Fidel Castro claims Osama bin Laden is a US spy

Former Cuban president says the 9/11 mastermind is in the pay of the CIA and cites WikiLeaks as his source

Roland W. Haas, a senior intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserve who claimed in a 2007 memoir that he was a CIA assassin, died over the weekend when he accidentally shot himself, police in Georgia said.

According to an account in the Newnan, Ga., Times-Herald, “Passing motorists saw Haas on the side of the road” on Saturday night “and heard the pop of a gunshot.”

A police patrolman soon discovered Haas, 58, lying face down behind his car and pronounced him dead, the paper said.

Haas had shot himself in the femoral artery in his right leg, the Coweta County police told the paper. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation ruled his death accidental.

“Authorities believe the victim was in medical distress at the time of the shooting,” the paper reported. “He was in diabetic shock, he suffered heart disease and had ‘several other things going on,’ ” police said.

In “Enter the Past Tense: My Secret Life as a CIA Assassin,” Haas said he had been recruited by the CIA in 1971, when he was a teenager, to conduct behind-the-lines Cold War assassinations. The account agitated a handful of former CIA officers into protesting his employment as head of intelligence for the U.S. Army Reserve at Ft. McPherson, Ga.

Haas was a fraud, John F. Sullivan, a retired CIA polygrapher, wrote to commanders.

“As one of an increasing number of former intelligence officers who believes that Roland Haas’ book… is a hoax, I find your willingness to tolerate Mr. Haas in his scam very disturbing,” Sullivan wrote.

“I am certain that you are as aware as I am that Mr. Haas’ book is 99 percent fiction, but I know also that for you to acknowledge this would leave your component’s hiring and personnel policies open to criticism. As embarrassing as that might be, it is the right thing to do. At some point, Haas will be exposed, and when that happens, your role in this hoax, however minor, could be addressed.”

A handful of accounts about the Haas controversy, including one by SpyTalk in 2008, have mysteriously vanished from the Internet.

On his Facebook page, Haas described himself as “self-employed” but listed two previous, unenumerated stints with the “Department of Defense.”

“Based on the Herald-Times article, it would appear as if Haas had fallen on hard times,” Sullivan said today. “May he rest In peace.”

[Via:Washington Post]

Former FBI agent discloses Information Linking Another Individual to the JFK Assassination

In the 18 months since the election, our new president seems to have undergone a 180 reversal in his politics. As well as reneging on nearly all his campaign promises, he has continued and expanded the pro-war, pro-torture, pro-covert assassination and anti-civil liberties policies of his predecessor George W. Bush. Eighteen months into Bush’s presidency, the major corporate players who influenced Bush and Cheney were blatantly obvious. Bush had extensive prior (family) ties with the oil industry and Cheney with both oil companies and defense contractors. While Obama also seems to be at the beck and call of corporate backers, exactly who they are is much less clear. The question has led many analysts on both sides of the political aisle – to take a closer look at his background before he came on the national stage as a US senator from Illinois senator in 2004.

Obama’s secrecy and evasiveness about his early life hasn’t helped. In fact there are gaping holes in his resume that have led to all kinds of (mainly right wing) conspiracy theories about the authenticity of his birth certificate, his secret adherence to the Muslim religion, a possible stint with the CIA during the years nobody remembers him at Columbia, and his allegiance to a secret international Marxist/socialist conspiracy. I think the birth certificate issue is a red herring to distract people from growing evidence that Obama has a past in intelligence. Likewise a so-called Marxist/socialist conspiracy would require financing – and wealthy elites are very reluctant to fund Marxist-Leninist groups that seek to deprive them of their wealth.

According to Obama’s unofficial biographer Webster Tarpley and Wayne Madsen, a former National Security Agency employee and member of the Association for Intelligence Officers, more and more credible evidence is surfacing that Obama had some type of intelligence career before entering public life. The Russians certainly thought he did when they detained Senators Obama and Lugar in 2004 following a three day fact finding mission related to disarmament talks. In fact they accused Obama of spying for the British (?) and demanded to search his aircraft (as he was leaving, not entering, the country).

