Research Trends & Technology Since 2013
WikiLeaks vs Cryptome
From: nobody
Subject: Wikileaks honeypot/SAIC whistlebreaker update
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2015 16:56:29 +0100 (CET)
Wikileaks is not offering a search of Cryptome - the files are hosted on their server as a honeypot for snatching user data for who knows what.
There are subtle sneaky differences that give it away.
Look at the html source code for https://cryptome.wikileaks.org/frontpage and https://cryptome.org. Why the code changes? What else is different?
Look at the SSL certs, the WL mirror uses its own and its own SSL crypto. May not even be valid certs.
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2430138/fake-banking-websites-issued-with-ssl-certificates-by-symantex-comodo-and-godaddy
and
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2999146/encryption/google-threatens-action-against-symantec-issued-certificates-following-botched-investigation.html
Look at the traceroutes.
traceroute to cryptome.wikileaks.org (195.35.109.44), 20 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 208.64.252.229.uscolo.com (208.64.252.229) 0.409 ms 0.454 ms 0.545 ms
2 199.197.11.45.uscolo.com (199.197.11.45) 0.550 ms 0.594 ms 0.599 ms
3 199.197.10.25.uscolo.com (199.197.10.25) 1.133 ms 0.889 ms 1.161 ms
4 31.217.128.5 (31.217.128.5) 0.412 ms 0.453 ms 0.456 ms
5 s1.eq1.ams.ixreach.com (91.196.186.78) 66.691 ms 66.711 ms 66.722 ms
6 91.196.187.50 (91.196.187.50) 158.441 ms 158.423 ms 175.391 ms
7 r2.thn.lon.ixreach.com (91.196.184.182) 164.760 ms 164.769 ms 164.755 ms
8 r1.tc2.ams.ixreach.com (91.196.184.138) 169.547 ms 170.111 ms 169.575 ms
9 blix.telecity5.nl-ix.net (193.239.116.75) 195.183 ms 195.550 ms 195.450 ms
10 te-9-1.dig-osl.blix.com (31.169.49.33) 195.238 ms 195.390 ms 195.433 ms
11 po-8.hmg-osl.blix.com (31.169.49.90) 195.161 ms 195.315 ms 195.414 ms
12 po-2.sa-hmg-osl.blix.com (178.255.145.162) 196.934 ms 196.696 ms 195.632 ms
traceroute to cryptome.org (209.17.116.160), 20 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 208.64.252.229.uscolo.com (208.64.252.229) 0.382 ms 0.435 ms 0.480 ms
2 199.197.10.6.uscolo.com (199.197.10.6) 0.743 ms 0.802 ms 0.811 ms
3 199.197.10.25.uscolo.com (199.197.10.25) 0.984 ms 1.026 ms 0.979 ms
4 c-5-144-66-207.lax.ca.wolfe.net (207.66.144.5) 0.904 ms 1.056 ms 1.109 ms
5 ACCRETIVE-T.edge2.Atlanta4.Level3.net (4.53.238.38) 52.495 ms 52.515 ms 52.716 ms
6 xe-9-2-2.edge2.Atlanta4.Level3.net (4.53.238.37) 50.834 ms 50.917 ms 51.021 ms
7 vl-3518.car2.Atlanta1.Level3.net (4.69.206.25) 51.413 ms 51.295 ms 51.472 ms
8 FIDELITY-IN.car2.Atlanta1.Le
vel3.net (4.71.22.42) 52.250 ms 52.286 ms 52.300 ms
9 (209.17.112.46) 51.437 ms (209.17.112.42) 51.840 ms 51.962 ms
10 209.17.116.160 (209.17.116.160) 52.003 ms 52.281 ms 51.944 ms
The fellow that told me about his whistlebreaker project isn't here anymore. Only a sub-subcontractor here for one phase of a project, paid from a special fund. Friend says he had no HR records except his checks and security info.
Talk to Wikileaks, find out whos idea it was and who executed it. Snake oilers.
//
Operation Fox News
#OpFoxNews #StandwithRand FOX decided to cut Rand Paul from the main debate. They did this same thing to his father and I for one won't allow the dinosaur media to control what we can and can't hear any longer. Rand Paul is polling Higher than that one big guy, Jeb Bush, and Kasich (who I just now heard of) Rand Paul is polling 5th/6th Nationally, Has 1000 precinct chairs in Iowa and met all the criteria for the #GOPDEBATE on the 14th. The past has a way of repeating itself. Fox excluded his father Ron Paul from debates they are now doing the same to Rand Paul. I have a rule. When the media starts to silence a person it means that person is doing something correct and they are scared of the message. Rand Paul is a champion against the NSA and the Patriot Act and the only candidate on both sides talking about peace through diplomacy so I'll champion him with Open Source Intelligence!
So here's a list of Corporate Phone Numbers and Emails, DNS, Apache Servers and a plethora of other information concerning Fox News. This is all information on the public domain ~_^. I did my part. Now do yours. The media is the Fourth Branch of gov't and if we continue to allow it control the message, who can and can't speak then soon the only voice left will be theirs.
