PENTAGON VIDEO WARNS OF “UNAVOIDABLE” DYSTOPIAN FUTURE FOR WORLD’S BIGGEST CITIES

THE YEAR IS 2030. Forget about the flying cars, robot maids, and moving sidewalks we were promised. They’re not happening. But that doesn’t mean the future is a total unknown.

According to a startling Pentagon video obtained by The Intercept, the future of global cities will be an amalgam of the settings of “Escape from New York” and “Robocop” — with dashes of the “Warriors” and “Divergent” thrown in. It will be a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes — brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers.

At least that’s the scenario outlined in “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a five-minute video that has been used at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University. All that stands between the coming chaos and the good people of Lagos and Dhaka (or maybe even New York City) is the U.S. Army, according to the video, which The Intercept obtained via the Freedom of Information Act.



“Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a video created by the Army and used at the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University.

The video is nothing if not an instant dystopian classic: melancholy music, an ominous voiceover, and cascading images of sprawling slums and urban conflict. “Megacities are complex systems where people and structures are compressed together in ways that defy both our understanding of city planning and military doctrine,” says a disembodied voice. “These are the future breeding grounds, incubators, and launching pads for adversaries and hybrid threats.”

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/13/pentagon-video-warns-of-unavoidable-dystopian-future-for-worlds-biggest-cities/

Bell Pottinger in the spotlight for creating propaganda videos for US military in Iraq

The work included creating short news segments made to look like Arabic news networks and fake insurgent videos, The Sunday Times, which worked with the Bureau on the investigation, and other news outlets reported over the weekend.

The scale of Bell Pottinger’s operation in Iraq was significant; costing, on average, more than a hundred million dollars per year, with the agency at one point employing almost 300 British and Iraqi staff.

Bell Pottinger made about £15m a year in fees from the work, agency founder Lord Bell told The Sunday Times, with the bulk of the money going on costs such as production and distribution.

The agency’s work started in Iraq in March 2004 when it was tasked with "promotion of democratic elections", but the Bureau said it has identified transactions worth $540m (£420m) between the Pentagon and Bell Pottinger relating to contracts issued from May 2007 to December 2011, with a contract worth a similar annual rate ($120m, £93m) reportedly in force in 2006 too.

Quoted widely in the media, former Bell Pottinger employee Martin Wells said his work consisted of three types of products: TV ads portraying al Qaeda in a negative light; news items made to look as if they had been "created by Arabic TV" and with the origins sometimes hidden; and the production of fake al Qaeda propaganda films.

The latter would be put on CDs and dropped into areas that were raided. The CDs had a code embedded in them that gave the location of where they had been played...

http://www.prweek.com/article/1410858/bell-pottinger-spotlight-creating-propaganda-videos-us-military-iraq

Largest-ever US military aid package to go to Israel

Washington (CNN) - The Obama administration is upping aid to Israel as part of the largest pledge of military assistance in US history.

Israel is set to get about $38 billion over 10 years, according to congressional and administration sources, up from the approximately $30 billion decade-long deal that expires in 2018.

The Memorandum of Understanding sealing the arrangement will be signed Wednesday at the State Department.

Talks to reach an agreement took months, unfolding behind closed doors at a time when US-Israel ties were strained by tensions between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli frustration over the nuclear pact with Iran.

"It's an important message to the region that nobody should misread the differences between the US and Israel when it comes to Iran or policy differences when it comes to the Palestinians," said David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Peace Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "At the core, the US remains very committed to Israel's long-term security."...

http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/13/politics/us-israel-military-aid-package-mou/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Military_Financing

Operation Northwoods [PDF]

Operation Northwoods

The Pentagon has shipped more than a million small arms to Iraq and Afghanistan’s defense forces

The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars since 2001 funneling roughly more than a million assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, and machine guns into Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to fuel lasting conflict there, according to a new report by a London-based nonprofit research and advocacy group Action on Armed Violence.

At least 949,582 of these small arms were given to security forces in Iraq, and at least 503,328 small arms were given to local forces in Afghanistan, the group said. They called this an “under-estimate” based on the information they were able to acquire.