More Via:noonehastodietomorrow

The victors in battles are those who create, modify and deploy ideas faster and more nimbly than opponents. Regrettably, limiting the U.S. military’s access to ideas risks failure.

For years, the U.S. military has been losing an asymmetric battle that involves not improvised explosive devices, bullets or al-Qaida, but instead swarms of defense industry contractors seizing control of taxpayer-funded ideas because government policy and regulations were engineered to buy iron and steel, not to deploy a software-based military.

Much like the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rapid and continual evolution of technology demands that the military accelerate just as rapidly, and the only way is to manage the ideas it has funded.

A common theme since 9/11 is that the U.S. government lacks imagination. We have not misplaced our imagination; we are simply unable to deploy new ideas as effectively or as quickly as we could. This loss of agility stands in stark contrast to private industry, foreign governments and nonstate actors, who are adopting and deploying software technologies once exclusively in the military domain.

For instance, China deploys advanced electronic warfare technologies, Iran builds unmanned aircraft, al-Qaida evolves explosive devices, and private companies like FedEx and eTrade create complex, redundant and failsafe command-and-control systems.

Software is the fabric that enables planning, weapons and logistics systems to function. It might be the only infinitely renewable military resource. New software builds on the raw material of previous software, evolving capabilities. Software is pervasive, from ground sensors to satellites; it is the final expression of a military idea transformed into human readable source code and deployed to a battlefield.

The Department of Defense spends tens of billions of dollars annually creating software that is rarely reused and difficult to adapt to new threats. Instead, much of this software is allowed to become the property of defense companies, resulting in DoD repeatedly funding the same solutions or, worse, repaying to use previously created software.

The lack of a coherent set of policies and regulations for the DoD’s intellectual property has eroded the U.S. military competitive advantage, leading to compromised missions and lost lives. Improvised explosive device countermeasure systems can’t be upgraded rapidly without replacing entire systems; personnel position systems can’t update in real time; billions are wasted on software radios that don’t interoperate.

The byzantine rules governing the military’s intellectual property portfolio use an antiquated rights structure where the contractor always retains copyright, and therefore effective monopoly, control over taxpayer-funded software ideas. By contrast, commercial industry ruthlessly exercises control over its own software ideas.

The U.S. government has legislated a belief that the defense industry will do right by the military. However, the defense industry will, understandably, do what is best for its shareholders: maximize profit.

Monopolies via copyright ultimately increase costs and decrease adaptability and agility in military software. Examples include the General Atomics Predator and the recently canceled Future Combat Systems, where only one company can control these platforms and manipulate the software. Imagine if only the manufacturer of a rifle were allowed to clean, fix, modify or upgrade that rifle. This is where the military finds itself: one contractor with a monopoly on the knowledge of a military software system.

A first step would be to require all taxpayer-funded software ideas to be licensed with an open source software copyright. An open source license would define the rights, roles and responsibilities for the military and defense industry and simplify how military software ideas can be shared. To keep the U.S. military ahead of its adversaries, the DoD and defense industry must end this dysfunctional partnership of nonsharing.

Defining a modern software intellectual property regime would broaden the defense industrial base by enabling industry access to defense knowledge, thereby increasing competition and eventually lowering costs. Over time, DoD would evolve common software architectures and industrywide baselines to increase the adaptability, agility and – most important – capacity to meet new dynamic threats.

As Defense Secretary Robert Gates said at the Eisenhower Library, “The gusher has been turned off and will stay off for a good period of time.”

The Department of Defense must develop a rights regime that explicitly deals with taxpayer-funded software ideas to increase returns on software investments.

The software idea chain is a future weapon; we can either plan for it now or be on the receiving end of it later.

[Via: DefenseNews]