The Air Force is looking to harness advances in bio-science so they can “degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive abilities.” It’s all part of a $49 million dollar bio-research effort unveiled last month by the Air Force Research Lab’s “Human Effectiveness Directorate,” and it’s the latest in a series of out-there military ideas to mess with adversaries’ heads.

For years, armed forces and intelligence community researchers have toyed with ways of manipulating minds. During the Cold War, the CIA and the military allegedly plied the unwitting with acid, weed, and dozens of psychoactive drugs, in a series of zany (and sometimes dangerous) mind-control experiments. In the 1970s and 80s, a small group of special operations soldiers at Ft. Bragg supposedly tried to teach themselves how to kill with psychic power – the basis for the upcoming movie The Men Who Stare at Goats. In 1994, one Air Force researcher proposed spraying enemies with “strong aphrodisiacs [which] caused homosexual behavior.” Last year, the National Research Council and Defense Intelligence Agency pushed for pharmaceutical-based tactics to weaken enemy forces.

This new Air Force project looks to do just that – and boost the cognitive abilities of U.S. troops at the same time. One component of the research effort, called Biobehavioral Performance, is looking for military specimens who are already resistant to physical or mental stressors. By analyzing the biochemical brain pathways of troops who are cool under pressure, the Air Force wants an “external stimulant” that can act as a synthetic version of optimal cognitive stress response and keep airmen operating at top level.

Resisting stress is good, but destroying your enemy with stress is even better. “Conversely, the chemical pathway area could include methods to degrade enemy performance and artificially overwhelm enemy cognitive capabilities,” the Air Force call for proposals notes. No further details are given. Researchers will just have to be creative, if they want to look for ways to turn military foes insane.

A team of journalists investigating the global electronic waste business has unearthed a security problem too. In a Ghana market, they bought a computer hard drive containing sensitive documents belonging to U.S. government contractor Northrop Grumman.

The drive had belonged to a Fairfax, Virginia, employee who still works for the company and contained “hundreds and hundreds of documents about government contracts,” said Peter Klein, an associate professor with the University of British Columbia, who led the investigation for the Public Broadcasting Service show Frontline. He would not disclose details of the documents, but he said that they were marked “competitive sensitive” and covered company contracts with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Transportation Security Agency.

The data was unencrypted, Klein said in an interview. The cost? US$40.

Northrop Grumman is not sure how the drive ended up in a Ghana market, but apparently the company had hired an outside vendor to dispose of the PC. “Based on the documents we were shown, we believe this hard drive may have been stolen after one of our asset-disposal vendors took possession of the unit,” the Northrop Grumman said in a statement. “Despite sophisticated safeguards, no company can inoculate itself completely against crime.”

A Northrop Grumman spokesman would not say who was responsible for disposing of the drive, but in its statement the company noted that “the fact that this information is outside our control is disconcerting.”

Some of the documents talked about how to recruit airport screeners and several of them even covered data security practices, Klein said. “It was a wonderful, ironic twist,” Klein said. “Here were these contracts being awarded based on their ability to keep the data safe.”

According to Klein, it’s common for old computers and electronic devices to be improperly dumped in developing countries such as Ghana and China, where locals scavenge the material for components, often under horrific working conditions.

Last year the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that a substantial amount of the country’s e-waste ended up in developing countries, where it was often dangerously disposed of.

The reporters bought seven hard drives, Klein said. The other drives contained sensitive information about their previous owners, including credit-card numbers, resumes and online account information.

Off-camera, sources in Ghana told the reporters that data thieves routinely scour these hard drives for sensitive information, Klein said.

Although that may be worrying to some, security experts say that there is already a vast quantity of this type of information available online from criminals who have stolen it from hacked computers.

Compared to hacking, stealing data from old hard drives is pretty inefficient, said Scott Moulton, an Atlanta data-recovery expert who teaches classes on data recovery. “It’s a tremendous amount of work, so it’s only going to be the bottom-of-the-barrel guys who would do that,” he said. “It’s happening on a small scale.”

