islam. Even worse for me was the news that three of the four terrorists had been to Pakistan. But neither Islam nor Pakistan has anything to do with these atrocities. Nowhere does the Koran justify attacks on innocent people. Pakistan is being blamed for fostering terrorists, yet Pakistan has been a victim for the past 15 years.
Some history is in order…
As bombings in London attract international attention, one study claims that terrorist patterns of attack might be the natural endpoint for all modern armed conflicts.
Ongoing wars in Iraq and Colombia, which had quite different causes and began as very different kinds of conflict, are developing a characteristic signature of long-term terrorist activity, say economist Mike Spagat of Royal Holloway, University of London, and his co-workers1.
They have found that the death statistics in both of these conflicts are converging on a particular mathematical pattern. This pattern is shared by fatality counts from terrorist attacks in countries that are not major industrialized nations.
This study in Nature is in agreement with a growing number of military scholars who say that we are helplessly in the midst of Fourth Generation Warfare, aka endless asymetrical conflict.
Ironically and despite the recent attacks, “southern Iraq is more stable and secure than the north,” Williams says. Thirty years of neglect and repression of southern Shia provinces by the Sunni Baath government in Baghdad have made people here tough, self-reliant, and wary of outsiders. As a result, Williams says, “Maysan does not have a Sunni problem.” The insurgency here is a different animal than the insurgency in Baghdad and the Sunni triangle, which has well-financed former-regime types, Zarqawist madmen, and the occasional jihadist heaven-bent on blowing himself up at a police station. Based on local sentiment in Al Amarah, Maysan’s insurgency seems less like the apocalyptic death throes of a tyrannical former regime than a violent grassroots protest against foreign occupation.
The CIA is conducting a secretive war game, dubbed “Silent Horizon,” this week to practice defending against an electronic assault on the same scale as the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks.
The three-day exercise, ending Thursday, was meant to test the ability of government and industry to respond to escalating Internet disruptions over many months.
A computer interface inspired by the futuristic system portrayed in the movie Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, could soon help real military personnel deal with information overload.
The film sees characters call up and manipulate video footage and other data in mid-air after donning a special pair of gloves. Now defence company Raytheon, based in Massachusetts, US, is working on a real version and has even employed John Underkoffler, the researcher who proposed the interface to the makers of the film.