It has dawned on me more and more how crucial true information is for the modern world. Not only my first encounters with propaganda, as I did my (compulsory) national service on the Soviet border at the end of the Cold War, and having read George Orwell as well as one of my favourite authors, John le Carre, made me aware of how much power that lies in swaying the public by lies. There are anectotal evidence of witch-hunts in the middle ages, which could only happened because of lies, prejudice and superstition, and when I read about ‘The Great Leap’ from the Cultural Revolution in China, I wonder how on Earth such a thing could take place. Commonplace to all these stories is the lack of knowledge, critical voices, and true information. I have also seen documentaries about how the tobacco and sugar have influenced the public information about drawbacks associated with their products, but realise that someone is twisting the truth, but one cannot be sure who. Presumably the lobby groups of those industries… But the even more recent encounter with lies in the media scared me the most: when one nation invaded another on the basis of lies. Sure, the invaded country was headed by a brutal dictator, but that argument probably could not justify a war…? After Hans Blixt and the UN had spent years searchin for evidence of WMD in country, they had come up empty handed. The country was flooded with volunteer ‘human shields’ just at the run-up forthe invasion, and in this golden opportunity for spying the living daylight out of the country, still the secret services didn’t manage to produce convincing evidence. A prominent British weapons specialist was found dead after having stated on the BBC that the Iraq dossier was ’sexed up’ (WMD could be launched within 45 minutes). Iraq relented at one point and produced a massive report to the UN, that the invading countries snatched and didn’t let anybody else read. Then there were false evidences: alleged radioactive materials from Nigeria, satellite images shown in the UN, alleged links between Saddam & Al Quaida, etc. The bottom line was that a war was started from lies. That’s scary.

Published on 4 Dec 2006 by Energy Bulletin.
Archived on 4 Dec 2006.
by Dmitry Orlovv

Robert Steele posted this to his [Open Source Inteligence] site where he wrote:

2006-12-05 Scary Comparisons of Soviet and US Collapses

The 29-page slide with briefing notes at the link dated today, is quite sensible and quite scary. It is sufficiently credible to have earned a complete reprinting in the [Energy Bulletin].

In our view, we have two years to make a public intelligence case for electing a transpartisan team able to address the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers in a responsible manner. If we fail to do so, we anticipate severe destruction in major urban areas, and a balkanization of rural areas. St.