/*Corporate Phones*/
+1 212 601 7000
+1 877 367 2526
+1 888 788 9910
+1 678 942 3158
+1 212 301 3320
+1 866 868 6861
+1 866 408 7669
+1 888 672 1411
+1 212 301 3000
+1 888 369 4762
+1 760 757 3560
+1 339 186 7544
+1 215 627 6005
/*Corporate Emails*/
david@robertson.foxnews.com
online@news.com.au
yourcomments@foxnews.com
contribute@beforeitsnews.com
http://video.foxnews.com/?
fox@megansafox.com
foxnewsonline@foxnews.com
discussions@silive.com
videos@foxnews.com
me@example.com
ldepartment@foxnews.com
website@www.adr.org
newsmanager@foxnews.com
julie@revelantwriting.com
closedcaptioning@foxnews.com
foxnewsonline@foxnews.com
deleteaccount@foxnews.com
you@domain.com
more@maxim.com
penelope@x17online.com
foxnewssunday2@foxnews.com
admin.newsletters.foxnews.com
66.230.192.0-66.230.223.255
66.230.193.66
66.230.193.0-66.230.193.255
66.230.193.65
Apache
Apache Tomcat Coyote
66.230.193.66
email.foxnews.com
66.230.193.65
Omniture Adobe Test and Target
23.3.98.74
23.3.98.51
jQuery
en.hao123.com
video.latino.foxnews.com
magazine.foxnews.com
radio.foxnews.com
nomoremister.blogspot.com
usw1.akam.net - FIREWALL
video.foxnews.com
dns.tpa.foxnews.com- FIREWALL
feeds.foxnews.com
ns1-253.akam.net -FIREWALL
usw3.akam.net
shop.foxnews.com
nation.foxnews.com
www.best918.com
usc4.akam.net -FIREWALL
usc2.akam.net -FIREWALL
metrics.foxnews.com
foxnews.com
interactive.foxnews.com
helpingheroeswork.foxnews.com
www.laughatliberals.com
ns1-157.akam.net -FIREWALL
www.rebelmouse.com
press.foxnews.com
asia3.akam.net -FIREWALL
www.greenecountymo.org
/*FIREWALL IPv4 and Endpoints*/
a23-78-222-115.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com (23.78.222.115)
firewall1.tpa.foxnews.com
firewall1.tpa.foxnews.com
video.foxnews.com
2.22.234.89
upload.foxnews.com
video.imag.foxnews.com
brocade2.tpa.foxnews.com
beta.webfarm.tpa.foxnews.com
ns1-253.akam.net
1.tpa.foxnews.com
usw3.akam.net
us.foxnews.com
response.foxnews.com
2.22.234.154
165.254.155.67
usc4.akam.net
insider.foxnews.com
feeds.foxnews.com
125.56.201.115
mail2.foxnews.com
mysql.tpa.foxnews.com
nation.foxnews.com
107.14.45.81
rwtest.foxnews.com
2.22.234.83
107.14.34.153
origin-4.tpa.foxnews.com
165.254.42.80
165.254.27.80
usw1.akam.net
firewall2.tpa.foxnews.com
mailout1.foxnews.com
dns.tpa.foxnews.com
66.230.193.2
fn-hp-origin.tpa.foxnews.com
165.254.34.232
usc2.akam.net
latino.foxnews.com
2.20.142.253
dns.tpa.foxnews.com
media.foxnews.com
2.22.234.137
199.117.103.121
ns1-157.akam.net
magazine.foxnews.com
drupal7test.tpa.foxnews.com
asia3.akam.net
video.insider.foxnews.com
165.254.155.81
14.200.100.16
mail3.foxnews.com
response.foxnews.com
ftp.newsletters.foxnews.com
help.foxnews.com
breakingnews1.foxnews.com
.foxnews.com
video.imag.foxnews.com
sb11.tpa.foxnews.com
business.foxnews.com
ardomeva.foxnews.com
broadband.foxnews.com
api.foxnews.com
qa.foxnews.com
1.tpa.foxnews.com
breakingnews2.foxnews.com
a57.foxnews.com
nation.foxnews.com
live.foxnews.com
foxnewsonline@foxnews.com
/*Standalone Servers & Traceroute*/
www.foxnews.com
96.17.10.48
email.foxnews.com
storage.foxnews.com
96.17.10.41
ads.foxnews.com
storage.foxnews.com
blogs.foxnews.com
careers.foxnews.com
email.foxnews.com
/#APACHE*/
www.pagesinventory.com
www.skymem.com
Tampa, United States
64.26.30.0-64.26.31.255
Apache Tomcat Coyote
United States
66.230.239.234
66.230.239.240
66.230.193.0-66.230.193.255
30217
66.230.239.237
66.230.224.0-66.230.239.255
66.230.239.235
63.208.1.0-63.208.1.255
66.230.192.0-66.230.223.255
66.230.239.236
64.41.94.0-64.41.95.255
64.41.82.0-64.41.83.255
66.230.193.65
64.26.29.0-64.26.29.255
66.230.239.248
66.230.239.239
64.41.92.0-64.41.92.255
66.230.193.66
66.230.239.238
66.230.239.247
64.23.0.0-64.23.127.255
charles@city-guide.com
8.6.220.0-8.6.223.255
+1 813 676 6666
64.41.97.0-64.41.97.255
admin.newsletters.foxnews.com
63.91.157.0-63.91.157.255
www.domain2008.com
64.41.88.0-64.41.91.255
64.41.84.0-64.41.87.255
66.230.239.233
66.230.239.245
66.230.239.246
- SODAGHAR 1/12/16
Anonymous Vows Cyber Holocaust on Israel
“As we did many times, we'll take down your servers, government websites, Israeli military websites, banks, and public institutions. We’ll erase you from cyber-space as we have every year, 7 April 2015, will be an electronic holocaust,”
Dubbed 'OpIsrael' the Hacker group stated it will "erase Israel from cyberspace" for crimes against humanity on the Palestinian people. This will take place on April 7th
This Video was Release by Anonymous on March 4th 2015
"Anonymous held its first OpIsrael cyber-attacks in November 2012 during Operation Pillar of Defense which was an eight day Israeli Defense Force assault on the Gaza strip.