If the figures are correct, the US exports amounted to more than one small arm for each member of Afghanistan’s security forces, which totaled roughly 355,000 soldiers, police, and airmen in February 2015, according to a NATO operational update on the force. The number of armaments sent to Iraq also vastly exceeded the current size of that country’s active military and paramilitaries - 209,000, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ 2016 Military Balance report.

Until now, the Pentagon hasn’t published such a tally of its own, so the group’s researchers spent a year scouring multiple databases to arrive at its estimate: a general Pentagon contract list, a government-wide contracting list, and multiple government reports on military spending. They finally calculated that the overall value of the contractually-agreed small arms shipments, just to those two countries, was roughly $2.16 billion.

U.S. intelligence reports and eyewitnesses have previously said that a significant fraction of the U.S.-financed arms were either lost or stolen, and that many wound up in the hands of forces opposed to US interests, including terrorist groups such as the Islamic State, or ISIS...

https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/08/26/20146/pentagon-has-shipped-more-million-small-arms-iraq-and-afghanistan-s-defense-forces

The Pentagon Money Pit

What if the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services were to report that $6.5 billion in spending by that federal agency was unaccounted for and untraceable? You can imagine the headlines, right? What if it was $65 billion? The headlines would be as big as for the first moon landing or for troops landing on Omaha Beach in World War II.

But how about a report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General saying that the US Army had $6.5 trillion in unaccountable expenditures for which there is simply no paper trail? That is 6,500 billion dollars! Have you heard about that? Probably not. That damning report was issued back on July 26 — two whole weeks ago — but as of today it has not even been reported anywhere in the corporate media.

It’s not that it’s secret information, or hard to come by. The report is available online at the Department of Defense’s OIG website. And as it states:

The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller) (OASA[FM&C]) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend JV adjustments made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation.2 The unsupported JV adjustments occurred because OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that caused errors resulting in JV adjustments, and did not provide sufficient guidance for supporting system‑generated adjustments.

In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System‑Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system, removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015. This occurred because DFAS Indianapolis did not have detailed documentation describing the DDRS-B import process or have accurate or complete system reports.

As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/11/pentagon-money-pit/

Pentagon source: Edward Snowden had little choice on NSA files

9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon

From railguns to AK knockoffs – Pentagon’s weapons shopping cart

While requesting $71.4 billion to fund the research and development of futuristic weapons for the US military, the Pentagon is turning to Soviet-era weapons for its proxies in Syria – and trying to get even more bang for the buck by buying Bulgarian.

Unveiling the military’s 2017 budget proposal, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter spoke of the importance of weapons research in tackling threats 10, 20 or 30 years down the road. Carter mentioned sci-fi-sounding technologies such as miniature drones, “swarming autonomous vehicles,” and railguns, which the US military is looking to adopt in the coming years.

The US Navy is already testing energy weapons as a point-defense system to bring down missiles and drones, and is looking to add railguns to the mix. A staple of science-fiction storytelling, the railguns – or Gauss rifles – use magnetic rails to launch shells at three times the speed of current naval cannons, far faster than cruise missiles. Prototype railguns are supposed to be installed aboard the USS Zumwalt, an experimental destroyer the size of a WW1 battleship currently undergoing sea trials.

Another futuristic system likely to cost the Pentagon millions is the 'Black Hornet.' The six-inch (16 cm) hand-held drone has a range of about a mile (1.6 kilometers), weighs less than an ounce, and carries three cameras for scouting in any weather – day or night. Officially designated UAS PD-100, the 'Black Hornet' is made by the Norwegian company Prox Dynamics, and sold through the Dutch-based consultancy Broadfield Security Services (BSS)...

https://www.rt.com/usa/332222-pentagon-wacky-weapons-shopping/

Obama, Pentagon clear way to send US aid to Ukraine neo-Nazis

Despite the unanimous support of US lawmakers for amendments banning aid to the openly neo-Nazi paramilitaries operating in Ukraine, the provisions were removed from the final versions of the Pentagon funding bill and the 2016 omnibus budget.