Still, it’s easy for criminals to find data on drives, even when they’ve been legitimately wiped clean, Moulton said. He buys used hard drives by the hundreds for his classes. These drives have been professionally wiped, but his students always find at least one drive in each class with information still on it.

That’s because it’s easy for a drive to get missed during the wiping process or improperly wiped. Compounding the problem, the software that some recycling companies use doesn’t actually remove all data from the drive, especially data that may be hidden on corrupted parts of the hard drive known as bad blocks, he explained.

The surest way to get your data off of a hard drive is to physically destroy it, Moulton said.

A new report from the National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council (NRC) argues that the Pentagon should harvest the fruits of neuro scientific research in order to enhance the “war fighting” capabilities of U.S. soldiers while diminishing those of enemy personnel.

The 151-page report issued by a 16-member blue ribbon commission, “Cognitive Neuroscience Research and National Security,” was quietly announced in an August 13 National Academy of Sciences Press Release.

Commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon spy shop, the study asserts that the U.S. intelligence “community” must do a better job following cutting-edge research in neuroscience or as is more likely, steering it along paths useful to the Defense Department. According to the NRC,

A 2005 National Research Council report described a methodology for gauging the implications of new technologies and assessing whether they pose a threat to national security. In this new report, the committee applied the methodology to the neuroscience field and identified several research areas that could be of interest to the intelligence community: neurophysiological advances in detecting and measuring indicators of psychological states and intentions of individuals, the development of drugs or technologies that can alter human physical or cognitive abilities, advances in real-time brain imaging, and breakthroughs in high-performance computing and neuronal modeling that could allow researchers to develop systems which mimic functions of the human brain, particularly the ability to organize disparate forms of data. (“National Security Intelligence Organizations should Monitor Advances in Cognitive Neuroscience Research,” National Academy of Sciences, Press Release, August 13, 2008)

Unlocking the secrets of the brain is projected as the next growth industry for the military, academia and corporate grifters hoping to land huge Pentagon contracts. As defense analyst Noah Shachtman reported in Wired, the “Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of “synthetic telepathy.” Unlike “remote viewing” research funded by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency between 1972 and 1996, variously known as “Grill Flame,” “Sun Streak” and finally, “Star Gate” before the plug was pulled, the Army-U.C. Irvine joint venture are exploring thought transmission via a brain-computer mediated interface.

Recently New Scientist reported on a series of bizarre experiments at the University of Reading in the UK. Researchers there have connected 300,000 disembodied rat neurons suspended in “a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics” to 80 electrodes at the base of the growth medium. As journalist Paul Marks informs us, the “rat neurons have made–and continue to make–connections with each other.” The voltages sparked by the firing cells are displayed on a computer screen.

Welcome to the “brave new world” of neural prosthetics and the militarists who are exploiting science and technology for new weapons applications.
Declaring that emerging technologies such as brain imaging and cognitive and physical enhancers are “desired by the public,” NRC avers “such forces act as strong market incentives for development.” But as Rick Weiss cautions on the Science Progress blog,

But even more interesting to me is the report’s discussion of the emerging market in brain-targeted, performance-degrading techniques. Some experiments, it turns out, suggest that magnetic beams can be used to induce seizures in people, a tempting addition to the military’s armamentarium. More conventionally, as scientists discover new chemicals that can blur thinking or undermine an enemy’s willpower, and as engineers design aerosolized delivery systems that can deliver these chemicals directly to the lungs (and from there, the brains) of large groups of people, the prospect of influencing the behavior of entire enemy regiments becomes real. (“Minding Mental Minefields,” Science Progress, August 15, 2008)

The use of so-called calmative agents as non-lethal weapons are already under development. As Antifascist Calling reported last month in “The Calmative Before the Storm,” the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) are carrying out experiments into what it euphemistically calls “Human Effects Research” and developing an “Advanced Total Body Model for predicting the effects of non-lethal impacts.”

Apparently the DIA has taken this a step further and will now explore the possibility of creating aerosolized pharmacological agents that can disrupt and perhaps influence, the mental functioning of targeted populations abroad, enemy soldiers or dissenting citizens here in the United States.