"Anonymous held its first OpIsrael cyber-attacks in November 2012 during Operation Pillar of Defense which was an eight day Israeli Defense Force assault on the Gaza strip.
700 Israeli website suffered repeated DDoS (Denial of Service)attacks, which targeted high-profile government systems including banks, military and even the Presidents own site.
The Israeli Finance Ministry reported an estimated 44 million unique attacks on government websites over a four day period. Anonymous posted the online personal data of 5,000 Israeli officials, including names, ID numbers and personal emails."
-sodaghar 3/30/15
Obama Blames Bush for ISIS
"Two things: One is, ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al-Qaeda in Iraq that grew out of our invasion,” Obama said in an interview with VICE News. “Which is an example of unintended consequences. Which is why we should generally aim before we shoot.” President Obama said.
This is something I totally I agree with however it seems like he's just playing the blame game instead of taking control. He fails to mention the fact that Bin Laden was a CIA asset and was trained and deployed to fight the Soviets in 1979 when they invaded Afghanistan.
The President also fails to mention the fact that the Syrian Rebels we have been funding for the past 3 years have turned to ISIS.
The US has had a presence in the middle east and other Muslim countries since 1953 with Operation Ajax in which the CIA started a Colour Revolution to overthrow the democratically elected president of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh.
This is admitted by the CIA...
We have been a presence in these Muslim countries for two generations now. It was only a matter of time before that population became radicalized.
This is the consequence of being the global police even if the intentions are good. It's time to fix the problems at home and stop worrying about the rest of the world. On the other hand, perhaps we created a monster that nothing can tame. At the cost of another World War it will be up to the United States to stop the monster it formed.
Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis
-Sodaghar 3/18/2015
The Intellectual as Servant of the State
by
Policy intellectuals — eggheads presuming to instruct the mere mortals who actually run for office — are a blight on the republic. Like some invasive species, they infest present-day Washington, where their presence strangles common sense and has brought to the verge of extinction the simple ability to perceive reality. A benign appearance — well-dressed types testifying before Congress, pontificating in print and on TV, or even filling key positions in the executive branch — belies a malign impact. They are like Asian carp let loose in the Great Lakes.
It all began innocently enough. Back in 1933, with the country in the throes of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first imported a handful of eager academics to join the ranks of his New Deal. An unprecedented economic crisis required some fresh thinking, FDR believed. Whether the contributions of this “Brains Trust” made a positive impact or served to retard economic recovery (or ended up being a wash) remains a subject for debate even today. At the very least, however, the arrival of Adolph Berle, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and others elevated Washington’s bourbon-and-cigars social scene. As bona fide members of the intelligentsia, they possessed a sort of cachet.
Then came World War II, followed in short order by the onset of the Cold War. These events brought to Washington a second wave of deep thinkers, their agenda now focused on “national security.” This eminently elastic concept — more properly, “national insecurity” — encompassed just about anything related to preparing for, fighting, or surviving wars, including economics, technology, weapons design, decision-making, the structure of the armed forces, and other matters said to be of vital importance to the nation’s survival. National insecurity became, and remains today, the policy world’s equivalent of the gift that just keeps on giving.
People who specialized in thinking about national insecurity came to be known as “defense intellectuals.” Pioneers in this endeavor back in the 1950s were as likely to collect their paychecks from think tanks like the prototypical RAND Corporation as from more traditional academic institutions. Their ranks included creepy figures like Herman Kahn, who took pride in “thinking about the unthinkable,” and Albert Wohlstetter, who tutored Washington in the complexities of maintaining “the delicate balance of terror.”
In this wonky world, the coin of the realm has been and remains “policy relevance.” This means devising products that convey a sense of novelty, while serving chiefly to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise. The ultimate example of a policy-relevant insight is Dr. Strangelove’s discovery of a “mineshaft gap” — successor to the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” that, in the 1950s, had found America allegedly lagging behind the Soviets in weaponry and desperately needing to catch up. Now, with a thermonuclear exchange about to destroy the planet, the United States is once more falling behind, Strangelove claims, this time in digging underground shelters enabling some small proportion of the population to survive.
In a single, brilliant stroke, Strangelove posits a new raison d'être for the entire national insecurity apparatus, thereby ensuring that the game will continue more or less forever. A sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s movie would have shown General “Buck” Turgidson and the other brass huddled in the War Room, developing plans to close the mineshaft gap as if nothing untoward had occurred.
The Rise of the National Insecurity State
Yet only in the 1960s, right around the time that Dr. Strangelove first appeared in movie theaters, did policy intellectuals really come into their own. The press now referred to them as “action intellectuals,” suggesting energy and impatience. Action intellectuals were thinkers, but also doers, members of a “large and growing body of men who choose to leave their quiet and secure niches on the university campus and involve themselves instead in the perplexing problems that face the nation,” as LIFE Magazine put it in 1967. Among the most perplexing of those problems was what to do about Vietnam, just the sort of challenge an action intellectual could sink his teeth into.