After the $1.8 trillion budget deal was struck between President Barack Obama and the Republican majority in Congress, the White House praised the removal of numerous “ideological riders,” while Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin) trumpeted the $64 million aid for European countries “facing Russian aggression.”

It now appears that one of those riders was the amendment passed unanimously by the House of Representatives last June that would have banned US aid to the notorious neo-Nazi ‘Azov’ battalion. The controversial unit is just one of many employed by the Kiev government against the residents of two eastern regions that have refused to accept the legitimacy of the government installed in the US-backed, February 2014 coup...

https://www.rt.com/usa/329010-ukraine-neo-nazis-aid/

America's $1 Trillion National Security Budget

The Pentagon's current leadership and most on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees in Congress describe President Obama's 2015 defense budget request as painfully austere, if not dangerously inadequate. The defense trade press is full of statements from generals, admirals and the other politicians from both political parties that there is not nearly enough money available to buy adequate amounts of new hardware, maintain current pay and benefits or provide even low amounts of training and equipment maintenance. As a result, they are looking for ways to relieve the Pentagon from its penury.

Scarcity of money is not their problem. Pentagon costs, taken together with other known national security expenses for 2015, will exceed $1 Trillion. How can that be? The trade press is full of statements about the Pentagon's $495.6 billion budget and how low that is.

There is much more than $495.6 billion in the budget for the Pentagon, and there are piles of national security spending outside the Pentagon-all of it as elemental for national security as any new aircraft and ships and the morale and well-being of our troops.

The table below details what a careful observer will find in President Obama's 2015 budget presentation materials. The amounts for the Pentagon are well above the advertised $495.6 billion, and there are several non-Pentagon accounts that are clearly relevant...

http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/defense-budget/2014/americas-one-trillion-national-security-budget.html

THE SPENDAGON: The Men Who Really Run the Pentagon

Before Chuck Hagel was nominated to be secretary of defense about a year ago, he made a reputation for himself as a independent Republican politician who described Pentagon spending as "bloated." In office, however, the former Nebraska senator has argued that the Pentagon should be rescued from historically minor and appropriate reductions. In doing so, he seeks to reverse one of the few real reforms that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates before him enforced on high spenders inside the Pentagon and in Congress.

Hagel and the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Sylvia Mathews Burwell, say they want to revive the old "wish list" process in which the Joint Chiefs of Staff used to connive with each other and Congress, behind the back of secretaries of defense and OMB, to make additions that couldn't cut the mustard in the regular budget review process.

Hagel has shown himself to be the individual of lesser stature that many were stunned to observe at his infamous confirmation hearing at the Senate Armed Services Committee last year. The Hagel-OMB undertaking also reveals who or what is really running the Pentagon these days: As with feckless secretaries of defense in the past, it's the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) that run the show.

Gates deserved some real praise for stopping the JCS from running behind the backs of defense secretaries (and presidents) to solicit spending above and beyond officially approved defense budgets. For years, the JCS had pre-arranged with high-spending members of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees to be asked at hearings to submit lists of programs for extra spending. The JCS preferred to call these lists "unfunded requirements;" everyone else called them "wish lists."

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/02/13/the_men_who_really_run_the_pentagon_chuck_hagel

Pentagon 'big winner' in $1T omnibus bill

The Pentagon and the defense industry came out of the $1 trillion omnibus spending bill as a big winner, experts and lawmakers said Tuesday, a day after the bill was released.

“The big winner is the Defense Department. They should be breaking out champagne in the Pentagon,” said Gordon Adams, a defense budget expert and former Clinton official.

The omnibus spending bill provides about $497 billion for the Defense Department in 2014 — about the same as in 2013. But the Pentagon also received $85.2 billion in overseas contingency operations (OCO) for the war in Afghanistan, roughly $5 billion more than it requested for 2014.

Before last month’s budget deal that relieved $22.4 billion in sequestration cuts, the 2014 defense budget would have been around $475 billion.

The OCO funding, which Adams said is the “cherry on top of the dessert,” can be used to pay for operations and maintenance in the base budget and help restore military readiness lost in previous years.

