Obama Raises Intelligence Budget

President Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget would fund a major new spy satellite proposal, provide $2 billion in additional funding for Department of Defense surveillance efforts and increase spending on drug-related intelligence programs.

Although most specifics of the intelligence budget are classified, budget documents provide hints of some priorities.

The budget would allocate an unspecified amount to the new “Imagery Satellite Way Ahead” program, a joint effort between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense designed to revamp the nation’s constellation of spy satellites.

The mostly classified plan would include new, redesigned “electro-optical” satellites, which collect data from across the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as the expanded use of commercial satellite imagery. Although the cost is secret, most estimates place it in the multibillion-dollar range.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been at odds with Defense appropriators and intelligence community leaders over spy satellite capabilities.

The top Republican on the Intelligence panel, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, has pushed for alternative plans to those recommended by intelligence community leaders, contending that his proposals would cost less and perform better.

The Pentagon would get about $2 billion more for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) programs such as unmanned drones and improved software for processing data — all to better combat terrorists and insurgents. The total amount is classified.

According to a Pentagon budget summary, that money would pay for:

• 50 Predator-class unmanned aerial patrols. According to a Defense Department summary, “This capability, which has been in high demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, will now be permanently funded in the base budget.”

• An increase in manned ISR capabilities, “such as the turbo-prop aircraft deployed as part of Task Force Odin in Iraq.”

• “Research and development on a number of ISR enhancements and experimental platforms.”

In addition, the FBI would get a boost of $555.6 million to help pay for an additional 357 agents and 321 intelligence analysts, according to a Department of Justice summary.

The Treasury Department’s counterterror and financial intelligence operations would receive $168 million, or 10 percent more than in fiscal 2009. Some of the funds would go toward supporting a joint program between the Treasury and U.S. Special Operations Command, an Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell designed to disrupt terror financing in that country, with an emphasis on narcotics.

Increased funding through the Drug Enforcement Administration and other Justice Department drug-related programs would pay for 25 new intelligence analysts. Much of their work would focus on interrupting drug flows across the U.S.-Mexico border and aiding law enforcement in combating Mexican drug cartels.

Unlike his predecessor, Obama does not recommend closing the National Drug Intelligence Center, a program that is located in the district of House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John P. Murtha , D-Pa., and has prompted heated partisan floor fights.

Although the request for the National Intelligence Program — which includes all spy agencies except those of the military branches — is classified, recently disclosed figures for fiscal 2008 put the budget total at $47.5 billion.

Secret Executive Order Gives U.S. Military Wide Latitude

The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials.

These military raids, typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States.

In 2006, for example, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency. Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away.
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Secret Project Accounts For Decline in Iraq Violence

Apparently the following article cites  “secret military technology” as being the key component to the rapid decline in violence that we have seen in Iraq over the past several months.

I was just wondering why we have not heard of these operational capabilities mentioned anywhere else in the mainstream media, although the mention of it in this article is very general and non-specific.

WASHINGTON — The dramatic drop in violence in Iraq is due in large part to a secret program the U.S. military has used to kill terrorists, according to a new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bob Woodward.

The program — which Woodward compares to the World War II era Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb — must remain secret for now or it would “get people killed,” Woodward said Monday on CNN’s Larry King Live.

“It is a wonderful example of American ingenuity solving a problem in war, as we often have,” Woodward said.

In “The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008,” Woodward disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders.

National security adviser Stephen Hadley, in a written statement reacting to Woodward’s book, acknowledged the new strategy. Yet he disputed Woodward’s conclusion that the “surge” of 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq was not the primary reason for the decline in violent attacks.

“It was the surge that provided more resources and a security context to support newly developed techniques and operations,” Hadley wrote.

Woodward, associate editor of the Washington Post, wrote that along with the surge and the new covert tactics, two other factors helped reduce the violence.

One was the decision of militant cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order a cease-fire by his Mehdi Army. The other was the “Anbar Awakening” movement that saw Sunni tribes aligning with U.S. troops to battle al Qaeda in Iraq.

Woodward told Larry King that while there is a debate over how much credit the new secret operations should get for the drop in violence, he concluded it “accounts for a good portion.”

“I would somewhat compare it to the Manhattan Project in World War II,” he said “It’s a ski slope right down in a matter of months, cutting the violence in half. This isn’t going to happen with the bunch of joint security stations or the surge.”

The top secret operations, he said, will “some day in history … be described to people’s amazement.”

While he would not reveal the details, Woodward said the terrorists who have been targeted were already aware of the capabilities.

