EX CIA OFFICER ROBERT DAVID STEELE
THE GUARDIAN 2014
Human Synthesis 01 Sep 2021 - (epub version)
With 18 years of experience working across the US intelligence community,
followed by 20 more years in commercial intelligence and training, Steele’s
exemplary career has spanned almost all areas of both the clandestine world.
Steele started off as a Marine Corps infantry and intelligence officer. After
four years on active duty, he joined the CIA for about a decade before co-
founding the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity, where he was deputy
director.
Widely recognized as the leader of the Open Source Intelligence
(OSINT) paradigm, Steele went on to write the handbooks on OSINT for
NATO, the US Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Special Operations
Forces. In passing, he personally trained 7,500 officers from over 66
countries.
In 1992, despite opposition from the CIA, he obtained Marine Corps
permission to organize a landmark international conference on open source
intelligence – the paradigm of deriving information to support policy
decisions not through secret activities, but from open public sources
available to all. The conference was such a success it brought in over 620
attendees from the intelligence world. But the CIA wasn’t happy and ensured that Steele was prohibited from running a second conference.
The clash prompted him to resign from his position as second-ranking civilian in Marine Corps intelligence, and pursue the open-source paradigm elsewhere. He went on to found and head up the Open Source Solutions Network Inc. and later the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network which runs the Public Intelligence Blog. Former CIA spy and Open Source Intelligence pioneer, Robert David Steele speaking at the Inter-American Defense Board in 2013.
I first came across Steele when I discovered his Amazon review of my third
book, The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism.
A voracious reader, Steele is the number 1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction
across 98 categories. He also reviewed my latest book, A User’s Guide to the
Crisis of Civilization, but told me I’d overlooked an important early work – ‘A
More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the UN High-Level
Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change.’
Last month, Steele presented a startling paper at the Libtech conference in
New York, sponsored by the Internet Society and Reclaim. Drawing on
principles set out in his latest book, The Open-Source Everything Manifesto:
Transparency, Truth and Trust, he told the audience that all the major
But it`s a mission that frightens the US intelligence establishment to its core.
preconditions for revolution – set out in his 1976 graduate thesis – were now
present in the United States and Britain.
Steele’s book is a must-read, a powerful yet still pragmatic roadmap to a new
civilizational paradigm that simultaneously offers a trenchant, unrelenting
critique of the prevailing global order. His interdisciplinary ‘whole systems’
approach dramatically connects up the increasing corruption, inefficiency
and unaccountability of the intelligence system and its political and financial
masters with escalating inequalities and environmental crises. But he also
offers a comprehensive vision of hope that activist networks like Reclaim are
implementing today.
“We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during
which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous
wisdom councils and communal decision-making,” he writes in The Open
Source Everything Manifesto. “Power was centralized in the hands of
increasingly specialized ‘elites’ and ‘experts’ who not only failed to achieve
all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive
the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that
they ultimately looted.”
Today’s capitalism, he argues, is inherently predatory and destructive:
“Over the course of the last centuries, the commons was fenced, and
everything from agriculture to water was commoditized without regard to
the true cost in non-renewable resources. Human beings, who had spent
centuries evolving away from slavery were re-commoditized by the
Industrial Era.” Open source everything, in this context, offers us the chance to build on what we’ve learned through industrialization, to learn from our mistakes,
and catalyze the re-opening of the commons, in the process breaking the grip
of defunct power structures and enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.
“Sharing, not secrecy, is the means by which we realize such a lofty destiny
as well as create infinite wealth. The wealth of networks, the wealth of
knowledge, revolutionary wealth - all can create a nonzero win-win Earth
that works for one hundred percent of humanity. This is the ‘utopia’ that
Buckminster Fuller foresaw, now within our reach.”
The goal, he concludes, is to reject:
“... concentrated illicitly a regulated and largely phantom wealth in favor of community wealth defined by community knowledge, community sharing of information, and community definition of truth derived in transparency and authenticity, the latter being the ultimate arbiter of shared wealth.” Despite this unabashedly radical vision, Steele is hugely respected by senior military intelligence experts across the world. As a researcher at the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, he has authored several monographs advocating the need for open source methods to transform the craft of intelligence.
