Is America Ready for John Bolton’s War with Iran?

Scott Ritter
Global Research 

Recently dispatched B-52s and ships are an act of theatrical bravado that ignore the real threat.

National Security Advisor John Bolton’s announcement this week that the U.S. is deploying a carrier strike group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region seemed perfectly framed to put America on a war footing with Iran. And it is.

Claiming that the decision was made in response to “a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” Bolton declared that “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime.” But, he added, “we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”

It took the Defense Department a full day to respond to Bolton’s statement, with acting Secretary of Defense Pat Shanahan finally tweeting that the

“announced deployment of the @CVN_72 and a @USAirForce bomber task force to the @CENTCOM area of responsibility…represents a prudent repositioning of assets in response to indications of a credible threat by Iranian regime forces.”

Shanahan followed with another tweet:

“We call on the Iranian regime to cease all provocation. We will hold the Iranian regime accountable for any attack on US forces or our interests.”

The USS Abraham Lincoln battle group had deployed a month ago from its Norfolk, Virginia, home port and was recently engaged in maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea. The Pentagon acknowledged that the Abraham Lincoln was scheduled to support CENTCOM during its deployment, but that its arrival was being “accelerated” due to intelligence indicating an imminent Iranian threat.

The fact that Bolton chose to repurpose routine deployments of U.S. military forces into the Middle East as an emergency response to an unspecified threat from Iran is in and of itself a curiosity. Bolton is an advisor to the president, a non-statutory (i.e., not confirmed by the Senate) member of the White House staff who is not in the military chain of command and lacks any command authority. 

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What The Hell Is Going On With UFOs And The Department Of Defense?

Tyler Rogaway
The Drive

Few stories have garnered more requests from our readers for commentary than the recent news that the Navy has decided to very publicly change its reporting rules and procedures for when its personnel observes an unexplained phenomenon like a UFO and a USO. 

There have been wildly varying takes on this sudden change, but the truth is that it is very hard to know what to make of it considering how absurd it sounds-the Navy now wants to know about unidentified craft that can penetrate airspace over its installations and around its most capable naval vessels with impunity? Shouldn't that be a default position for a service tasked with defending American interests and controlling vast swathes of area above, below, and on the surface of the Earth? 

Politico was first to report on the Navy's new directions for reporting unexplained objects operating in the same environment as its vessels and aircraft. Politico's Bryan Bender writes:

"There have been a number of reports of unauthorized and/or unidentified aircraft entering various military-controlled ranges and designated air space in recent years," the Navy said in a statement in response to questions from POLITICO. "For safety and security concerns, the Navy and the [U.S. Air Force] takes these reports very seriously and investigates each and every report."

"As part of this effort," it added, "the Navy is updating and formalizing the process by which reports of any such suspected incursions can be made to the cognizant authorities. A new message to the fleet that will detail the steps for reporting is in draft."

To be clear, the Navy isn't endorsing the idea that its sailors have encountered alien spacecraft. But it is acknowledging there have been enough strange aerial sightings by credible and highly trained military personnel that they need to be recorded in the official record and studied - rather than dismissed as some kooky phenomena from the realm of science-fiction.

The Washington Post did their own follow-up to Politico's story, stating:

Recently, unidentified aircraft have entered military-designated airspace as often as multiple times per month, Joseph Gradisher, spokesman for office of the deputy chief of naval operations for information warfare, told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

Citing safety and security concerns, Gradisher vowed to "investigate each and every report."

He said, "We want to get to the bottom of this. We need to determine who's doing it, where it's coming from and what their intent is. We need to try to find ways to prevent it from happening again."

In recent years, from what we can tell, in part by the reporting done by The War Zone itself, is that there is no real way to distinctly classify something like a UFO or USO in such a way that it gets reported and an investigation occurs on an official level within the military. This appears to be true for civilian government institutions, like the FAA, as well. 

The lack of a structured procedure and classification system, and the nebulous fear of being stigmatized by reporting things like UFOs-something that has long plagued the military and private sectors alike-has repressed the conveyance of information in unquantifiable, but hugely significant ways. 

This reality has led to much speculation, and rightfully so, that the military knows far more about these strange happenings than they are willing to let on, at least on the surface. Otherwise, why wouldn't they want to know more about intruders wielding fantastic technology that makes them impervious to existing countermeasures and defenses?

Now all this appears to be changing on a grand level, but why? 

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Cyborgs 2030: The Military’s Vision of Remote Controlled Soldiers

C.K. Golden
Disinfo

(A Call to Actions)  The following is a portion of an article written by Bobby Vaughn Jr. about the US Military’s plans to develop “cyborg humans” for use in warfare.  To view the entire article please click here.

“Be All You Can Be” – the motto of Earth’s most aggressive and persistently violent team of death adders: The United States ARMY.