“The enemy has a heads up because they’ve been getting wiped out and a lot of them have been killed,” he said. “It’s not news to them.

“If you were a member of al Qaeda or the resistance or some extremist militia, you would be wise to get your rear end out of town,” Woodward said. “It is very dangerous.”

Intelligence Community Paints Grim Future

The world economy is failing, U.S. forces remain tied up in Iraq, Afghanistan is on a downward spiral — one might wonder why anyone would want to be U.S. president during these trying times. Recently, the nation’s chief intelligence officer weighed in, painting an even more somber picture of a far more complicated world. National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell looked beyond the immediate future, focusing on what his analysts are telling him about the challenges the world community is likely to face by 2025. It isn’t pretty. Speaking to an annual conference of intelligence officials and contractors, McConnell said demographics, competition for natural resources and climate change will increase the potential for conflict. President-elect Barack Obama may get a glimpse of some of those challenges on Thursday. McConnell is expected to lead Obama’s first top-secret intelligence briefing, according to U.S. officials familiar with the process.

A team of intelligence briefers has been named and is ready to discuss with Obama the Presidential Daily Brief, similar to the one provided to President Bush, says a message from CIA Director Michael Hayden to CIA employees obtained by CNN.

According to McConnell’s outlook, economic and population growth will strain resources. “Demand is projected to outstrip the easily available supplies over the next decade,” he said at the annual conference.

The intelligence community’s forecast indicates oil and gas supplies will continue to dwindle and production will be concentrated in unstable areas, he said. And there appears to be no relief at hand.

McConnell said studies have shown that new energy technologies — such as biofuels, clean coal and hydrogen — generally take 25 years to become commercially viable and widespread.

The lack of access to safe, reliable water will reach unprecedented levels over the next 20 years, he said, and 1.4 billion people in 36 countries are likely to face water shortages that will have a substantial impact on food production.

“Climate change is expected to exacerbate those resource scarcities,” he said.

McConnell spoke of the unprecedented transfer of global wealth from West to East. By 2025, China is projected to be the second-largest economy and on its way to becoming the largest. India will grow to be the second- or third-largest economy.

All of this adds up to an unstable future. “Given the confluence of factors from a new global international system, increasing tension over natural resources, weapons proliferation … we predict an increased likelihood for conflict,” McConnell concluded.

Among the problems that aren’t going away is terrorism — an issue that did not get as much play as it initially appeared it would during the presidential campaign. McConnell said the descendants of long-established terrorist groups “will inherit organizational structures, the command and control processes and the training procedures necessary to conduct sophisticated attacks.”

He said he is particularly concerned that a terrorist group will acquire and use biological agents to create casualties greater than the September 11, 2001, attacks.

In addition, he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would “sow the seeds of instability and potential conflict” in that region on a scale that could affect the entire world.

Although the risk of a nuclear attack is “very low” over the next 20 to 30 years, McConnell said, “That possibility is grayer in the future than it is today.”

So what does this mean for the new president?

“After the new president-elect’s excitement subsides after winning the election, it is going to be dampened somewhat when he begins to focus on the realities of the myriad of changes and challenges we are going to face in the future,” McConnell said.

Failed Covert Nuclear Attack on Iran

Was a Covert Attempt to Bomb Iran with Nuclear Weapons ruined by a Military Leak?

	U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

Critically exploring whether or not there was a covert attempt to instigate a catastrophic nuclear war against Iran is illuminated through an introduction using the recent B-52 Incident. On August 30, a B-52 bomber armed with five nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise missiles travelled from Minot Air Force base, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force base, Louisiana, in the United States. Each missile had an adjustable yield between five and 150 kilotons of TNT which is at the lower end of the destructive capacities of U.S. nuclear weapons. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13 kilotons, while the Bravo Hydrogen bomb test of 1954 had a yield of 15,000 kilotons. The B-52 story was first covered in the Army Times on 5 September after the nuclear armed aircraft was discovered by Airmen. LINK

What made this a very significant event was that it was a violation of U.S. Air Force regulations concerning the transportation of nuclear weapons by air. Nuclear weapons are normally transported by air in specially constructed planes designed to prevent radioactive pollution in case of a crash. Such transport planes are not equipped to launch the nuclear weapons they routinely carry around the U.S. and the world for servicing or positioning.

The discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 was, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, the first time in 40 years that a nuclear armed plane had been allowed to fly in the U.S. LINK. Since 1968, after a SAC bomber crashed in Greenland, all nuclear armed aircraft have been grounded but were kept on a constant state of alert. After the end of the Cold War, President George H. Bush ordered in 1991 that nuclear weapons were to be removed from all aircraft and stored in nearby facilities.