He has lectured to the US State Department and Department of Homeland Security as well as National Security Councils in various countries and his new book has received accolades from senior intelligence officials across multiple countries including France and Turkey. Yet he remains an outspoken critic of US intelligence practices and what he sees as their integral role in aggravating rather than ameliorating the world’s greatest threats and challenges.
This week, I had the good fortune of being able to touch base with Steele to
dig deeper into his recent analysis of the future of US politics in the context
of our accelerating environmental challenges. The first thing I asked him was
where he sees things going over the next decade, given his holistic take.
“Properly educated people always appreciate holistic approaches to any
challenge. This means that they understand both cause and effect, and
intertwined complexities,” he said. “A major part of our problem in the public
policy arena is the decline in intelligence with integrity among key
politicians and staff at the same time that think tanks and universities and
non-governmental organizations have also suffered a similar intellectual
diminishment.
“My early graduate education was in the 1970s when Limits to Growth and
World Federalism was the rage. Both sought to achieve an over-view of
systemic challenges, but both also suffered from the myth of top-down
hubris. What was clear in the 1970s, that has been obscured by political and
financial treason in the past half-century is that everything is connected –
what we do in the way of paving over wetlands, or in poisoning groundwater
‘inadvertently’ because of our reliance on pesticides and fertilizers that are
not subject to the integrity of the ‘Precautionary Principle,’ ultimately leads
to climate catastrophes that are acts of man, not acts of God.”
He points me to his tremendous collection of reviews of books on climate
change, disease, environmental degradation, peak oil, and water scarcity. “I
see five major overlapping threats on the immediate horizon,” he continues.
“They have all related: the collapse of complex societies, the acceleration of
the Earth’s demise with changes that used to take 10,000 years now taking
three or less, predatory or shock capitalism and financial crime out of the
The city of London and Wall Street, and political corruption at scale, to include
the west supporting 42 of 44 dictators. We are close to multiple mass
catastrophes.”
What about the claim that the US is on the brink of revolution? “Revolution is
overthrow – the complete reversal of the status quo ante. We are at the end of
centuries of what Lionel Tiger calls ‘The Manufacture of Evil,’ in which
merchant banks led by the City of London have conspired with captive
governments to concentrate wealth and commoditize everything including
humans. What revolution means in practical terms is that balance has been
lost and the status quo ante is unsustainable. There are two ‘stops’ to greed
to the nth degree: the first is the carrying capacity of Earth, and the second is
human sensibility. We are now at a point where both stops are activating.”
Former CIA officer’s matrix on the preconditions for revolution
It’s not just the US, he adds. “The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK,
and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite
stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate
socialization and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of
authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy,
to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media
dishonesty, to the mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on.”
So why isn’t it happening yet?
Video presentation about the tour
“Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our
Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when
most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of
‘you are helpless, this is the order of things.’ When we have a scandal so
powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will
have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both
countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls
this ‘The Power of the Powerless.’ One spark, one massive fire.”
But we need more than revolution, in the sense of overthrow, to effect
change, surely. How does your manifesto for ‘open source everything’ fit into
this? “The west has pursued an industrialization path that allows for the
privatization of wealth from the commons, along with the criminalization of
commons rights of the public, as well as the externalization of all true costs.
Never mind that fracking produces earthquakes and poisons aquifers –
corrupt politicians at local, state or province, and national levels are all too
happy to take money for looking the other way. Our entire commercial,
diplomatic, and informational systems are now cancerous.
When trade
treaties have secret sections – or are entirely secret – one can be certain the
the public is being screwed and the secrecy is an attempt to avoid accountability.
Secrecy enables corruption. So also does an inattentive public enable corruption.” Is this a crisis of capitalism, then? Does capitalism need to end for us to resolve these problems? And if so, how? “Predatory capitalism is based on the privatization of profit and the externalization of cost. It is an extension of
the fencing of the commons, of enclosures, along with the criminalization of
prior common customs and rights. What we need is a system that fully
accounts for all costs. Whether we call that capitalism or not is irrelevant to
me.