Over the previous century-and-a-half, the United States had gone to war for many reasons, including greed, fear, panic, righteous anger, and legitimate self-defense. On various occasions, each of these, alone or in combination, had prompted Americans to fight. Vietnam marked the first time that the United States went to war, at least in considerable part, in response to a bunch of really dumb ideas floated by ostensibly smart people occupying positions of influence. More surprising still, action intellectuals persisted in waging that war well past the point where it had become self-evident, even to members of Congress, that the cause was a misbegotten one doomed to end in failure.
In his fine new book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, Christian Appy, a historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, reminds us of just how dumb those ideas were.
As Exhibit A, Professor Appy presents McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser first for President John F. Kennedy and then for Lyndon Johnson. Bundy was a product of Groton and Yale, who famously became the youngest-ever dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, having gained tenure there without even bothering to get a graduate degree.
For Exhibit B, there is Walt Whitman Rostow, Bundy’s successor as national security adviser. Rostow was another Yalie, earning his undergraduate degree there along with a PhD. While taking a break of sorts, he spent two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. As a professor of economic history at MIT, Rostow captured JFK’s attention with his modestly subtitled 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which offered a grand theory of development with ostensibly universal applicability. Kennedy brought Rostow to Washington to test his theories of “modernization” in places like Southeast Asia.
Finally, as Exhibit C, Appy briefly discusses Professor Samuel P. Huntington’s contributions to the Vietnam War. Huntington also attended Yale, before earning his PhD at Harvard and then returning to teach there, becoming one of the most renowned political scientists of the post-World War II era.
What the three shared in common, apart from a suspect education acquired in New Haven, was an unwavering commitment to the reigning verities of the Cold War. Foremost among those verities was this: that a monolith called Communism, controlled by a small group of fanatic ideologues hidden behind the walls of the Kremlin, posed an existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but to the very idea of freedom itself. The claim came with this essential corollary: the only hope of avoiding such a cataclysmic outcome was for the United States to vigorously resist the Communist threat wherever it reared its ugly head.
Buy those twin propositions and you accept the imperative of the U.S. preventing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. North Vietnam, from absorbing the Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. South Vietnam, into a single unified country; in other words, that South Vietnam was a cause worth fighting and dying for. Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington not only bought that argument hook, line, and sinker, but then exerted themselves mightily to persuade others in Washington to buy it as well.
Yet even as he was urging the “Americanization” of the Vietnam War in 1965, Bundy already entertained doubts about whether it was winnable. But not to worry: even if the effort ended in failure, he counseled President Johnson, “the policy will be worth it.”
How so? “At a minimum,” Bundy wrote, “it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.” If the United States ultimately lost South Vietnam, at least Americans would have died trying to prevent that result — and through some perverted logic this, in the estimation of Harvard’s youngest-ever dean, was a redeeming prospect. The essential point, Bundy believed, was to prevent others from seeing the United States as a “paper tiger.” To avoid a fight, even a losing one, was to forfeit credibility. “Not to have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major risk” — that was the problem to be avoided at all cost.
Rostow outdid even Bundy in hawkishness. Apart from his relentless advocacy of coercive bombing to influence North Vietnamese policymakers, Rostow was a chief architect of something called the Strategic Hamlet Program. The idea was to jumpstart the Rostovian process of modernization by forcibly relocating Vietnamese peasants from their ancestral villages into armed camps where the Saigon government would provide security, education, medical care, and agricultural assistance. By winning hearts-and-minds in this manner, the defeat of the communist insurgency was sure to follow, with the people of South Vietnam vaulted into the “age of high mass consumption,” where Rostow believed all humankind was destined to end up.
That was the theory. Reality differed somewhat. Actual Strategic Hamlets were indistinguishable from concentration camps. The government in Saigon proved too weak, too incompetent, and too corrupt to hold up its end of the bargain. Rather than winning hearts-and-minds, the program induced alienation, even as it essentially destabilized peasant society. One result: an increasingly rootless rural population flooded into South Vietnam’s cities where there was little work apart from servicing the needs of the ever-growing U.S. military population — hardly the sort of activity conducive to self-sustaining development.
Yet even when the Vietnam War ended in complete and utter defeat, Rostow still claimed vindication for his theory. “We and the Southeast Asians,” he wrote, had used the war years “so well that there wasn’t the panic [when Saigon fell] that there would have been if we had failed to intervene.” Indeed, regionally Rostow spied plenty of good news, all of it attributable to the American war.
”Since 1975 there has been a general expansion of trade by the other countries of that region with Japan and the West. In Thailand we have seen the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs. Malaysia and Singapore have become countries of diverse manufactured exports. We can see the emergence of a much thicker layer of technocrats in Indonesia.”
So there you have it. If you want to know what 58,000 Americans (not to mention vastly larger numbers of Vietnamese) died for, it was to encourage entrepreneurship, exports, and the emergence of technocrats elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Appy describes Professor Huntington as another action intellectual with an unfailing facility for seeing the upside of catastrophe. In Huntington’s view, the internal displacement of South Vietnamese caused by the excessive use of American firepower, along with the failure of Rostow’s Strategic Hamlets, was actually good news. It promised, he insisted, to give the Americans an edge over the insurgents.
The key to final victory, Huntington wrote, was “forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power.” By emptying out the countryside, the U.S. could win the war in the cities. “The urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of life.” The language may be a tad antiseptic, but the point is clear enough: the challenges of city life in a state of utter immiseration would miraculously transform those same peasants into go-getters more interested in making a buck than in signing up for social revolution.