Recently, the Air Force began decommissioning its stockpile of Advanced Cruise missiles. The five nuclear weapons on the B-52 were to be decommissioned, and were to be taken to another Air Force base. An Air Force press statement issued on 6 September 2007, claimed that there “was an error which occurred during a regularly scheduled transfer of weapons between two bases.”

Furthermore, the statement declared: “The Air Force maintains the highest standards of safety and precision so any deviation from these well established munitions procedures is considered very serious.” The issue concerning how a nuclear armed B-52 bomber was allowed to take off and fly in U.S. air space after an ‘error’ in a routine transfer process, is now subject to an official Air Force inquiry which is due to be completed by September 14.

Three key questions emerge over the B-52 incident. First, did Air Force personnel at Minot AFB not spot the ‘error’ earlier given the elaborate security procedures in place to prevent such mistakes from occurring? Many military analysts have commented on the stringent security procedures in place to prevent this sort of mistake from occurring. Multiple officers are routinely involved in the transportation and loading of nuclear weapons to prevent the kind of ‘error’ that allegedly occurred in the B-52 incident.

According to the U.S. Air Force statement, the commanding officer in charge of military munitions personnel and additional munitions airmen were relieved of duties pending the completion of the investigation. According to Kristensen, the error could not have come from confusing the Advanced Cruise Missile with a conventional weapons since no conventional form exists. So the munitions Airmen should have been easily able to spot the mistake. Other routine procedures were violated which suggests a rather obvious explanation for the error. The military munitions personnel were acting under direct orders, though not through the regular chain of military command. This takes me to the second question

Who was in Charge of the B-52 Incident?

Who ordered the loading of Advanced Cruise missiles on to a B-52 in violation of Air Force regulations? The quick reaction of the Air Force and the issuing of a public statement describing the seriousness of the issue and the launch of an immediate investigation, suggests that whatever occurred, was outside the regular chain of military command. If the regular chain of command was violated, then we have to inquire as to whether the B-52 incident was part of a covert project whose classification level exceeded that held by officers in charge of nuclear weapons at Minot AFB.

The most obvious governmental entity that may have ordered the nuclear arming of the B-52 outside the regular chain of military command is the last remaining bastion of neo-conservative activism in the Bush administration.

Vice President Cheney has taken a very prominent role in covert military operations and training exercises designed for the “seamless integration” of different national security and military authorities to possible terrorist attacks. On May 8, 2001, President Bush placed Mr. Cheney in charge of “[A]ll federal programs dealing with weapons of mass destruction, consequence management within the Departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Justice, and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and other federal agencies”. LINK. Mr. Cheney subsequently played a direct role in supervising training exercises that simultaneously occurred during the 911 attacks.

According to former Los Angeles Police Officer Michael Ruppert, Mr. Cheney had a parallel chain of command that he used to override Air Force objections to stand down orders that grounded the USAF during the 911 attacks, LINK.

Mr. Ruppert learned that the Secret Service had the authority to directly communicate presidential and vice presidential orders to fighter pilots in the air thereby circumventing the normal chain of command. (Crossing the Rubicon, pp. 428 – 429). Furthermore: “It is the Secret Service who has the legal mandate to take supreme command in case of a scheduled major event – or an unplanned major emergency – on American soil; these are designated “National Special Security Events”.LINK.

Mr. Ruppert and others have subsequently claimed that 911 was an “inside job;” and alleges Mr. Cheney through the Secret Service, played a direct leadership role in what occurred over 911. Consequently, it is very possible that Mr. Cheney could have played a similar role in circumventing the regular chain of military command in ordering the B-52 incident. The B-52 incident could be part of a contrived “National Special Security Event” directly controlled by Cheney by virtue of the alleged authority granted to him by President Bush, and through the Secret Service which at least theoretically, has the technological means to by pass the regular chain of military command. I now move to my third key question.

Why was the nuclear armed B-52 sent to Barksdale AFB?

If initial reports that the weapons were being decommissioned, but were mistakenly transported by a B-52 bomber, then the weapons should have been taken to Kirtland Air Force Base. According to Kristensen, this is “where the warheads are separated from the rest of the weapon and shipped to the Energy Department’s Pantex dismantlement facility near Amarillo, Texas”. LINK.

However, it has been revealed that Barksdale AFB is used as a staging base for operations in the Middle East, LINK.

This is circumstantial evidence that the weapons were being deployed for possible use in the Middle East.

