This is a really good report by one of the most thoughtful reporters covering the Middle East and Central Asia–and below, the second story on Teamsters forcing Wall Street to back down from its predatory behavior in one instance. Chuck
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The Script Calls for Victory, No Matter What: The Battle for Marjah
By PATRICK COCKBURN 11 February 2010
The largely mythical US success in Iraq is now to be replicated in Afghan towns like Marjah and skirmishes there will be heavily reported. A NATO spokesman says the people of the town will soon “feel the benefits of better governance, of economic opportunities and of operating under the legitimate authorities of Afghanistan.” But according to a leaked cable from the US ambassador in Kabul Karl Eikenberry to President Obama three months ago, no such Afghan authority exists at any level. Instead he warned that US troop reinforcements, which are now going into action, will only ensure “an indefinite, large-scale US military role in Afghanistan.”
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“We Don't Want a Bunch of Angry Teamsters Showing Up at Our Doors!”
The Economic Velociraptors
By ANDREW COCKBURN 14 February 2010
But while the gamblers wreck their havoc on ancient nations, some of them of at least may be facing a comeuppance closer to home. CounterPunchers will recall that when Goldman and others on Wall Street sought to ruin the big trucking company YRCW over Christmas by sabotaging a debt reorganization while betting on the firm’s default and demise – thus eliminating 30,000 jobs – the Teamsters mobilized successfully and forced the offending parties to back off. “We got out of our position in a hurry,” one hedge find trader told me later, figuratively mopping his brow, “we didn’t want a bunch of angry Teamsters showing up at our door.”
Invite your attention to attached — contains a couple of interesting observations about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT):
“…open source intelligence — catapulting it to primary place for new adversaries and increasingly for the U.S. military — and also rapid organizational learning and assembly of capabilities…” [page 9]
“…There are strong indications that Hezbollah made significant use of OSINT — gathering valuable intelligence from Israeli press and news broadcasts as well as websites. Reports suggest that Hezbollah used Israeli press reports to plot the location of its rocket strikes in Israel and may have used Google Earth to help re-calibrate the accuracy of its fire….” [page 56]
Personal from Robert Steele. Although this search yields some links, we'd like to do a little better for you. Here are a few observations:
1) If you are only working with 20% of the relevant information, you cannot connect dots that lie outside that 20%. We live in a complex globalized environment in which everything is connected, and if you cannot do all information in all languages all the time, while also managing human intelligence to leverage all humans, all minds, all the time, you are toast. The US Government generally, and the US Intelligence Community specifically, are still back in the 1950's to 1970's in terms of mind-set, isolation from reality and open sources, and so on.
2) The top-down unilateral command and control communciations, computing, and intelligence (C4I) infrastructure is so severely handicapped as to be largely worthless in terms of estimate intelligence, warning, or rapid reaction. Haiti is a classic example of how badly the US Government performs when it cannot connect to reality on the ground–the hard rains come in May, the USA has wasted 30 days by focusing on the evacuation of Americans rather than the stabilization and reconstruction of Haiti–what this means is that in April and May the US Coast Guard may well be over-whelmed with a boat exodus–because at the strategic level, our command authority could “command” individual boats and flights, but it could not “connect” to reality and see the obvious: fix Haiti, or watch them swarm toward US shores. We invaded Haiti once before to stop a boatlift, it seems we learned nothing from that experience.
Millions of people in Haiti still lack adequate food, shelter and security a month after the massive earthquake, problems sure to be exacerbated by the Caribbean country's looming rainy season.
Food has yet to reach all of the three million people who need it. Infrastructure problems and supply backlogs continue to hamper an international aid effort that has drawn about $113 million from Canada alone. Schools remain closed.
And on Thursday morning, in a taste of the new horrors the impending rainy season promises to bring, an early-morning downpour muddied the dirt in which 1.2 million people have pitched a makeshift camp.
Video: one quarter missing, 90% homeless, rains will come in May–superb video overview. Five hour wait for a small box of suppiies, only two boxes per person in entire time since earthquake.“Major UN agencies conspicuous by their absence.”
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – A predawn rain shower soaked tens of thousands of people Thursday, turning dirt to mud in their makeshift camps and giving an early warning of the misery that the impending rainy season could bring to this earthquake-ravaged country.
Rain collapsed cardboard shacks and soaked clothing and bedding at the Marassa 14 camp, where about 2,500 displaced people are living in a dry riverbed.
Most of the estimated 1.2 million people who the U.N. says are living in temporary camps across Haiti dwell in simple structures made of bed sheets and plastic sheeting. Officials warn that more permanent shelter must be in place before the rainy season begins within weeks.
MIAMI, USA (AFP) — A US Coast Guard cutter on Thursday took 78 Haitians picked up on an overloaded sailboat off the Bahamas back to their quake ravaged country, delivering them to Cap Haitien, officials said.
The repatriation signalled US determination to turn back Haitian boat people even though it is letting Haitians already illegally in the United States stay for the time being because of the January 12 quake.
Unlike Facebook, whose builders strive to make it an ever more organized social network, Twitter seems to thrive on being a jumble. It is an egalitarian sort of mess: Twitter does not sort its users into categories, does not tag some as celebrities, does not map out who does lunch with whom in the real world. You and Shaquille O’Neal are Twitter equals, only he has an extra 2.8 million followers.
There is also a Web site, Listorious listorious.com where volunteers publish personally chosen lists of posters to follow based on specific themes. But it is hit or miss. The Best of Photography list is a sharp collection of 29 eye-catching feeds, but Tech News People is a pile of 499 journalists for you to sort through.
So, how do you figure out who to follow? Start with a sweeping generalization: Twitter users can be grouped into different categories. For each, there is an automated site somewhere that lets you follow the genre without having to find and follow dozens, or even hundreds, of individual Twitter streams.
Phi Beta Iota: This article provides an extraordinary bridge to the future, when Twitter could become the real-time feed for inputs easily sorted in an infinite number of “back offices” that remix the information by threat, policy, player, and zip code. The difference between Google and Twitter is that Twitter empowers the end-user, Google ravages the end user (intellectually and metaphorically speaking).
Shortly after we posted the original Project 4636 info graphic, a few folks involved in the project got in touch to see if we could clarify the process. There are a lot of moving parts, many of which are constantly changing, and so the original graphic didn’t quite reflect the exact process as well as it could have. With that in mind, we worked with Josh Nesbit of Frontline SMS Medic and Nicolás di Tada of InSTEDD to make sure the graphic reflected the process as accurately as possible. The biggest update that we made is that InSTEDD’s Nuntium SMS Gateway and the Thomson Reuters Foundation Emergency Information System are now the first entities that receive and process incoming SMS’s. Everything else is pretty much the same.