Revisited decades later, claims once made with a straight face by the likes of Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington — action intellectuals of the very first rank — seem beyond preposterous. They insult our intelligence, leaving us to wonder how such judgments or the people who promoted them were ever taken seriously.
How was it that during Vietnam bad ideas exerted such a perverse influence? Why were those ideas so impervious to challenge? Why, in short, was it so difficult for Americans to recognize bullshit for what it was?
Creating a Twenty-First-Century Slow-Motion Vietnam
These questions are by no means of mere historical interest. They are no less relevant when applied to the handiwork of the twenty-first-century version of policy intellectuals, specializing in national insecurity, whose bullshit underpins policies hardly more coherent than those used to justify and prosecute the Vietnam War.
The present-day successors to Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington subscribe to their own reigning verities. Chief among them is this: that a phenomenon called terrorism or Islamic radicalism, inspired by a small group of fanatic ideologues hidden away in various quarters of the Greater Middle East, poses an existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but — yes, it’s still with us — to the very idea of freedom itself. That assertion comes with an essential corollary dusted off and imported from the Cold War: the only hope of avoiding this cataclysmic outcome is for the United States to vigorously resist the terrorist/Islamist threat wherever it rears its ugly head.
At least since September 11, 2001, and arguably for at least two decades prior to that date, U.S. policymakers have taken these propositions for granted. They have done so at least in part because few of the policy intellectuals specializing in national insecurity have bothered to question them.
Indeed, those specialists insulate the state from having to address such questions. Think of them as intellectuals devoted to averting genuine intellectual activity. More or less like Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter (or Dr. Strangelove), their function is to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise.
The fact that the enterprise itself has become utterly amorphous may actually facilitate such efforts. Once widely known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, it has been transformed into the War with No Name. A little bit like the famous Supreme Court opinion on pornography: we can’t define it, we just know it when we see it, with ISIS the latest manifestation to capture Washington’s attention.
All that we can say for sure about this nameless undertaking is that it continues with no end in sight. It has become a sort of slow-motion Vietnam, stimulating remarkably little honest reflection regarding its course thus far or prospects for the future. If there is an actual Brains Trust at work in Washington, it operates on autopilot. Today, the second- and third-generation bastard offspring of RAND that clutter northwest Washington — the Center for this, the Institute for that — spin their wheels debating latter day equivalents of Strategic Hamlets, with nary a thought given to more fundamental concerns.
What prompts these observations is Ashton Carter’s return to the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth secretary of defense. Carter himself is an action intellectual in the Bundy, Rostow, Huntington mold, having made a career of rotating between positions at Harvard and in “the Building.” He, too, is a Yalie and a Rhodes scholar, with a PhD. from Oxford. “Ash” — in Washington, a first-name-only identifier (“Henry,” “Zbig,” “Hillary”) signifies that you have truly arrived — is the author of books and articles galore, including one op-ed co-written with former Secretary of Defense William Perry back in 2006 calling for preventive war against North Korea. Military action “undoubtedly carries risk,” he bravely acknowledged at the time. “But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea's race to threaten this country would be greater” — just the sort of logic periodically trotted out by the likes of Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter.
As Carter has taken the Pentagon’s reins, he also has taken pains to convey the impression of being a big thinker. As one Wall Street Journalheadline enthused, “Ash Carter Seeks Fresh Eyes on Global Threats.” That multiple global threats exist and that America’s defense secretary has a mandate to address each of them are, of course, givens. His predecessor Chuck Hagel (no Yale degree) was a bit of a plodder. By way of contrast, Carter has made clear his intention to shake things up.
So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth Pollack, Michael O’Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national insecurity intellectuals and old Washington hands one and all. Besides all being employees of the Brookings Institution, the three share the distinction of having supported the Iraq War back in 2003 and calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS today. For assurances that the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is sound — we just need to try harder — who better to consult thanPollack, O’Hanlon, and Kagan(any Kagan)?
Was Carter hoping to gain some fresh insight from his dinner companions? Or was he letting Washington’s clubby network of fellows, senior fellows, and distinguished fellows know that, on his watch, the prevailing verities of national insecurity would remain sacrosanct? You decide.
Soon thereafter, Carter’s first trip overseas provided another opportunity to signal his intentions. In Kuwait, he convened a war council of senior military and civilian officials to take stock of the campaign against ISIS. In a daring departure from standard practice, the new defense secretary prohibited PowerPoint briefings. One participant described the ensuing event as “a five-hour-long college seminar” — candid and freewheeling. “This is reversing the paradigm,” one awed senior Pentagon official remarked. Carter was said to be challenging his subordinates to “look at this problem differently.”
Of course, Carter might have said, “Let’s look at a different problem.” That, however, was far too radical to contemplate — the equivalent of suggesting back in the 1960s that assumptions landing the United States in Vietnam should be reexamined.
In any event — and to no one’s surprise — the different look did not produce a different conclusion. Instead of reversing the paradigm, Carter affirmed it: the existing U.S. approach to dealing with ISIS is sound, he announced. It only needs a bit of tweaking — just the result to give the Pollacks, O’Hanlons, and Kagans something to write about as they keep up the chatter that substitutes for serious debate.
Do we really need that chatter? Does it enhance the quality of U.S. policy? If policy/defense/action intellectuals fell silent would America be less secure?
Let me propose an experiment. Put them on furlough. Not permanently — just until the last of the winter snow finally melts in New England. Send them back to Yale for reeducation. Let’s see if we are able to make do without them even for a month or two.