There has been recent speculation concerning a possible attack against Iran given reports that the Pentagon has completed plans for a three day bombing blitz of Iran according to a Sunday Times report, LINK. The Report claims that 1200 targets have been selected and this will destroy much of Iran’s military infrastructure. Such an attack will devastate Iran’s economy, create greater political instability in the region, and stop the oil supply. A disruption of the oil supply from the Persian Gulf could trigger a global economic recession and lead to the collapse of financial markets.

In a rather disturbing synchronistic development, there have been reports of billion dollar investments in high risk stock options in both Europe and the U.S. that would only be profitable if a dramatic collapse of the stock market were to occur before September 21. Similar stock options were purchased weeks before the 911 attack in 2001, and investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible insider trading. The combination of the Sunday Times report and the Stock market option purchases is circumstantial evidence that plans for a concerted military attack against Iran have been secretly approved and covert operations have begun, LINK.

Seymour Hersh in May 2006 reported the opposition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.

In late April, the military leadership, headed by General Pace, achieved a major victory when the White House dropped its insistence that the plan for a bombing campaign include the possible use of a nuclear device to destroy Iran’s uranium-enrichment plant at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran. .. “Bush and Cheney were dead serious about the nuclear planning,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “And Pace stood up to them.

Then the world came back: ‘O.K., the nuclear option is politically unacceptable.’ LINK.

Given earlier opposition by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it is likely that the present attack plans for Iraq drawn up by the Pentagon don’t involve the use of nuclear weapons. In order to circumvent the regular chain of command, opposed to a nuclear attack, it is very likely that Vice President Cheney contrived a “National Special Security Event” that involved a nuclear armed B-52. This would have given him the legal authority to place orders directly through the Secret Service to the Air Force officers responsible for the B-52 incident.

Conclusion: Exposing those Responsible for the B-52 Incident

Consequently, there is considerable circumstantial evidence to argue that the nuclear armed B-52 was part of an apparent covert operation, outside the regular chain of constitutional military command. The alleged authority responsible for this was Vice President Cheney. He very likely used the Secret Service to take charge of a contrived National Special Security Event involving a nuclear armed B-52 that would be flown from Minot AFB. The B-52 was directed to Barksdale Air Force base where it would have conducted a covert mission to the Middle East involving the detonation of one or more nuclear weapons most likely in or in the vicinity of Iran. This could either have occurred during a conventional military strike against Iran, or a False Flag operation in the Persian Gulf region.

Apparently, the leaking and discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 at Barksdale was not part of the script. According to a confidential source of Larry Johnson, a former counter-terrorism official from the State Department and CIA, the discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 was leaked. Johnson concludes: “Did someone at Barksdale try to indirectly warn the American people that the Bush Administration is staging nukes for Iran? I don’t know, but it is a question worth asking.” LINK.

While the general public is likely to be given a watered down declassified report by the Air Force over the B-52 incident on September 14, the real investigation will reveal that it was part of a covert operation that intended to bypass the regular chain of command in using nuclear weapons in the Middle East. This will likely result in a furious backlash by key figures in the regular military chain of Command such as Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and the Commander of Central Command, Admiral William Fallon, who have direct responsibility for the conduct of military operations in the Middle East. The US. Air Force, the Secretary of Defense and Commander of Central Command, is now aware of what was likely going to be the true use of the B-52 and the responsibility of the Office of the Vice President.

It is very likely that the exposure of the B-52 incident will lead to an indefinite hold on plans to attack Iran given uncertainty whether other nuclear weapons have been covertly positioned for use in the Middle East. Significantly, public officials briefed about the true circumstances of the B-52 incident will almost certainly place enormous pressure on Vice President Cheney to immediately resign if it is found that he played the role identified above. It is therefore anticipated that in a very short time, the public will learn that Cheney has resigned for health resigns.

The forthcoming September 14 U.S. Air Force report will likely describe the B-52 incident as an “error” and an “isolated incident” as foreshadowed in the September 6 Press Statement. This will create some difficulty in exposing the actual role played by Cheney and any other government figures that supported him. There will be a need for continued public awareness of the true events behind the B-52 incident in order to expose the actual role of Mr. Cheney. Only in that way can Cheney be held accountable for his actions, and other government figures that supported his neo-conservative agenda be exposed. Regardless of whether Cheney’s role as the prime architect of the B-52 incident is exposed to the public, the official backlash against his covert operation should force his resignation. In either case, a very dangerous public official would be removed from a powerful position of influence. More importantly, the world has been spared a devastating nuclear war by courageous American airmen who revealed the true contents of an otherwise routine B-52 landing at Barksdale, AFB headed for a covert nuclear mission to the Middle East.