But doing so would fundamentally transform the dynamic of present day
capitalism, by making capital open source. For example, and as calculated by
my colleague JZ Liszkiewicz, a white cotton T-shirt contains roughly 570
gallons of water, 11 to 29 gallons of fuel, and a number of toxins and
emissions including pesticides, diesel exhaust, and heavy metals, and other
volatile compounds – it also generally includes child labor. Accounting for
those costs and their real social, human and environmental impacts have
totally different implications for how we should organize production and
consumption than current predatory capitalism.”
So what exactly do you mean by open source everything? “We have over 5
billion human brains that are the one infinite resource available to us going
forward. Crowd-sourcing and cognitive surplus are two terms of art for the
changing power dynamic between those at the top that are ignorant and
corrupt, and those across the bottom that are attentive and ethical. The open
source ecology is made up of a wide range of opens – open farm technology,
open-source software, open hardware, open networks, open money, open
small business technology, open patents – to name just a few. The key point
is that they must all develop together, otherwise, the existing system will
isolate them into ineffectiveness. Open data is largely worthless unless you
have open hardware and open software. Open government demands open
cloud and open spectrum, or money will dominate feeds and speeds.”
Robert Steele’s vision for open source systems:
On 1st May, Steele sent an open letter to US vice president Joe Biden
requesting him to consider establishing an Open Source Agency that would
transform the operation of the intelligence community, dramatically reduce
costs, increasing oversight and accountability while increasing access to the
best possible information to support holistic policy-making. To date, he has
received no response.
I’m not particularly surprised. Open source everything pretty much
undermines everything the national security state stands for. Why bother
even asking vice president Biden to consider it? “The national security state
is rooted in secrecy as a means of avoiding accountability. My first book, On
Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World – which by the way had a
foreword from Senator David Boren, the immediate past chairman of the
Senate Select Committee for Intelligence - made it quite clear that the
the national security state is an expensive, ineffective monstrosity that is simply
not fit for purpose. In that sense, the national security state is its own worst
enemy – it’s bound to fail.”
Intelligence excesses are beyond scathing – they are damning. “Most of what
is produced through secret methods is not actually intelligence at all. It is
simply secret information that is, most of the time, rather generic and
therefore not actually very useful for making critical decisions at a
government level. The National Security Agency (NSA) has not prevented
any terrorist incidents. CIA cannot even get the population of Syria correct
and provides no intelligence - decision-support - to most cabinet secretaries,
assistant secretaries, and department heads. Indeed General Tony Zinni,
when he was commander in chief of the US Central Command as it was at
war, is on record as saying that he received, ‘at best,’ a meager 4% of what he
needed to know from secret sources and methods.”
So does open source mean you are calling for the abolition of intelligence
agencies as we know them, I ask. “I’m a former spy and I believe we still
need spies and secrecy, but we need to redirect the vast majority of the funds
now spent on secrecy toward savings and narrowly focused endeavors at
home. For instance, utterly ruthless counterintelligence against corruption,
or horrendous evils like pedophilia. “Believe it or not, 95% of what we need for ethical evidence-based decision support cannot be obtained through the secret methods of standard intelligence practices. But it can be obtained quite openly and cheaply from academics, civil society, commerce, governments, law enforcement
organizations, the media, all militaries, and non-governmental organizations.
An Open Source Agency, as I’ve proposed it, would not just meet 95% of our
intelligence requirements, it would do the same at all levels of government
and carry over by enriching education, commerce, and research – it would
create what I called in 1995 a ‘Smart Nation.’
“The whole point of Open Source Everything is to restore public agency.
Open Source is the only form of information and information technology
that is affordable to the majority, interoperable across all boundaries, and
rapidly scalable from local to global without the curse of overhead that
proprietary corporations impose.” Given his standing as an intelligence expert, Steele’s criticisms of US Robert Steele’s graphic on open source systems thinking
It’s clear to me that when Steele talks about intelligence as ‘decision-
support,’ he really does intend that we grasp “all information in all languages
all the time” – that we do multidisciplinary research spanning centuries into
the past as well as into the future. His most intriguing premise is that the 1%
are simply not as powerful as they, and we, assume them to be. “The
collective buying power of the five billion poor is four times that of the one
billion rich according to the late Harvard business thinker Prof C. K. Prahalad
– open source everything is about the five billion poor coming together to
reclaim their collective wealth and mobilize it to transform their lives. There
is zero chance of the revolution being put down. A public agency is emergent,
and the ability of the public to literally put any bank or corporation out of
business overnight is looming. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, you cannot screw
all of the people all of the time. We’re there. All we lack is a major precipitant
– our Tunisian fruit seller. When it happens the revolution will be deep and
lasting.”