In the meantime, invite Iraq and Afghanistan War vets to consider how best to deal with ISIS. Turn the op-ed pages of major newspapers over to high school social studies teachers. Book English majors from the Big Ten on the Sunday talk shows. Who knows what tidbits of wisdom might turn up?
It all began innocently enough. Back in 1933, with the country in the throes of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first imported a handful of eager academics to join the ranks of his New Deal. An unprecedented economic crisis required some fresh thinking, FDR believed. Whether the contributions of this “Brains Trust” made a positive impact or served to retard economic recovery (or ended up being a wash) remains a subject for debate even today. At the very least, however, the arrival of Adolph Berle, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and others elevated Washington’s bourbon-and-cigars social scene. As bona fide members of the intelligentsia, they possessed a sort of cachet.
Then came World War II, followed in short order by the onset of the Cold War. These events brought to Washington a second wave of deep thinkers, their agenda now focused on “national security.” This eminently elastic concept — more properly, “national insecurity” — encompassed just about anything related to preparing for, fighting, or surviving wars, including economics, technology, weapons design, decision-making, the structure of the armed forces, and other matters said to be of vital importance to the nation’s survival. National insecurity became, and remains today, the policy world’s equivalent of the gift that just keeps on giving.
People who specialized in thinking about national insecurity came to be known as “defense intellectuals.” Pioneers in this endeavor back in the 1950s were as likely to collect their paychecks from think tanks like the prototypical RAND Corporation as from more traditional academic institutions. Their ranks included creepy figures like Herman Kahn, who took pride in “thinking about the unthinkable,” and Albert Wohlstetter, who tutored Washington in the complexities of maintaining “the delicate balance of terror.”
In this wonky world, the coin of the realm has been and remains “policy relevance.” This means devising products that convey a sense of novelty, while serving chiefly to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise. The ultimate example of a policy-relevant insight is Dr. Strangelove’s discovery of a “mineshaft gap” — successor to the “bomber gap” and the “missile gap” that, in the 1950s, had found America allegedly lagging behind the Soviets in weaponry and desperately needing to catch up. Now, with a thermonuclear exchange about to destroy the planet, the United States is once more falling behind, Strangelove claims, this time in digging underground shelters enabling some small proportion of the population to survive.
In a single, brilliant stroke, Strangelove posits a new raison d'être for the entire national insecurity apparatus, thereby ensuring that the game will continue more or less forever. A sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s movie would have shown General “Buck” Turgidson and the other brass huddled in the War Room, developing plans to close the mineshaft gap as if nothing untoward had occurred.
The Rise of the National Insecurity State
Yet only in the 1960s, right around the time that Dr. Strangelove first appeared in movie theaters, did policy intellectuals really come into their own. The press now referred to them as “action intellectuals,” suggesting energy and impatience. Action intellectuals were thinkers, but also doers, members of a “large and growing body of men who choose to leave their quiet and secure niches on the university campus and involve themselves instead in the perplexing problems that face the nation,” as LIFE Magazine put it in 1967. Among the most perplexing of those problems was what to do about Vietnam, just the sort of challenge an action intellectual could sink his teeth into.
Over the previous century-and-a-half, the United States had gone to war for many reasons, including greed, fear, panic, righteous anger, and legitimate self-defense. On various occasions, each of these, alone or in combination, had prompted Americans to fight. Vietnam marked the first time that the United States went to war, at least in considerable part, in response to a bunch of really dumb ideas floated by ostensibly smart people occupying positions of influence. More surprising still, action intellectuals persisted in waging that war well past the point where it had become self-evident, even to members of Congress, that the cause was a misbegotten one doomed to end in failure.
In his fine new book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, Christian Appy, a historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, reminds us of just how dumb those ideas were.
As Exhibit A, Professor Appy presents McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser first for President John F. Kennedy and then for Lyndon Johnson. Bundy was a product of Groton and Yale, who famously became the youngest-ever dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, having gained tenure there without even bothering to get a graduate degree.
For Exhibit B, there is Walt Whitman Rostow, Bundy’s successor as national security adviser. Rostow was another Yalie, earning his undergraduate degree there along with a PhD. While taking a break of sorts, he spent two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. As a professor of economic history at MIT, Rostow captured JFK’s attention with his modestly subtitled 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which offered a grand theory of development with ostensibly universal applicability. Kennedy brought Rostow to Washington to test his theories of “modernization” in places like Southeast Asia.
Finally, as Exhibit C, Appy briefly discusses Professor Samuel P. Huntington’s contributions to the Vietnam War. Huntington also attended Yale, before earning his PhD at Harvard and then returning to teach there, becoming one of the most renowned political scientists of the post-World War II era.
What the three shared in common, apart from a suspect education acquired in New Haven, was an unwavering commitment to the reigning verities of the Cold War. Foremost among those verities was this: that a monolith called Communism, controlled by a small group of fanatic ideologues hidden behind the walls of the Kremlin, posed an existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but to the very idea of freedom itself. The claim came with this essential corollary: the only hope of avoiding such a cataclysmic outcome was for the United States to vigorously resist the Communist threat wherever it reared its ugly head.
Buy those twin propositions and you accept the imperative of the U.S. preventing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. North Vietnam, from absorbing the Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. South Vietnam, into a single unified country; in other words, that South Vietnam was a cause worth fighting and dying for. Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington not only bought that argument hook, line, and sinker, but then exerted themselves mightily to persuade others in Washington to buy it as well.