Neil Davison, a researcher with the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre (BDRC) at Bradford University in the UK, wrote an important 2007 study, “‘Off the Rocker’ and ‘On the Floor’: The Continued Development of Biochemical Incapacitating Weapons.” Davison examined the historical differentiation made by weaponeers between “off the rocker” agents such as LSD, PCP and psilocybin in their allegedly weaponized forms versus “on the floor” agents such as sedatives, opiate analgesics and anesthetic chemicals.

As the NRC would have it, academics in thrall to corporate funding and state agencies staffed by war criminals now expect us to believe that “ethics” will guide those exploring pharmacological methods to obtain more insidious means to subjugate humanity.

Weiss reports that the NRC notes in its report, the motivation, or lack thereof, to fight, is of great concern to Pentagon bureaucrats and policy makers. “So one question,” for military-corporate-academic funded research “would be, ‘How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight?’ Other questions raised by controlling the mind: ‘How can we make people trust us more?’ ‘What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain?’ ‘Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?’…As cognitive neuroscience and related technologies become more pervasive, using technology for nefarious purposes becomes easier.”

But as is usual with all such screeds, the psychoanalytic theory of projection comes in handy when deciphering the monstrous intent of Pentagon weaponeers. It is all-too-clear whether we are discussing nuclear, biological, chemical or contemporaneously, cognitive weapons that Western proponents of preemptive war, always couch their acts of violent imperialist aggression in purely defensive terms.

In this light, Freud and his followers have defined projection as a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, and where aggressive impulses then appear as a threat from the external world. In the case of corporate defense and security grifters, their militarist pit bulls and the academic sycophants who fuel their deranged “cognitive warfare” fantasies, the other–a nation, a dispossessed class or a bogeyman such as “international terrorism”–are always the external harbingers of apocalyptic death and destruction, when in reality such fantasies are wholly reflective of their own desire to aggressively dominate and plunder other nations.

Therefore, the NRC maintains, and note the ideologically-skewed reference to the eternal verities of “the market,” the Holy Grail of capitalism in its hyperimperialist phase:

The fear that this approach to fighting war might be developed will be justification for developing countermeasures to possible cognitive weapons. This escalation might lead to innovations that could cause this market area to expand rapidly. Tests would need to be developed to determine if a soldier had been harmed by a cognitive weapon. And there would be a need for a prophylactic of some sort. (NRC, op. cit.)

Who, pray tell, is driving this “escalation” and counting on academia to produce “innovations” in “this market area”? One might also quite reasonably inquire: Who profits?

As Christopher Green, the chairman of the NRC investigative panel championing neuroweapons research avers in a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,

Big Pharma is global. Drug discovery research is both ponderous (not as much as arms control, however) and increasingly beyond the control of governments and the public. The development of cognitive enhancers and anti-aging aides during the next two decades (the time needed for drug discovery to become successful) will be…ethically worrisome. But it will be beyond opprobrium. Drugs will be developed and marketed, and not necessarily under the auspices of traditional Western controls and good laboratory practices. (“The potential impact of neuroscience research is greater than previously thought,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9 July 2008) [emphasis added]

While Green claims he is opposed to developing drugs “with safe and efficacious properties for military use,” the NRC study, after all, was funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, hardly a “neutral party” when it comes to “enhanced interrogation techniques” and other horrors of this horrible system!

One must also dissect the linguistic formulations and assumptions deployed by those advocating this line of research. By referring to neuroweapons production as a “market area,” those contemplating unleashing devilish pharmacological forms of warfare on unsuspecting populations behave, in you’ll pardon the pun, as if they were brainstorming the release of a new video game or suite of luxury condominiums in an American city “ethnically cleansed” of its urban poor!

Green and his acolytes claim that “battlefield commanders of all nations hold sacrosanct the right to determine the applications” of weapon deployments that may cause “collateral damage” to civilian noncombatants. Therefore, Green argues that “if governments or scientists were to try to develop a system to pre-screen neuroscientific cognitive manipulators, which would be HIPAA approved and tested, and robust in its core science, success would be as likely as it was with mines and cluster-bombs–meaning not likely.” Translation: full-speed ahead!

