Showing posts with label Pentagon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pentagon. Show all posts
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Pentagon: US Empire is 'Collapsing,' So Give Us More Money
Monday, December 14, 2015
Sunday, September 27, 2015
US-trained Syria Rebels Gave Weapons to Al-Nusra Islamists, Pentagon Confirms
Sunday, December 21, 2014
North Korea Threatens to 'Blow Up' the White House after Claiming to Find 'Clear Evidence' that the Government Was behind Controversial Sony Film The Interview
North Korea has threatened more attacks against the U.S. government and other American institutions in the wake of the hack on Sony which cancelled the release of The Interview.
The government - which was outraged by the film showing the assassination of leader Kim Jong Un - also claimed to have 'clear evidence' that the U.S. government engineered the project as a 'propaganda' attack against North Korea.
In a ranting post published by the state news agency KCNA, Korean authorities hit back in an escalating war of words in which they say they will 'blow up' the White House - while bizarrely continuing to deny they have anything to do with the cyber attacks on Sony.
'Nothing is a more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction.'
'Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans.
'The army and people of the DPRK are fully ready to stand in confrontation with the U.S. in all war spaces including cyber warfare space to blow up those citadels.' Read on and comment » | Kieran Corcoran for MailOnline | Sunday, December 21, 2014
Friday, March 07, 2014
Pentagon Confronting Putin with 'Second Best' Units?
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Pentagon Warns against Syria Intervention Which Could Cost US '$1bn a Month'
The Pentagon's top uniformed official has given one of the clearest signals yet of the reluctance of the Obama administration to intervene militarily in the Syrian civil war, warning that to do so would cost billions of dollars annually and possibly backfire against US interests.
In a letter to the Senate Armed Committee, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, set out five options, ranging from training and arming the opposition to establishing buffer zones or or a no-fly zone and direct strikes against regime targets. The pricetag would vary from $500m a year to $1bn a month, as well as thousands of troops.
His warning came as the US and allies including Britain have begun to concede that after his recent successes on the battlefield, President Bashar al-Assad could remain in power for a long while, albeit controlling only a portion of his country. » | Rupert Cornwall | Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Wednesday, February 06, 2013
The military is poised to extend some benefits to the same-sex partners of service members, US officials said Tuesday, about 16 months after the Pentagon repealed its ban on openly gay service.
Defense secretary Leon Panetta has not made a final decision on which benefits will be included, the officials said, but the Pentagon is likely to allow same-sex partners to have access to the on-base commissary and other military subsidized stores, as well as some health and welfare programs.
Panetta must walk a fine, legal line. While there has been increased pressure on the Pentagon to extend some benefits to same-sex partners, defense officials must be careful not to violate the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA. The federal law forbids the federal government from recognizing any marriage other than those between a man and a woman. » | Associated Press in Washington | Tuesday, February 05, 2013
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
FOX NEWS: WASHINGTON – The Pentagon has suspended a course for military officers that officials say contained inflammatory material about Islam.
Defense Department spokesman Capt. John Kirby said Wednesday that among problems with the course taught at Norfolk, Va., was a presentation that asserted the United States is at war with Islam. Kirby noted that officials across two American administrations have stressed that the U.S. is at war with terrorists who have a distorted view of the religion. » | Associated Press | Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Thursday, January 05, 2012
President Obama has unveiled plans for America's military future, outlining a historic shift towards a smaller and leaner force that will focus on China and move away from large-scale ground warfare that has dominated the post-9/11 era.
Obama became the first president to announce a strategy change directly from inside the Pentagon – a theatrical gesture designed to underline the significance of the shift. Mindful of the dangers of displaying any weakness over national security in an election year, Obama said he was determined to maintain US military supremacy around the world, but he admitted that the review involved a move to "smaller conventional ground forces" and the removal of "outdated cold war-era systems".
The immediate incentive for the change in tack, set out in a Pentagon strategy paper, is the fiscal crisis and the Congress-led drive for spending cuts. Currently, the Pentagon is under orders to slash $487bn from the resources it had expected to receive over the next 10 years, and those cuts could rise to close to $1tn if Congress fails to reach agreement on alternative reductions by January next year. » | Ed Pilkington in New York | Thursday, January 05, 2012
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Hamburg - Die USA wähnen sich im Internet-Krieg - und behalten sich vor, künftig mit konventionellen Mitteln auf Hacker-Angriffe zu reagieren. Setzt ein Land Viren, Würmer und Trojaner in Bewegung, riskiert es eine Vergeltung durch Kampfjets, Panzer und Bodentruppen. "Wer die Stromnetze unseres Landes sabotiert, muss mit Raketen im Schornstein rechnen", sagte ein Pentagon-Sprecher dem "Wall Street Journal". Der Cyberwar soll nicht länger nur virtuell geführt werden.