Yet even as he was urging the “Americanization” of the Vietnam War in 1965, Bundy already entertained doubts about whether it was winnable. But not to worry: even if the effort ended in failure, he counseled President Johnson, “the policy will be worth it.”
How so? “At a minimum,” Bundy wrote, “it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.” If the United States ultimately lost South Vietnam, at least Americans would have died trying to prevent that result — and through some perverted logic this, in the estimation of Harvard’s youngest-ever dean, was a redeeming prospect. The essential point, Bundy believed, was to prevent others from seeing the United States as a “paper tiger.” To avoid a fight, even a losing one, was to forfeit credibility. “Not to have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major risk” — that was the problem to be avoided at all cost.
Rostow outdid even Bundy in hawkishness. Apart from his relentless advocacy of coercive bombing to influence North Vietnamese policymakers, Rostow was a chief architect of something called the Strategic Hamlet Program. The idea was to jumpstart the Rostovian process of modernization by forcibly relocating Vietnamese peasants from their ancestral villages into armed camps where the Saigon government would provide security, education, medical care, and agricultural assistance. By winning hearts-and-minds in this manner, the defeat of the communist insurgency was sure to follow, with the people of South Vietnam vaulted into the “age of high mass consumption,” where Rostow believed all humankind was destined to end up.
That was the theory. Reality differed somewhat. Actual Strategic Hamlets were indistinguishable from concentration camps. The government in Saigon proved too weak, too incompetent, and too corrupt to hold up its end of the bargain. Rather than winning hearts-and-minds, the program induced alienation, even as it essentially destabilized peasant society. One result: an increasingly rootless rural population flooded into South Vietnam’s cities where there was little work apart from servicing the needs of the ever-growing U.S. military population — hardly the sort of activity conducive to self-sustaining development.
Yet even when the Vietnam War ended in complete and utter defeat, Rostow still claimed vindication for his theory. “We and the Southeast Asians,” he wrote, had used the war years “so well that there wasn’t the panic [when Saigon fell] that there would have been if we had failed to intervene.” Indeed, regionally Rostow spied plenty of good news, all of it attributable to the American war.
”Since 1975 there has been a general expansion of trade by the other countries of that region with Japan and the West. In Thailand we have seen the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs. Malaysia and Singapore have become countries of diverse manufactured exports. We can see the emergence of a much thicker layer of technocrats in Indonesia.”
So there you have it. If you want to know what 58,000 Americans (not to mention vastly larger numbers of Vietnamese) died for, it was to encourage entrepreneurship, exports, and the emergence of technocrats elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Appy describes Professor Huntington as another action intellectual with an unfailing facility for seeing the upside of catastrophe. In Huntington’s view, the internal displacement of South Vietnamese caused by the excessive use of American firepower, along with the failure of Rostow’s Strategic Hamlets, was actually good news. It promised, he insisted, to give the Americans an edge over the insurgents.
The key to final victory, Huntington wrote, was “forced-draft urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power.” By emptying out the countryside, the U.S. could win the war in the cities. “The urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of life.” The language may be a tad antiseptic, but the point is clear enough: the challenges of city life in a state of utter immiseration would miraculously transform those same peasants into go-getters more interested in making a buck than in signing up for social revolution.
Revisited decades later, claims once made with a straight face by the likes of Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington — action intellectuals of the very first rank — seem beyond preposterous. They insult our intelligence, leaving us to wonder how such judgments or the people who promoted them were ever taken seriously.
How was it that during Vietnam bad ideas exerted such a perverse influence? Why were those ideas so impervious to challenge? Why, in short, was it so difficult for Americans to recognize bullshit for what it was?
Creating a Twenty-First-Century Slow-Motion Vietnam
These questions are by no means of mere historical interest. They are no less relevant when applied to the handiwork of the twenty-first-century version of policy intellectuals, specializing in national insecurity, whose bullshit underpins policies hardly more coherent than those used to justify and prosecute the Vietnam War.
The present-day successors to Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington subscribe to their own reigning verities. Chief among them is this: that a phenomenon called terrorism or Islamic radicalism, inspired by a small group of fanatic ideologues hidden away in various quarters of the Greater Middle East, poses an existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but — yes, it’s still with us — to the very idea of freedom itself. That assertion comes with an essential corollary dusted off and imported from the Cold War: the only hope of avoiding this cataclysmic outcome is for the United States to vigorously resist the terrorist/Islamist threat wherever it rears its ugly head.
At least since September 11, 2001, and arguably for at least two decades prior to that date, U.S. policymakers have taken these propositions for granted. They have done so at least in part because few of the policy intellectuals specializing in national insecurity have bothered to question them.
Indeed, those specialists insulate the state from having to address such questions. Think of them as intellectuals devoted to averting genuine intellectual activity. More or less like Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter (or Dr. Strangelove), their function is to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise.
The fact that the enterprise itself has become utterly amorphous may actually facilitate such efforts. Once widely known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, it has been transformed into the War with No Name. A little bit like the famous Supreme Court opinion on pornography: we can’t define it, we just know it when we see it, with ISIS the latest manifestation to capture Washington’s attention.
All that we can say for sure about this nameless undertaking is that it continues with no end in sight. It has become a sort of slow-motion Vietnam, stimulating remarkably little honest reflection regarding its course thus far or prospects for the future. If there is an actual Brains Trust at work in Washington, it operates on autopilot. Today, the second- and third-generation bastard offspring of RAND that clutter northwest Washington — the Center for this, the Institute for that — spin their wheels debating latter day equivalents of Strategic Hamlets, with nary a thought given to more fundamental concerns.