The Arab spring analogy has its negatives. So far, there really isn’t much to
root for. I want to know what’s to stop this revolution from turning into a
violent, destructive mess. Steele is characteristically optimistic. “I have
struggled with this question. What I see happening is an end to national
dictate and the emergence of bottom-up clarity, diversity, integrity, and
sustainability. Individual towns across the USA are now nullifying federal
and state regulations - for example, gag laws on animal cruelty, blanket
permissions for fracking. Those such as my colleague Parag Khanna that
speak to a new era of city-states are correct in my view. Top-down power has
failed in a most spectacular manner, and bottom-up consensus power is
emergent.
‘Not in my neighborhood’ is beginning to trump ‘Because I say so.’
The one unlimited resource we have on the planet is the human brain – the
the current strategy of 1% capitalism is failing because it is killing the Golden
Goose at multiple levels. Unfortunately, the gap between those with money
and power and those who actually know what they are talking about has
grown catastrophic. The rich are surrounded by sycophants and pretenders
whose continued employment demands that they not question the premises.
As Larry Summers lectured Elizabeth Warren, ‘insiders do not criticize
insiders.’”
But how can activists actually start moving toward the open-source vision
now? “For starters, there are eight ‘tribes’ that among them can bring
together with all relevant information: academia, civil society including labor
unions and religions, commerce especially small business, government
especially local, law enforcement, media, military, and non-
government/non-profit. At every level from local to global, across every
mission area, we need to create stewardship councils integrating
personalities and information from all eight tribes. We don’t need to wait
around for someone else to get started. All of us who recognize the vitality of
this possibility can begin creating these new grassroots structures from the
bottom-up, right now.”
So how does open source everything have the potential to ‘re-engineer the
Earth’? For me, this is the most important question, and Steele’s answer is
inspiring. “Open Source Everything overturns top-down ‘because I say so at
the point of a gun’s power. Open Source Everything makes truth rather than
violence the currency of power. Open Source Everything demands that true
cost economics and the indigenous concept of ‘seventh generation thinking
– how will this affect society 200 years ahead – become central. Most of our
problems today can be traced to the ascendance of unilateral militarism,
virtual colonialism, and predatory capitalism, all based on force and lies and
… we have a small favour to ask. With much of the US now trapped in a
vicious cycle of heat, wildfires and drought, our climate journalism has
never been more essential, and we need your support to keep producing it.
“My motto, a play on the CIA motto that is disgraced every day, is ‘the truth
at any cost lowers all other costs”, he tells me. “Others wiser than I have
pointed out that nature bats last. We are at the end of an era in which lies can
be used to steal from the public and the commons. We are at the beginning of
an era in which truth in public service can restore us all to a state of grace.”
WHERE WE GO ONE WE GO ALL!! BUT, WHO DECIDES WHERE?
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is
the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It,
and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. ZERO POINT is set in
a near-future following a Fourth Iraq War.
Former CIA Officer Robert David Steele Is Dead
Posted on August 30, 2021, by State of the Nation
ROBERT DAVID STEELE
Farewell video by a friend and colleague
“He Worked His Ass Off For The Country Like Nobody Else!”
*Here’s how SOTN often saw RDS during our Skype sessions with him as his many viewers also did during his lively and inspiring videos.
If you knew Robert David Steele as we did, you would know he would absolutely love the subtitle of this tribute.
Since Trump first ran for POTUS in 2015, SOTN had the pleasure of speaking with the former CIA officer on many occasions. You never really knew how the conversation was going to end. But you did know that RDS was always “working his ass off” doing one of many civic duties, and other important things, on behalf of his fellow citizens.
During several of those conversations, RDS encouraged us to support the Florida leg of his then-upcoming national tour. He even wanted us to help launch the whole campaign right here in Tallahassee We gently demurred … time and time again.
We knew that such a tour was not a good idea FOR QUITE OBVIOUS REASONS.
During the Covid era, we were quite sure that such a public procession of high-profile events could easily end in disaster.
