Tag: pentagon

How Amazon’s $10 Billion Contract Squabble with the Pentagon Reveals the Shady Nature of Military Contracts

Earlier this month the US Department of Defense (DOD) canceled a $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract awarded to Microsoft in 2019. The goal of the contract was to modernize the Department’s IT operations using cloud computing.

The JEDI cancellation occurred following a lawsuit from Amazon after the company was denied the contract. Amazon alleges that they were rejected because the Department of Defense was pressured by then President Donald Trump to “screw Amazon.” The motivation for this move, it was claimed, was driven by Trump’s personal animus for then-CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post.

Amazon claims insider sources responsible for the book Holding The Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis provide evidence for Trump’s direct intent to “screw Amazon,” but you need not trust another book published by Washington insiders for this story. Trump’s personal problems with Bezos, valid or not, are extremely public. Tweets targeted at Bezos’ include:

“The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @JeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon.” December 7, 2015.

“If @amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The @washingtonpost scam is saving it!” December 7, 2015.

“Really sick to watch the Fake and totally Slanted News(?) coming out of MSDNC and CNN. It bears NO relationship to the Truth or Facts. They are merely offshoots of the DNC, much like the @nytimes and the Amazon @washingtonpost. Just like 2016, but worse. Sad, but we will win big!” June 3rd, 2020.

“Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!” August 16, 2017.

Prompted by Amazon’s lawsuit, the DOD launched an investigation that yielded a 317-page report evaluating Amazon’s allegations. The authors claimed that lack of cooperation from White House officials prevented them from reaching any clear conclusions.

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Pentagon admits it trained SEVEN of Haiti president’s murderers, but denies ‘encouraging’ assassination

The Pentagon’s top spokesman has confirmed that at least seven Colombians implicated in the assassination of Haiti’s president had received US training in the past, but denied it might have somehow “encouraged” the hit.

“Thus far, we’ve identified seven individuals who were former members of the Colombian military that had received some sort of … US funded and provided education and training,” Defense Department spokesman John Kirby said on Thursday, stressing that such training is “very common,” and did not “[lead] to or [encourage] what happened in Haiti.”

While Kirby declined to provide details on an individual basis for the seven assassins, he said the instruction included “cadet leadership development, counter-drug operations, noncommissioned officer professional development, small-unit leadership training, human rights training, emergency medical training, some helicopter maintenance training, and those kinds of things.”

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Pentagon contractor investigating ‘extremism’ says BLM web search raises concerns about White supremacy

The Pentagon is reportedly working with an extremism analysis company that considers the web search “the truth about Black Lives Matter” and others to be signs of interest in or engagement with White supremacism.

According to Defense One, the contractor Moonshot CVE, which has ties to the Obama Foundation, is working on data that would identify which military bases and branches have the most troops searching for domestic extremist content. While that particular project’s contours are unclear, the company previously released a June report, in conjunction with the left-leaning Anti-Defamation League, on purported “White supremacy trends in the United States.”

In it, the U.K.-based company said it “monitored a list of almost 1,600 indicators of interest in or engagement with White supremacism, focused specifically on anti-Black and anti-Semitic narratives being used by extremist groups.”

As examples, it listed the search phrases “George Floyd deserved to die,” “Jews will not replace us” and “the truth about black lives matter.”

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UFO Witnesses From Mississippi and Alabama Disapprove of Recent UFO Report

Some folks from Mississippi and Alabama are not buying the federal report about UFOs that was released on June 25 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The report was about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena sighted by members of the military since 2004. It doesn’t deny the possibility of some of the phenomena being extraterrestrial life forms visiting our planet, but neither does it doesn’t suggest the theory as a possibility.

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House Intelligence Subcommittee Chairman Carson Says He Will Hold Hearings on UFOs

House Intelligence Subcommittee Chairman on Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) said Sunday that he wants Congress to conduct hearings on sightings of UFOs after the release of the Pentagon report that examines “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs).

“We have a pretty ambitious schedule. Chairman Schiff has a pretty ambitious agenda and my own committee we’re planning on having a series of hearings … and hopefully we will discuss UAPs in the very near future I can’t give a definitive date right now,” said Carson.