What prompts these observations is Ashton Carter’s return to the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth secretary of defense. Carter himself is an action intellectual in the Bundy, Rostow, Huntington mold, having made a career of rotating between positions at Harvard and in “the Building.” He, too, is a Yalie and a Rhodes scholar, with a PhD. from Oxford. “Ash” — in Washington, a first-name-only identifier (“Henry,” “Zbig,” “Hillary”) signifies that you have truly arrived — is the author of books and articles galore, including one op-ed co-written with former Secretary of Defense William Perry back in 2006 calling for preventive war against North Korea. Military action “undoubtedly carries risk,” he bravely acknowledged at the time. “But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea's race to threaten this country would be greater” — just the sort of logic periodically trotted out by the likes of Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter.
As Carter has taken the Pentagon’s reins, he also has taken pains to convey the impression of being a big thinker. As one Wall Street Journalheadline enthused, “Ash Carter Seeks Fresh Eyes on Global Threats.” That multiple global threats exist and that America’s defense secretary has a mandate to address each of them are, of course, givens. His predecessor Chuck Hagel (no Yale degree) was a bit of a plodder. By way of contrast, Carter has made clear his intention to shake things up.
So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth Pollack, Michael O’Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national insecurity intellectuals and old Washington hands one and all. Besides all being employees of the Brookings Institution, the three share the distinction of having supported the Iraq War back in 2003 and calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS today. For assurances that the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is sound — we just need to try harder — who better to consult thanPollack, O’Hanlon, and Kagan(any Kagan)?
Was Carter hoping to gain some fresh insight from his dinner companions? Or was he letting Washington’s clubby network of fellows, senior fellows, and distinguished fellows know that, on his watch, the prevailing verities of national insecurity would remain sacrosanct? You decide.
Soon thereafter, Carter’s first trip overseas provided another opportunity to signal his intentions. In Kuwait, he convened a war council of senior military and civilian officials to take stock of the campaign against ISIS. In a daring departure from standard practice, the new defense secretary prohibited PowerPoint briefings. One participant described the ensuing event as “a five-hour-long college seminar” — candid and freewheeling. “This is reversing the paradigm,” one awed senior Pentagon official remarked. Carter was said to be challenging his subordinates to “look at this problem differently.”
Of course, Carter might have said, “Let’s look at a different problem.” That, however, was far too radical to contemplate — the equivalent of suggesting back in the 1960s that assumptions landing the United States in Vietnam should be reexamined.
In any event — and to no one’s surprise — the different look did not produce a different conclusion. Instead of reversing the paradigm, Carter affirmed it: the existing U.S. approach to dealing with ISIS is sound, he announced. It only needs a bit of tweaking — just the result to give the Pollacks, O’Hanlons, and Kagans something to write about as they keep up the chatter that substitutes for serious debate.
Do we really need that chatter? Does it enhance the quality of U.S. policy? If policy/defense/action intellectuals fell silent would America be less secure?
Let me propose an experiment. Put them on furlough. Not permanently — just until the last of the winter snow finally melts in New England. Send them back to Yale for reeducation. Let’s see if we are able to make do without them even for a month or two.
In the meantime, invite Iraq and Afghanistan War vets to consider how best to deal with ISIS. Turn the op-ed pages of major newspapers over to high school social studies teachers. Book English majors from the Big Ten on the Sunday talk shows. Who knows what tidbits of wisdom might turn up?
Historic Jury Decision Proves Power of the People
Broward County Florida : A jury acquits a marijuana grower with 46 plants citing medical use and proves the true power is always within the people.Two years ago Jesse Teplicki got a visit from detectives and was arrested. He is the first defendant in Florida to argue medicinal use of the plant. "You saved my life" as he wept and told the jury after the not guilty decision was reached. Possession of Cannabis can get you up to 5 years in prison but honestly who is going to convict someone over marijuana these days when half the country has some form of legal weed. I know I wouldn't. This is why you always go to trial by jury and NEVER take a plea deal. A jury of your peers is higher than any judge or any law and as Americans we seem to forget that as sovereigns we are in full control. Jury Nullification is a term that can be used when even though you might be breaking a "law" the jury finds that "law" to be ridiculous.
Remember there was a time in this country when slavery was legal and just because it's a "law" doesn't make it right.
Jury's around the country are also responsible for acquitting people being charged with tax evasion citing to the IRS "show me the law".
"A federal jury in Memphis has acquitted a FedEx pilot on six counts of tax evasion after she testified that she wrote letters asking the Internal Revenue Service what law required her to pay taxes but never received a response."
This truly is a historic day not just for Florida but for the whole country and a silver lining in what seems to be endless dark. I have not heard any mainstream media talking about this because they do not want you to know where the true power lies which is YOU. Imagine 15 years ago getting caught with 46 marijuana plants! It would have made national news and pinned you as some drug lord. With the nations capitol Washington D.C legalizing pot I can't imagine any cop or jury convicting anyone over this medical plant.
Last year Florida voted 58% to get medical marijuana in the state but because of a "law" passed two years prior requiring 60% of the vote if it's an amendment to the states constitution Florida is now lagging behind the rest of the country.
Call to Action on 4/20/15 Florida Smoke Out Day on Fort Lauderdale Beach!
We The People choose our own rights!
Join me and others as we light up our freedoms in public
Sign the Petition
-Sodaghar 3/3/15
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