Es ist ein Vorgeschmack auf eine neue Strategie der US-Regierung. Das Verteidigungsministerium ist derzeit dabei, formale Regeln zum Umgang mit Internet-Angriffen aufzustellen. Nach jahrelanger Diskussion soll die Cyber-Doktrin jetzt in Kraft treten. 30 Seiten umfasst die Strategie, Teile davon sollen im Juni vorgestellt werden. Kernbestandteil: Sollte ein Cyber-Angriff die Energieversorgung stören, Krankenhäuser ausschalten und somit viele Menschenleben in Gefahr bringen, wird zurückgeschlagen.
Mehr als 100 ausländische Geheimdienste würden versuchen, in amerikanische Rechnernetze einzudringen, warnte ein Pentagon-Sprecher. Einige der Angreifer seien in der Lage, die Kommunikationsnetze zum Erliegen zu bringen - doch bei den meisten Attacken ist das gar nicht die Absicht. Viel öfter geht es um geheime Informationen, um Spionage. Menschenleben sind hier zunächst nur indirekt betroffen. » | Von Ole Reißmann | Mittwoch 01. Juni 2011
Saturday, May 07, 2011
BBC: The Pentagon has released home videos of Osama Bin Laden, seized at the secret Pakistani compound where he was shot dead by US commandos.
The tapes show him watching himself on television, and preparing a video message addressed to the US.
At a news briefing in Washington, intelligence officials said Bin Laden had been actively leading al-Qaeda from the compound in Abbottabad.
In total, five videos were seized during Monday's raid.
Rehearsals
In the first video, filmed in October or November 2010, Bin Laden is shown wearing a white skullcap and shirt and a golden robe. He speaks to the camera in the style of previous video addresses by the al-Qaeda leader.
Pentagon officials have removed audio from the film, citing security concerns, but said it was a message to the United States.
Three other clips appear to be rehearsals for the video message, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Washington. (+ video) » | Saturday, May 07, 2011
Thursday, April 07, 2011
Saturday, December 04, 2010
Monday, November 29, 2010
THE GUARDIAN: • More than 250,000 dispatches reveal US foreign strategies • Diplomats ordered to spy on allies as well as enemies • Saudi king urged Washington to bomb Iran
The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.
At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated "secret" – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.
These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers' website, also reveal Washington's evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.
These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan's growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen. >>> David Leigh | Sunday, November 28, 2010
Read the full coverage of the US embassy cables >>>
SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL: 251,000 State Department documents, many of them secret embassy reports from around the world, show how the US seeks to safeguard its influence around the world. It is nothing short of a political meltdown for US foreign policy.
What does the United States really think of German Chancellor Angela Merkel? Is she a reliable ally? Did she really make an effort to patch up relations with Washington that had been so damaged by her predecessor? At most, it was a half-hearted one.
The tone of trans-Atlantic relations may have improved, former US Ambassador to Germany William Timken wrote in a cable to the State Department at the end of 2006, but the chancellor "has not taken bold steps yet to improve the substantive content of the relationship." That is not exactly high praise.
And the verdict on German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle? His thoughts "were short on substance," wrote the current US ambassador in Berlin, Philip Murphy, in a cable. The reason, Murphy suggested, was that "Westerwelle's command of complex foreign and security policy issues still requires deepening."
Such comments are hardly friendly. But in the eyes of the American diplomatic corps, every actor is quickly categorized as a friend or foe. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia? A friend: Abdullah can't stand his neighbors in Iran and, expressing his disdain for the mullah regime, said, "there is no doubt something unstable about them." And his ally, Sheikh bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi? Also a friend. He believes "a near term conventional war with Iran is clearly preferable to the long term consequences of a nuclear armed Iran."
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emissaries also learn of a special "Iran observer" in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku who reports on a dispute that played out during a meeting of Iran's Supreme National Security Council. An enraged Revolutionary Guard Chief of Staff Mohammed Ali Jafari allegedly got into a heated argument with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and slapped him in the face because the generally conservative president had, surprisingly, advocated freedom of the press. A Political Meltdown >>> SPIEGEL Staff | Sunday, November 28, 2010
”Turkey hardly comes away any less scathed in the cables. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the cables allege, governs with the help of a cabal of incompetent advisors. Ankara Embassy officials depict a country on a path to an Islamist future -- a future that likely won't include European Union membership.”