While the NRC allege that their approach to monitoring neuroweapons research is “ethical,” the committee ponders whether “the concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that someday there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects.”

This Article details how the US came to the conclusion that Iraq was a threat concerning weapons of mass destruction and how and why an over zealous Bush administration led the US to this extremely expensive multi-year Occupation in Iraq.

To the surprise of few, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency-led survey group hunting for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had admitted in one of his reports that none have yet been unearthed.

But the Iraq Survey Group’s leader, David Kay, did say that Saddam Hussein “remained firmly committed to acquiring nuclear weapons”. However, they have not found any, nor any evidence of any.

The report will come as more bad news for President George W Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are under increasing pressure from their American and British constituencies for allegedly “cooking” or exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam as a pretext for going to war against him.

And now confirmed reports from the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which says that information provided by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) about Iraq’s weapon’s programs was exaggerated and false.

Two DIA agents currently serving in Iraq, who also voiced bitterness about other aspects of US Iraq policy, spoke on condition of anonymity to Asia Times Online. The first, a 30-year veteran of the agency, complained that “the fixation on weapons is alienating intelligence staff”, calling it an “obsession”.

Officials in Washington now confirm that former Iraqi officials who had defected and were handed over to the CIA by the INC, the exile opposition group led by Chalabi, provided them with information on Iraq’s WMD program, which the Bush administration relied on to press its case for war.

In Iraq, this was confirmed by the same DIA agent. “The statements on WMD that the INC guys brought in matched conclusions they [Bush cabinet members] already had. We looked at the info and said ‘you can’t be serious, you have got to be kidding’.”

There has been an increase in the willingness of intelligence officials from the CIA and DIA to speak out about their skepticism over Iraq WMD claims since the end of the war and the failure to discover any evidence of their existence. Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix also recently asserted that Iraq had had no chemical or biological program since 1998, and no nuclear program since the first Gulf war of 1991.

The DIA agent went on to say, in Chalabi’s defense that “there were plenty of good reasons to attack Iraq, human rights, dictatorship, but the impetus to attack was the immediacy of a threat. Without Chalabi and his access to the Pentagon through [former CIA chief James] Woolsey and then [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz, [Vice President Dick] Cheyney, [Pentagon head Donald] Rumsfeld and [Under Secretary of Defense Douglas J ] Feith the war wouldn’t have happened. The INC was very good at manipulating the press. They would say, ‘look at this, look at this’, and [New York Times reporter] Judy Miller would go to Baghdad and chase down a guy and her information provided the lever to go to war.”

This DIA agent, who has served as an interrogator at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where the US holds alleged terrorists from Afghanistan called “illegal combatants”, also rejected claims still alleged by the vice president that there was a relationship between Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and Saddam’s regime in Iraq. “There were four Iraqis in Guantanamo. More people had British passports than Iraqi ones.”

Now serving in Iraq as a security expert, the DIA agent criticized post-war policy as well, referring to what he described as “the coalition’s pursuit of a single point panacea with a semblance of political organization to hand over the country to them”, meaning the undue trust placed in Chalabi’s organization, as well as Iyad Alawi’s Iraqi National Accord. He also did not mince words with the staff of the office of the Coalition Provisional Administration (CPA), headed by L Paul Bremer. He viewed Bremer’s young staff as immature and inexperienced, citing the case where an aide to Bremer did not want to issue weapons licenses for a political organization to provide for its security,”she’s worried about issuing a few weapons licenses when they have whole armies”.

He added that Bremer’s predecessor Jay Garner was unfairly maligned due to inflated expectations. “Garner was friendly, approachable and personable. He got scapegoated by impatient people in DC. Now its DC politics and ‘what’s your stance on Israel’?” He also strongly criticized Bremer’s decision to dismiss all 400,000 members of the Iraqi army. “It was a dogmatic and ideological brain fart idea to dissolve the military. They should have used them for security. They should have issued an order mobilizing the regular army and put them on highways.” He ended his litany by adding that there was not even any cable television in the al-Rashid hotel where CPA staff were housed and they had to rely on short wave radio for news “they want to keep CPA staff as ignorant as possible”.

