Peace Intelligence – Page 426 – Public Intelligence Blog

UPDATED 2014-01-29 to add the following new links:

2012 Robert Steele: Practical Reflections on UN Intelligence + UN RECAP

References: NATO Transformation Process Documents — and Gaps + Peace from Above RECAP

Search: phd topics on the role of intelligence in peace support operation + Peacekeeping RECAP

Phi Beta Iota: We are detecting a fascinating evolutionary process within the United Nations “system” which is not a system at all, more like an archipelago with a different cat in charge of each island. Information-sharing is coming into vogue, but more importantly, the United Nations, perhaps stimulated by the report of the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A more secure world: our shared responsibility, appears to finally be realizing that all threats are connected and that poverty is the foundation for all of the other threats thriving–one cannot defeat transnational crime (threat #10) without first addressing poverty (threat #1).

Security Council Calls for Strengthened International, Regional Cooperation to Counter Transnational Organized Crime, in Presidential Statement

With the top United Nations anti-drug official urging concerted global action to “break the vicious circle between insecurity and underdevelopment” being increasingly fuelled by criminal networks, drug smugglers and human traffickers, the Security Council today called on the world body’s Member States to increase international and regional cooperation to tackle transnational organized crime.

The Council invited Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who opened today’s meeting, to consider transnational threats as a factor in conflict prevention strategies, conflict analysis, integrated missions’ assessment and planning and to consider including in his reports, as appropriate, analysis on the role played by those threats in situations on the Council’s agenda. [Phi Beta Iota: Emphasis Added.]

Maturity New — UN Intelligence = World that Works for All

Global gangs exploit blind spots for trafficking: U.N.

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – International criminal gangs and traffickers are exploiting large geographic blind spots where radar, satellite or other surveillance is minimal or nonexistent, the U.N. crime and drugs czar said on Wednesday.

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the Vienna-based U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), told members of the 15-nation U.N. Security Council that countries must improve their systems of sharing intelligence to reduce these surveillance gaps.

“We need a change in attitude,” Costa told the council. “It is time to regard information sharing as a way of strengthening sovereignty, not surrendering it.”

Continue reading “Journal: United Nations and Information-Sharing”

2010/03/082010/03/08

Journal: C/JCS Shines on Iran-Israel

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, Military, Peace Intelligence

Mullen Wary of Israeli Attack on Iran

by Ray McGovern

Phi Beta Iota: We strongly recommend McGovern's article be read in its entirety. Key points:

1. US has no mutual defense treaty with Israel and no order to the US military to support Israel is Constitutionally valid without a Senate validation.

2. Israel will not get away with a USS Liberty atrocity on Admiral Mike Mullen's watch.

3. Washington is remains a moral and intellectual cesspool with the White House lacking a strategic analytic model, intelligence (decision-support) or any clue as to how to restore democracy and prosperity in America and peace in the rest of the world. Partisanship–uninformed partisanship–is what runs the White House today and it is NOT WORKING.

4. C/JCS has the right idea but the wrong company–no one now working in the US national security “establishment” has the combination of brains and integrity to actually propose a strategic analytic model; a reconstruction of secret intelligence so it provides non-secret decision-support to everybody now flying deaf, dumb, and blind in the NCA; and a redirection of the Pentagon so its budget funds the four forces after next–reform can be revenue and jobs neutral!

President Obama is at a fork in the road. He can stick with business as usual–partisanship, polling, and proxies that pay lip service to concepts like “national security,” or he can commit to creating a national strategy that gets a grip on reality and then connects means, ways, and ends to achieve a prosperous world at peace. From where we sit, C/CJS is the only person with both the right idea and the courage to speak the truth in public. Three immediately useful references:

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

Search: QDR “four forces after next”

2010/03/072010/03/07

Journal: Three United Nations (UN) Memes Emergent

01 Agriculture, 04 Education, 07 Health, 12 Water, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Meme 1: Separate Agency Budget Intelligence (SABI). The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) may be within a year of a huge management advance, understanding, with decision-support, the relative return on investment (ROI) of its investments in relation to the ten high-level threats, many of which it is uniquely positioned to address. Understanding that clean water and sanitation is the most important medical advancement since 1840, UNESCO is poised to call into question its excessive investments in vaccinations that yield little return and often create broader health issues, as opposed to focusing on micro-education (see meme 3) and micro-financiing of clean water initiatives.

Meme 2: integrated missions’ assessment and planning. This is the United Nations (UN) equivalent of Whole of Government planning, programming. and budgeting. While non-existent within most governments, the UN appears to be realizing that with its back to the fall and the fate of over 175 “failed states” on the table, it might be time to add intelligence (decision-support) to how it does business. This means understanding that all threats and all policies have to be evaluated together and in relation (the Eastern way), and that all budgets and behaviors must be planned–harmonized–so as to achieve integrated outcomes, not outcomes in isolation that undermine “rest of system” stability.

Meme 3: micro-education. This is a brand new meme but it defines practices that already exist and could be brought together. With the vast majority of subsistence farmers still using ancient methods such as furrow irrigation, and many not recognizing the value of rain harvesting, there is a route opening for UNESCO by which it can leverage Alvin Toffler's insight and substitute information for capital, labor, time, and space. Put bluntly, some micro-education is vastly more important than a complete (albeit mediocre) elementary education. Micro-education on water and health appears to be the center of gravity for jump-starting the entrepreneurial possibilities among the extreme poor. What no one has done is create a stacked list of “Essential Elements of Information” (EEI) that should be taught to the poor in priority order as part of “any and all” encounters.