”Often enough, the lesson of the documents that have now been obtained, is that the Arab leaders use their friends in Washington to expand their own positions of power.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels: WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats. >>> Scott Shane and Andrew W. Lehren | Sunday, November 28, 2010
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Around the World, Distress Over Iran >>> David E. Sanger, James Glanz and Jo Becker | Sunday, November 28, 2010
THE NEW YORK TIMES: Iran Fortifies Its Arsenal With the Aid of North Korea >>> William J. Broad, James Glanz and David E. Sanger | Sunday, November 28, 2010
THE NEW YORK TIMES: U.S. Expands Role of Diplomats in Spying: WASHINGTON — The United States has expanded the role of American diplomats in collecting intelligence overseas and at the United Nations, ordering State Department personnel to gather the credit card and frequent-flier numbers, work schedules and other personal information of foreign dignitaries. >>> Mark Mazzetti | Sunday, November 28, 2010
SKY NEWS: Arab rulers secretly lobbied the US to launch air strikes to destroy Iran's nuclear programme, leaked US diplomatic messages reveal.
Details from 250,000 leaked documents obtained by whistleblower website WikiLeaks have been published by a number of newspapers given advance sight of the material.
The Guardian says it will publish details later in the week of cables relating to the UK - including allegations of "inappropriate behaviour" by a member of the Royal Family which was said to have "startled" US diplomats.
The documents are also said to include "serious political criticism" of David Cameron and "devastating criticism" of British military operations in Afghanistan.
Potentially most seriously of all for the UK, the newspaper said that the cables included requests for "specific intelligence" about British MPs. (+ video) >>> Andy Jack and Richard Williams, Sky News Online | Monday, November 29, 2010
Key Points Of Leaked Confidential Documents >>>
THE TIMES: Arabs urged US to bomb Iran >>> Tom Coghlan, Defence Correspondent | Monday, November 29, 2010 (Paywall: £)
Sunday, November 28, 2010
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Embarrassment for Coalition as Wikileaks prepares to release secret US papers: Potentially "embarrassing" comments on the formation of Britain's coalition government are to be revealed this week as millions of leaked US diplomatic documents are made public. >>> Patrick Hennessy, Political editor | Saturday, November 27, 2010
THE SUNDAY TIMES: Britain fears Islamic fury over leaked sensitive documents >>> David Leppard | Sunday, November 28, 2010 (Paywall: £)
Related >>>
Friday, November 05, 2010
WELT ONLINE: Julian Assange sorgt sich um seine Sicherheit und fühlt sich vom Pentagon bedroht. In der Schweiz kündigte er nun neue Enthüllungen an.Der Gründer der Internet-Enthüllungsplattform Wikileaks, Julian Assange, erwägt nach eigenen Angaben eine Niederlassung in der Schweiz. In einem Interview mit dem Schweizer Fernsehsender TSR antwortete er am Donnerstag auf die Frage, ob er samt seiner Website in die Schweiz ziehen wolle, dies sei eine „reale Möglichkeit“. Auf die Frage, ob er dort einen Antrag auf Asyl stellen könnte, sagte der Australier: „Das ist richtig. Wir überlegen, ob ich Asyl beantragen sollte.“ Wikileaks prüfe derzeit zudem die Möglichkeit der Gründung einer Stiftung, mit der die Website von der Schweiz aus agieren könne. Die Schweiz und Island seien die einzigen westlichen Länder, in denen sich Wikileaks sicher fühle.
Wikileaks hatte Ende Oktober weltweit Aufsehen erregt, als es fast 400.000 Geheimdokumente zum Irak-Krieg veröffentlichte. Aus ihnen geht unter anderem hervor, dass die US-Armee trotz ihres Wissens von Folterungen von Gefangenen durch irakische Sicherheitskräfte nicht einschritt. Die USA protestierten heftig gegen die „unverantwortliche“ Veröffentlichung der Geheimdokumente. Assange berichtete nach der Veröffentlichung, er sorge sich um seine Sicherheit. Auch in Genf sagte er, Wikileaks-Mitarbeiter und Menschen aus dem Umfeld der Plattform fühlten sich vom Pentagon „bedroht“. >>> AFP/tma | Friday, November 05, 2010
Wikileaks Iraq War Diaries >>>
Friday, October 22, 2010
THE TELEGRAPH: A Pentagon official says radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki had lunch there as part of a program to reach out to moderate Muslims in the months following the Sept 11, 2001, attacks against the United States.
Al-Awlaki is now on the US capture-or-kill list. >>> | Thursday, October 21, 2010
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