A lieutenant-colonel in the DIA who specialized in terrorism and the Muslim world also ridiculed the claims connecting Iraq and al-Qaeda, adding that administration officials relied on evidence provided by Laurie Mylroie in her book The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge. “From her book,” he said, “It was evident she hadn’t spent one day in the Middle East but she was close with Wolfowitz and as a result we had a guy on staff [at the DIA] whose job for two years was to debunk her allegations.”

The lieutenant-colonel maintained that the civilian staff of CPA, drawn from the State Department, were ineffective in Iraq. “The State Department just generates public policy papers,” he said, “they don’t do anything, they don’t run organizations.” He cited a recent CPA talking point that it would be run and structured like an embassy, “but embassies preserve the status quo, they don’t do anything, we are creating a revolution. Military officers are used to managing organizations and know they have to deal with everybody from top to bottom, but the State Department trains policy makers and they don’t want to hear stuff they disagree with.”

He added finally that Iraqis are ill informed about what the CPA does do because “CPA public affairs pay more attention to the foreign press then the local Iraqi press. English is a problem. Also they are used to a standard press conference and then send press releases that nobody reads. Even if Iraqi papers can find the numbers for CPA, nobody returns their calls.”

The 30-year veteran also confirms language difficulties in Iraq. “The entire government was unprepared for 9/11 [September 11] and for Iraq in terms of linguists and interrogators.”

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said on Tuesday that Iran has the ability to launch a ballistic missile capable of hitting sections of eastern and southern Europe.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Trey Obering, director of the Missile Defense Agency, told reporters he believes Iran now has a missile with a range of 1,250 miles, but he declined to say whether the weapon has been test-fired.

Iran said last week it conducted two missile tests involving a number of weapons including what Iranian state television called a “new” Shahab-3 missile, a medium-range missile that could be used to strike Israel.

Tensions over Iran’s missile arsenal and accusations from the United States and its allies that Tehran is pursuing nuclear weapons have roiled international financial markets with fears of a possible military confrontation.

Iran denies it wants nuclear weapons and says its nuclear program is designed to produce electricity to increase its output of oil and natural gas.

Older versions of the Shahab-3 have an 800-mile (1,300-km) range. But a new extended version is believed to have a range of up to 1,250 miles, making it capable of hitting targets as far away as Greece, Serbia, Romania and Belarus.

Iran is also developing a solid-fuel missile known as the Ashura with a range of 1,250 miles, according to the Pentagon.

U.S. officials and independent missile experts have said last week’s tests involved no new or enhanced technology, or even the latest generations of missiles known to be in Iran’s arsenal.

Obering did not dispute those assertions in a briefing for Pentagon officials on Tuesday.

But his description of Iran’s missile capability was stronger than what U.S. officials have said up to now.

“The Iranians themselves are describing … a 2,000-km range missile launch,” Obering said of last week’s tests, adding that Iran also claimed to have such a missile in November.

“I believe, based on what I have seen, that they have the ability to do that and to continue to advance in the future, based on what I have seen so far from those (Iranian state media) reports and from the intelligence reports,” he added.

“I won’t go into detail as to what was fired when. That’s something I think the intel community should answer,” he said.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, which monitors major weapons threats to the United States and its allies, was more vague in its February 27 testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“Iran continues to develop and acquire ballistic missiles that can hit Israel and central Europe, including Iranian claims of an extended-range variant of the Shahab-3 and a new 2,000-km medium range ballistic missile called the Ashura,” DIA director Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples told the panel.

U.S. officials and analysts dismissed last week’s missile tests as an angry Iranian response to recent military exercises including an Israeli air exercise in June that some have called a rehearsal for an attack on Iran.

The Bush administration has used concern about Iranian missiles to press forward with plans for a missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, capable of protecting both Europe and the United States from attack.

Washington and the Czech Republic signed an agreement last week to place missile-tracking radar on Czech soil. U.S. officials are now hoping for a deal to station the system’s interceptor missiles in Poland.