“The ARMY states this in a catchy way- convincing many that joining is the best you can do for yourself by improving yourself, upgrading yourself. Being all that you can be once you have raped sacred lands of all human dignity and enforced a terror state amongst the children and women?  Is that the best the United States Citizen can be? Of course not, the military wants more & more! More, of course, in a techno-integro sense.  What they want are cyborgs: Remotely-controlled man/machine trans-humans that have stripped away all dignity and will to the hands of war.”

 

Department of Defense Budget report for Fiscal Year 2015. Nanotechnology is the future of warfare. Take the boots off the ground, put them in your living room. Video games of the future might be the mans by which cyborg soldiers are controlled, perhaps they already are.

You've been lied to all the time: Chelsea Manning issues dire warning about Iraq

RT

As the White House weighs the possibility of taking military action in war-torn Iraq, WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning is warning that it’s imperative that the American media demands unfettered access to any operations overseas.

Manning, 26, issued that call for action in an editorial published in the New York Times this weekend authored from the jail cell in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas where she is currently serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking a trove of sensitive files to the anti-secrecy site. Before being arrested and charged with dozens of crimes related to the unauthorized disclosure of those documents, Manning was deployed outside of Baghdad and for months worked as an intelligence analyst for the United States Army. 

According to Manning, her experience during the Iraq War has left her believing the Pentagon has a big problem with providing access to journalists, especially those who may portray America’s military actions in a way that Defense Department wouldn’t particularly like. 

“As Iraq erupts in civil war and America again contemplates intervention, that unfinished business should give new urgency to the question of how the United States military controlled the media coverage of its long involvement there and in Afghanistan. I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance,” Manning wrote. 

Contrasting sharply the news articles authored by DOD-vetted journalists during the Iraq War, Manning wrote, was a more “complicated reality” that wasn’t being seen by reporters. 

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Pentagon preparing for mass civil breakdown

Comment: from Kevin Flaherty of cryptogon.com:

That part of the focus here is protest movements isn’t news.

I read, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping by Frank Kitson when I was in college back in the early 1990s and the book was a couple of decades old even then. 

Summary: Start gathering information on people involved in protest movements before they turn into insurgents.

In the U.S., COINTELPRO and other similar programs are standard operating procedure and have been for decades. Governments employ countless numbers of people who are tasked with infiltrating, discrediting, surveiling and otherwise rendering useless protest movements.

Also, the U.S. has had multiple martial law contingency plans in place at least as far back as the 1980s. See REX84, Garden Plot, NSPD-51.

So, a more appropriate headline might be, “Pentagon Has Been Preparing for Mass Civil Breakdown for Decades.”


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Dr. Nafeez Ahmed
The Guardian

Social science is being militarised to develop 'operational tools' to target peaceful activists and protest movements

A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 - the year of the global banking crisis - the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."

Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.  

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US Defense Dept. analyzing Bitcoin as potential terrorism threat

RT 

The US Defense Department is conducting a counterterrorism program investigation of virtual currencies like Bitcoin and other new technologies, including smartphones and social media, to better understand if they pose security threats.
 
Run by the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office (CTTSO), a division of the Pentagon that analyzes terrorism and irregular warfare capabilities, the program recently ended its open call for vendors that could help the US military understand the technologies and any threats they could potentially pose, the International Business Times reported. 

In an unclassified memo first published by Bitcoin Magazine, the CTTSO called for various solicitations for agency projects, including one for “innovative...solutions to develop and/or enhance new concepts and constructs for understanding the role of virtual currencies” in financing threats to the US. 

“The introduction of virtual currency will likely shape threat finance by increasing the opaqueness, transactional velocity, and overall efficiencies of terrorist attacks,” the memo stated. 

The anonymity offered by virtual currencies is a top point of concern for law enforcement as it aids in the formation of illicit operations like Silk Road, a digital black market thought to be closed down in October but still popular despite its founders arrest. 

Ross Ulbricht was arrested in October, 2013, and indicted in February. Prosecution alleges he was operating Silk Road, a clandestine website that allowed its users to buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods and services anonymously. The site could only be accessed through the Tor anonymizing service and the deals were made using a bitcoin-based payment system, which also enabled users to conceal their identities. 

In January, federal charges were made public against Robert Faiella and Charlie Shrem, the CEO of the bitcoin exchange service BitInstant. They have been accused of operating a bitcoin exchange business in connection with the ongoing investigation involving Silk Road. 

And in February, Mt. Gox, a top bitcoin exchange, suddenly filed for bankruptcy, claiming that hundreds of millions of bitcoins were stolen. 

The US Treasury Department said in March that, after an investigation, it had found no evidence of “widespread” use of digital currency to bankroll terrorism. 

Accordingly, the Pentagon’s CTTSO has called for research into the “anonymizing software” and “Dark Web,” or corners of the internet not indexed on normal search engines. 

The agency views anonymous networks like TOR as a convenient path to traffic drugs, humans, and weapons of all sorts. The CTTSO’s mission against potential threats also demands “methods and means to systematically discern and display ‘precursors of instability’ in the Dark Web.”
 
The CTTSO is also researching Android, Motorola, social media, and virtual reality for their potential to be used in terrorism campaigns, the International Business Times noted.