SOTN has always held firm to the obvious certainty that COVID-19 is, first and foremost, a highly sophisticated bioweapon. Not only that, but that COVID-19 represents an advanced form of weapons-grade bioengineering that is now creating the dreaded variants such as Delta and Lambda.
The bottom line here is that, from the very beginning of this wholly manufactured pandemic, the Covid perpetrators have been methodically taking out anyone they so choose to and then they easily blame it on COVID-19.
This stealthy tactic is used particularly against all high-profile Anti-Vaxxers. The NWO cabal has no tolerance for either the Anti-Vaccine Movement or Health Freedom Advocacy Groups.
Of course, RDS found himself at the crossroads of all of these organizations because of his refusal to get the Covid injection. Hence, his “raising awareness tour” posed a very real threat to both OPERATION COVID-19 and the Covid Super Vaccination Agenda.
CAVEAT: Because of what’s truly at stake for The Powers That Be, righteous and aware folks need to know that it’s exceedingly dangerous to ascend too high of a public platform. Therefore, concerned citizens are highly encouraged to hang in large groups; protest en masse and resist by the millions. The more any Covid Truth Movement leaders stand out, the bigger the target they will become.
Surely RDS knew this. But his mission was way too important to him. RDS also know that America’s hospitals have been transformed into death factories. Nevertheless, he became an inpatient at one right here in Florida and was predictably killed by the notorious vent.
His doctors provided alternative treatments with Remdisivir which he had requested but were probably administered too late to save his life.
Let’s be very clear: to date since the Plandemic began in January of 2020, millions have been killed by the COVID-19 bioweapon. Likewise, millions will be killed by the weaponized Covid vaccines. Similarly, many unaware souls will die in various types of healthcare facilities at the hands of healthcare professionals via iatrogenic homicide.
People, this is exactly how upwards of 100 million people died during the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918. It was all planned out that way. In point of fact, that genocidal criminal conspiracy of 1918 was the model for the 2020/2021 Covid Pandemic.
Robert David Steele knew all of this. Perhaps he unconsciously sacrificed himself for the greater good in order to expose this highly organized and ongoing plot to depopulate humanity via a global biowar and never-ending acts of bioterrorism via COVID-19.
May Robert David Steele rest in peace!
Our deepest condolences to his wife and children.
State of the Nation August 30, 2021
BRIEF ORIGINS OF Hydroxychloroquine and Remdesivir
Hydroxychloroquine is an immunomodulatory drug that has been used for 60 years to treat malaria and autoimmune diseases such as systemic lupus erythematosus and inflammatory arthritis, and potential new uses and benefits continue to emerge. Toxicity concerns have been addressed with updated prescribing recommendations. On March 28, 2020, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a EUA to allow hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate donated to the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to be distributed and used for hospitalized COVID-19 patients. In fact, these two drugs have been used for decades for the therapy and control of malaria and autoimmune diseases. Hydroxychloroquine is effective against Covid-19 if not administered too late.
-------------------------------------
Remdesivir is an investigational new drug created by Gilead. The research that led to Remdesivir began as early as 2009, with research programs underway in hepatitis C (HCV) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). We continued to explore various uses for Remdesivir following its discovery, including antiviral profiling in 2013 and early 2014 that suggested the potential for Remdesivir to have broad-spectrum antiviral activity.
COVID-19
In January 2020, when a new pneumonia-like illness in China was identified as a coronavirus, Gilead moved quickly to determine whether Remdesivir could play a role in responding to the growing public health threat that subsequently became known as COVID-19. Gilead’s preclinical data suggested that testing Remdesivir against COVID-19 should take place immediately.
In late February, Gilead initiated its own two Phase 3 studies of Remdesivir, which will enroll patients in countries globally with high numbers of diagnosed COVID-19 cases. These studies began enrolling patients in March 2020 and will evaluate two dosing durations of Remdesivir.
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WHO and WHAT is behind it all ? : >
The bottom line is for the people to regain their original, moral principles, which have intentionally been watered out over the past generations by our press, TV, and other media owned by the Illuminati/Bilderberger Group, corrupting our morals by making misbehavior acceptable to our society. Only in this way shall we conquer this oncoming wave of evil.
Commentary:
Administrator
HUMAN SYNTHESIS
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