Fiscal watchdog and anti-war groups criticized the $5 billion increase from the Pentagon's request in OCO funding as a “slush fund to pad the department’s budget and avoid spending reductions,” especially with the winding down of the Afghan War...

http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/budget-appropriations/195449-pentagon-a-big-winner-in-1t-omnibus-spending-bill

911GATE: Rumsfeld Predicted Pentagon Attack - YouTube

via youtube.com

Pentagon establishes Defense Clandestine Service, new espionage unit - The Washington Post

History is pretty consistent in the result of combining foreign and domestic intelligence services.  That is, it never ends well.

"The Pentagon is planning to ramp up its spying operations against high-priority targets such as Iran under an intelligence reorganization aimed at expanding on the military’s espionage efforts beyond war zones, a senior defense official said Monday.

The newly created Defense Clandestine Service would work closely with the CIA — pairing two organizations that have often seen each other as rivals — in an effort to bolster espionage operations overseas at a time when the missions of the agency and the military increasingly converge.

The plan, the official said, was developed in response to a classified study completed last year by the director of national intelligence that concluded that the military’s espionage efforts needed to be more focused on major targets beyond the tactical considerations of Iraq and Afghanistan..."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-creates-new-espionage-unit/2012/04/23/gIQA9R7DcT_print.html

9/11 Flight 77 Did Not Crash Into The Pentagon

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CIA, Pentagon fight to keep Osama bin Laden death photos secret

Photos and videos of Al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden after he was killed in May in a U.S. military/Central Intelligence Agency raid in Pakistan should not be released publicly because they would reveal military and intelligence secrets and could lead to violence against U.S. personnel, the Obama administration argued in papers filed in federal court in Washington late Monday night.

The new filings from the Justice Department provide scant details about the imagery, but CIA National Clandestine Service Director John Bennett wrote that the CIA has "52 unique....photographs and/or videorecordings" depicting bin Laden during or after the May operation. Bennett did not break down the tally further, but said all the imagery is classified "TOP SECRET," meaning that disclosure of the material could lead to "exceptionally grave damage" to U.S. national security.

"All of the responsive records are the product of a highly sensitive, overseas operation that was conducted under the direction of the CIA," Bennett wrote, arguing that disclosure of the information would reveal "intelligence activities and/or methods." He called the photos "gruesome," and said they depict the gunshot wound to bin Laden's head. It is unclear whether his descriptions referred to all the images and videos, or just some of them.

via politico.com

Nick Turse: The Pentagon's New Power Elite

"Somewhere on this planet an American commando is carrying out a mission. Now, say that 70 times and you're done... for the day. Without the knowledge of the American public, a secret force within the U.S. military is undertaking operations in a majority of the world's countries. This new Pentagon power elite is waging a global war whose size and scope has never been revealed, until now.

After a U.S. Navy SEAL put a bullet in Osama bin Laden's chest and another in his head, one of the most secretive black-ops units in the American military suddenly found its mission in the public spotlight. It was atypical. While it's well known that U.S. Special Operations forces are deployed in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it's increasingly apparent that such units operate in murkier conflict zones like Yemen and Somalia, the full extent of their worldwide war has remained deeply in the shadows.

Last year, Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post reported that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency. By the end of this year, U.S. Special Operations Command spokesman Colonel Tim Nye told me, that number will likely reach 120. "We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq," he said recently. This global presence -- in about 60% of the world's nations and far larger than previously acknowledged -- provides striking new evidence of a rising clandestine Pentagon power elite waging a secret war in all corners of the world..."

http://counterpunch.com/turse08042011.html

9/11 Pentagon Attack

via vimeo.com

List of cyber-weapons developed by Pentagon to streamline computer warfare

"The Pentagon has developed a list of cyber-weapons and -tools, including viruses that can sabotage an adversary’s critical networks, to streamline how the United States engages in computer warfare.

The classified list of capabilities has been in use for several months and has been approved by other agencies, including the CIA, said military officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive program. The list forms part of the Pentagon’s set of approved weapons or “fires” that can be employed against an enemy..."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/list-of-cyber-weapons-developed-by-pen...