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British Parliament Discusses Pentagon UFO Report

The much-discussed Pentagon Report on UFOs wound up becoming a topic of conversation in Britain’s Parliament this week as multiple politicians questioned an official with the country’s Ministry of Defense about the potential threat posed by the phenomenon. The enlightening exchange reportedly occurred during a House of Lords session on Wednesday when MP Lord Sarfraz detailed how the DoD assessment “does not rule out that these could be military aircraft with very fast capabilities or even extraterrestrial phenomena.” He then asked defense minister Baroness Goldie if she could “reassure members of the public that the Ministry of Defense takes reports of unidentified objects in our airspace very seriously?”

In response, she acknowledged the findings of the report and indicated that the MoD “holds no reports on unidentified aerial phenomena, but constantly monitors UK airspace to identify and respond to any credible threat to its integrity, and is confident in the existing measures in place to protect it.” Goldie went on to express what appeared to be a fairly skeptical take on the phenomenon, stressing that “the MoD deals with actual threats substantiated by evidence.” The conversation continued when another MP, Viscount Ridley, argued that “the idea that in an era of mobile phone cameras, drones and frequent travel there could possibly be alien spaceships whizzing about undetected in our atmosphere on a regular basis is not, I think, very plausible.”

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Adviser to Pentagon Counter-Extremism Group Warns of Protected Speech Crackdown

An adviser to the Pentagon’s Counter-Extremism Working Group (CEWG) is warning the Biden administration’s efforts to purge the military of “extremists” could violate individual First Amendment rights.

Mike Berry, general counsel for First Liberty Institute and Marine Corps reservist, first sounded the alarm in a recent op-ed that said the CEWG is looking to formulate a new definition of extremism that could include constitutionally protected speech. He wrote in the Washington Examiner on June 19:

Instead of monitoring external threats, the Pentagon is on a mission to identify and remove whomever it labels as extremists from America’s armed forces. Ironically, the CEWG has yet to define what it means by ‘extremism.’ Extremism is usually defined as the threat or use of violence to achieve an ideological agenda. But the Pentagon is now poised to expand upon that definition to include constitutionally protected speech. In other words, sticks and stones may break our bones, but words are the biggest threat.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin set up the Counter-Extremism Working Group (CEWG) in April after vowing to root out extremists and ordering the entire military force to spend a day discussing “extremism.” Since there is no Pentagon definition for “extremism,” Austin tasked the CEWG, led by Bishop Garrison, to come up with a definition and to define activities that would be considered “extremist.”

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Long-awaited UFO report mentions no aliens, but asks for more money for US spies

The newly released US intelligence community report on unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP) offers more questions than answers. It doesn’t mention aliens, says UAP might be a national security threat – and asks for more funding.

Released on Friday afternoon by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the entire unclassified report clocks in at only nine pages, including two pages of appendices with definitions of terms. 

The dataset it is based on relies on US government reports of incidents between November 2004 and March 2021. However, no standardized reporting mechanism existed until the US Navy set one up in 2019, and the Air Force adopted it the following year.

We were able to identify one reported UAP with high confidence. In that case, we identified the object as a large, deflating balloon. The others remain unexplained.

The report mentions 144 reports, of which 80 “involved observation with multiple sensors.” While some UAP “may be attributable to sensor anomalies,” most “probably do represent physical objects” given they were “registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.”

If and when the incidents are resolved, the report said, the US intelligence community believes they will break down into five potential categories: “airborne clutter” such as birds, balloons, drones or plastic bags; natural atmospheric phenomena such as ice crystals; US government or industry research projects, foreign adversary systems, and “other.” 

ODNI was “unable to confirm” that classified research and development programs by the US government or industry “accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.” Some UAP sightings “may be” technologies developed by China, Russia or someone else.

If that is the case, UAPs would “represent a national security challenge” as well as a threat to flight safety, but US spies said they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary.”

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Facebook Doesn’t Want to Talk About Fake Users Created by the Pentagon

On a press call a few years ago, I asked Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, if the company would treat a misinformation campaign orchestrated by the US government the same as it would as one from a foreign adversary.

Facebook had organized the call to tout how it had discovered and deleted dozens of Iranian accounts, groups, and pages linked to “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—the company’s term for when people and organizations create fake accounts in an attempt to mislead and manipulate other users and the broader information landscape. The conversation came at a time when Facebook was conducting a spate of such announcements and media briefings championing its work removing phony networks tied to foreign governments.Recent reporting says US operatives “engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

Gleicher’s response to my hypothetical question about whether they would react the same way was quite clear: “Yes. Part of the key of our operations here is that we engage based on behavior—not based on content and not based on the nature of the actor. And that’s been a very intentional choice on our part.”

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