2010/03/032010/03/03

Journal: Stronger Signals of Armed Anger in USA

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Peace Intelligence

Armed Resistance in USA

There is a new nation-wide movement striving to innoculate the National Guard as well as state and local police forces against illegal orders from the Pentagon and the White House. The basic loyalty to the Republic Oath elements are below. This comes in reaction to three distinct tangibles and one unverified but provocative intangible that are circulating with increasing urgency among those who fear the two-party tyranny and a blindly-obedient Pentagon:

1) Haliburton prison camps on US soil

2) FEMA discussions with various state and local law enforcement agencies about “federalizing” state and local police in case of a “national” emergency

3) Document said to be circulating within Washington on the prospects of an armed rebellion within the USA (we think secession and nullification much more likely, with armed resistance only if the federal government stupidly tries to use force against state and local resistance.

4) Unverified but from a Special Forces source with eyes on and unblemished integrity: multiple US military camps, one in Washington State and one in Alabama, among other locations, at which battalion size units of foreign troops (men without a country) have been kept in isolation, armed and trained, for contingency use within the USA. The same source says there is a long running PSYOP profiling program to identify for contingency need those US military personnel who would be willing to disarm US citizens if ordered to do so.

Never thought we'd get to this point. Visit the site above for a closer look. This is a movement Of, By, and For We the People, and it has very strong West Point, retired USMC, and National Guard support. In our view, the US military itself is beginning to realize the topsy-turvy nature of the morphing of the Global War on Terror (which is a tactic, not a target) into a War on Liberty right here in America. As we have long maintained, it is vital that our military personnel remember that Integrity is about loyalty to the Constitution, not to the chain of command.

OATH KEEPERS: ORDERS WE WILL NOT OBEY

1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.

2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people

3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.

4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.

5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.

6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.

7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.

8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control.”

9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies. 10.We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

2010/03/022010/03/02

Journal: Robert Baer on Transparency of Assassinations

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Peace Intelligence

A Perfectly Framed Assassination

Stepped-up surveillance technology may be tipping the scales in the cat-and-mouse game between spies and their targets. Robert Baer on the current state of spycraft.

EXTRACT:

Full Story Online

I can only speculate about where exactly the hit went wrong. But I would guess the assassins failed to account for the marked advance in technology. Not only were there closed-circuit TV cameras in the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated and at the airport, but Dubai has at its fingertips the best security consultants in the world. The consultants merely had to run advanced software through all of Dubai's digital data before, during and after the assassination to connect the assassins in time and place. For instance, a search of all cellular phone calls made in and around the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated would show who had called the same number—reportedly a command post in Vienna. It would only be a matter then of tracking when and where calls were made from these phones, tying them to hotels where the team was operating or staying.

Phi Beta Iota: Robert Baer, who spoke to the international OSINT conference before the movie was made about his life as a case officer, is a most valued colleague who apart from being a speaker of truth and an author, has doubts about the 9/11 Commission and the general veracity of the U.S. Government. He is a “tough love” patriot. His newest opinion piece exposes the rapidly narrowing space for covert actions including assassinations and other behaviors that can no longer pass undetected. As we pointed out a decade ago, it is no longer possible to create solid covers–instead of stealing or misappropriating them, we have been preaching 1) hire mid-career officers who have already built their covers unwittingly, and keep them in those real-world covers; and 2) stop doing the stupid shit. 95% of intelligence (decision-support) should b e legal and ethical. All its takes is integrity and a leadership that actually knows something about full-spectrum intelligence and the point of it all: to create a Smart Nation.

2010/03/012010/03/01

Journal: Israel Joins USA in the Psycho Ward

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

The attached opinion piece by Juan Cole is an excellent summary of how the self destructive nexus of Israeli and US foreign policies has pushed both countries into the grand-strategic equivalent of a psycho ward.

Chuck SPinney

The Decline of the Israeli Right and the Increasing Desperation of the ‘Anti-Semitism' Charge

The great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, even as Israel's reputation in the world is sinking. As rightwing policies more visibly fail, the Likudniks are flailing around making fools of themselves by smearing critics of those policies as racists. (Anyone who knows how Likud supporters talk among themselves about Arabs and other outsiders can only be amused at their impudent hypocrisy in playing the race card.)

The mess that Mossad's mercenaries (some of them possibly from the Fateh Palestinian faction also opposed to Hamas) made of a routine political assassination in Dubai of a Hamas agent funneling arms from Iran is a blow against Ithe image of daring, stone-cold competence cultivated by the Israeli security establishment. The killing went smoothly, but it transpires that the assassins had not only stolen the passport identities of British and Irish citizens, but those of several Israeli dual citizens originally from the UK, as well. Mossad thus made potential problems for those passport holders for the rest of their lives, since Interpol will be interested every time the numbers pop up at an airport check-in.

2010/02/242010/02/24

Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence

Hurdles Stymie Counterterrorism Center

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)

WASHINGTON — The nation's main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.

The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department.

. . . . . . .

Continue reading “Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL”