Month: June 2010

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Journal: US Political & Military Double-Dealing Blown Open

02 Diplomacy, 08 Wild Cards, Ethics
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

COMMENT:  From (UK) Independent.  There is some interesting stuff on Wikileaks.  Not all of it is US and not all of it is classified.  Further, Wikileaks is far from the only site in the business.  Oh, and Bradley Manning is very unlikely to be a US IO.  He's much more likely to be an E-1 or E-2 Army 96B intel analyst who had a couple of Article 15s and was on his way out of the Army.  However, he probably did have the standard USIC clearance package and access to codeword-level computer systems.  Lesson (re)learned here:  if you're going to take an adverse action against somebody with that kind of access, you probably need to terminate permanently the access before you take the action so revenge can't, at least as easily as  it may have here, take the form of an intentional compromise)
 
Pentagon rushes to block release of classified files on Wikileaks

By Jerome Taylor

Saturday, 12 June 2010

Visit WikiLeaks

It has the ingredients of a spy thriller: an American military analyst turned whistleblower; 260,000 classified government documents; and rumours that the world's most powerful country is hunting a former hacker whom it believes is about to publish them.

 Pentagon and State Department officials are desperately trying to discover whether Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence officer currently under arrest in Kuwait, has leaked highly sensitive embassy cables to Wikileaks.org, an online community of some 800 volunteer cyber experts, activists, journalists and lawyers which has become a thorn in the side of governments and corrupt corporations across the globe.

Reports in the US say officials are seeking to apprehend Julian Assange, the website's founder who has pioneered the release of the kind of information the mainstream media are either unwilling or unable to publish.

 . . . . . . .

Manning, 22, an intelligence analyst from Potomac, Maryland, who had been serving in Iraq, was revealed earlier this week as the source behind a highly damning leak earlier in the year that showed harrowing cockpit footage of an American Apache helicopter gunning down unarmed civilians in Baghdad three years ago.

But the Apache video may have proven to be one leak too far. Adrian Lamo, a former US hacker turned journalist who had been conversing with Manning online and later gave up his name to the authorities, said he also claimed to have handed 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.

According to Mr Lamo, Manning said the documents showed “almost-criminal political back dealings” made by US embassies in the Middle East which, if true, would cause enormous embarrassment to key allies in a notoriously volatile area of the world. Mr Lamo claims Manning said that “Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public”.

 READ THE FULL STORY

Phi Beta Iota:  The US Military may at some point — using open sources of information — discover that Mr. Assange is the confirmed keynote speaker at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), taking place at the Hotel Pennsylvania in NYC, 18-20 July 2010.  He will be followed by the founder of OSS.Net, Earth Intelligence Network, and Phi Beta Iota, Mr. Robert Steele, who is now in seclusion in Latin America, but has never missed this event, for which he was the first keynote speaker in 1994.  On Friday the 18th Steele will provide a 30 minute presentation on his new book, “Hacking Humanity,” on Saturday the 19th he will do SPY IMPROV from 2200 until the audience runs out of questions–the record is four hours.  As with past sessions, video will be provided online for those who cannot stay up late.

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Journal: Correction To Spinney Piece Makes It Stronger

08 Wild Cards
Chuck Spinney Sends

All … Please be advised, a reader from Toronto correctly informed me that I made a serious error of fact in my last piece in Counterpunch, “Obama as Moral Dupe: Will Erdogan Blink?”

I stated that the threat to sink any Gaza aid ship or escorting warship carrying Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was made by Deputy of Staff Uzi Dayan. In fact, Dayan is not the currrent Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army, but a former DCS. He is now a member of Likud Party in the Knesset. He is not a member of the Netanyahu government, however.

Therefore, the threat to sink any ship carrying Erdogan was not technically made by the Netanyahu government. However, given the fact that Dayan is a member in good standing of the Israeli generals club; the fact that being Moshe Dayan's nephew, he is a prominent member of the Israeli military aristocracy; and the facts that the Jerusalem Post and Army Radio are known mouthpieces for the Israeli Government, I suspect this threat was an exercise in “strategic ambiguity” to hype tensions in the hope of deterring the Erdogan government, while leaving the door open for the Netanyahu government to distance itself from the remarks, should that become necessary. It is also possible Dayan had domestic political reasons for making this statement. And, of course, he may have been a loose cannon.

Whatever the case, imagine a prominent US senator saying the US must take a military action that could kill the prime minister of a rival country, and the President taking no action to disavow those remarks. I have searched the internet to find a statement disavowing Dayan's comments by the Netanyahu government and found none to date.

I should have included wording to this effect — and paradoxically, I think a correction these lines would have made my argument stronger, because it is more illustrative of the kind of psychology at work in a march to a folly reminiscent of that in 1914.

Also, apropos the question of Erdogan blinking, the Turks do not seem deterred and on the contrary appear to be ratcheting up the pressure, if the following quotes attributed to Turkish President Gul in this Ha'aretz report are accurate.

“On Friday Turkish President Abdullah Gul told the French daily Le Monde that Israel must make amends to be forgiven for a commando assault on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, including apologizing for the attack and paying compensation.

Gul added that if Israel made no move to heal the rift, then Turkey could even decide to break diplomatic relations.

In an interview published on Friday, Gul said the Israeli attack at the end of May, which killed nine activists, was a “crime” which might have been carried out by the likes of al-Qaida rather than a sovereign state.

“It seems impossible to me to forgive or forget, unless there are some initiatives which could change the situation,” Gul was quoted as saying by Le Monde.

Asked what these might be, he said: “Firstly, to ask pardon and to establish some sort of compensation.” He added that he also wanted to see an independent inquiry into the botched raid and a discussion on lifting Israel's blockade of Gaza.”

In my opinion, statements like Dayan's and Gul's illustrate how this crisis could evolve in to a more serious crisis than the Cuban Missile Crisis. I say more serious, because in the Cuban crisis, both sides had militaries armed with nuclear weapons that we now know were controlled by rational civilian leaders, whereas in this crisis is inherently more unstable, because only one side has nuclear weapons, and that side's politics are dominated by the military, its political and military leaders have a belligerent history preemptive wars, and it has a national outlook that is governed by an increasingly disconnected sense of self-righteous victimhood that has, in Henry Siegman's words, lost its moral imagination. An the other side is equally stubborn and it senses it has the moral high ground. And the US is in this up to its neck, because it has tight connections to both sides of the quarrel.

Sorry for any confusion caused by my mistake.
Chuck Spinney

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Journal: The Loss of Moral Imagination–Israel AND the USA

08 Wild Cards
Chuck Spinney Recommends

Henry Siegman, the author of this article in the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, is a distinguished Jewish American.  He  has written some of the most thoughtful and cogent criticisms of Israel's occupation policies, prominent among these are Israel's Lies and The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam, both published in the London Review of Books.

Israel’s Greatest Loss: Its Moral Imagination

If a people who so recently experienced such unspeakable inhumanities cannot understand the injustice and suffering its territorial ambitions are inflicting, what hope is there for the rest of us?

By Henry Siegman, Ha’aretz, 11 June 2010

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/israel-s-greatest-loss-its-moral-imagination-1.295600

Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former Senior Fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and, before that, was national director of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994.

Following Israel’s bloody interdiction of the Gaza Flotilla, I called a life-long friend in Israel to inquire about the mood of the country. My friend, an intellectual and a kind and generous man, has nevertheless long sided with Israeli hardliners. Still, I was entirely unprepared for his response. He told me—in a voice trembling with emotion—that the world’s outpouring of condemnation of Israel is reminiscent of the dark period of the Hitler era.

He told me most everyone in Israel felt that way, with the exception of Meretz, a small Israeli pro-peace party. “But for all practical purposes,” he said, “they are Arabs.”

READ FULL ANALYSIS ONLINE

Phi Beta Iota:  Ha’aretz is our favorite Jewish publication, consistently both honest and intelligent, which one cannot say about any of the mainstream Israel or US (including CNN) media “sources.”  The USA has been infected by Israel, the neo-conservatives being the primary conduit for this fatal disease of moral and mental incapacitation, and the liberal Democrats in turn infected by their counterparts within the two-party tyranny that does not represent 70% of the eligible voters of America, 43% (and growing) of whom have declared their independence from the corrupt and despicable tragic farce called “democratic government” in America.  It is neither democratic, nor a government in the proper sense of the word.

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Journal: Obama as Moral Dupe

08 Wild Cards

 

Chuck Spinney Sends...

Obama as Moral Dupe: Will Erdogan Blink?

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

Counterpunch

A recent article by Patrick Cockburn, one of the ablest reporters covering the Middle East, provides an excellent character portrait of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. It is certainly consistent with what little I have been able to learn about this fascinating politician. Regardless of what you may think of Erdogan, and he has many detractors (I am not one), he is certainly establishing himself as an influential world leader who must be reckoned with in an emerging multi-polar world.

Cockburn's report is must reading, because Erdogan has maneuvered himself onto the moral high ground in a very serious crisis he did not create. Consider please the following:

By standing tall against Israel's murderous commando attack on the unarmed ship in international waters that was carrying aid to the besieged inhabitants of Gaza, and by promising to be on another ship trying to break the blockade, Erdogan has set an example that contrasts sharply with the latest generation of pusillanimous leaders in the United States. They have refused to condemn Israel's attack, even though a US citizen was among those murdered — thus continuing the pattern of unprincipled moral weakness that began when President Johnson refused to act decisively after the Israelis deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in international waters in June 1967, murdering over 30 American sailors.

Not surprisingly, Erdogan has become the newest bête noire of the neocons.

FULL STORY ONLINE

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Journal: DECLASSIFICATION AND THE “CRISIS” IN INTEL HISTORY

Uncategorized

Phi Beta Iota:  The next Director of National Intelligence (DNI) should be required by Congress, as conditions for confirmation, to agree to open the entire Intelligence Community, every single one of the 953 codeword compartments (and the other 200+ that “don't exist”); and to immediately and without further ado declassify all documents as required by law–instead of the deliberately idiotic process of having drones pretend to “study” quarter-century old documents for threats to national security, have a phased process where declassification is absolute, and only publication of the tediously isolated elements is subject to review.  John Lewis Gaddis, in The Landscape of History, says it best: history is a denied area because we are irresponsible about respecting the importance of history in all its forms.  The fact is that the US Intelligence Community understands full well that the declassification as required by law, if done, will immediately do two things:

1.  Subject all past intelligence professionals at the leadership level in clandestine and covert operations to investigation and indictment before International Tribunals that can no longer be ignored, for crimes against humanity including regime change; and

2.  Demonstrate conclusively that the Return on Investment (RoI) for secret sources and methods is questionable at best–when 75 billion dollars a year produce today, “at best,” 4% of what a combatant commander needs to know, the secret world has become a cancer on the body politic of virtually no redeeming value to the public–only to the thieves in high places.

Federation of American Scientists Secrecy News

DECLASSIFICATION AND THE “CRISIS” IN INTEL HISTORY

The ongoing failure to establish a robust, reliable and productive declassification program is steadily eroding the study of intelligence history and may lead to the collapse of the entire field, one intelligence historian told the National Security Agency last month.

“I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that we're at a crisis point in the study of intelligence history in general, and signals intelligence history in particular;  because there is a very real question of whether any serious historians outside of the intelligence community are going to continue trying to research and understand and write about this subject at all,” said author Stephen Budiansky in an invited lecture at the National Cryptologic Museum at Fort Meade on May 24.

Continue reading “Journal: DECLASSIFICATION AND THE “CRISIS” IN INTEL HISTORY”

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Anti-Piracy Without A Clue…

08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime

Somalia anti-piracy patrol: Reuters Africa published a report that European Union foreign ministers are expected to extend the bloc's anti-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia for another year next week.

Rear Admiral Peter Hudson, Commander of the European Union Naval Force Somalia, said he expected a new extension of its mandate which expires in December to be cleared at Monday's regular meeting of EU ministers. “Over the last two years, there has been real growth in the area the pirates are operating in, as they become more adventurous, more fearless and more determined to strike merchant ships in the Indian Ocean,” he told a news conference.

Since December 2008, the EU's ‘Operation Atalanta' has protected ships delivering food aid to Somalia and others passing through the Gulf of Aden and near the Somali coast. The task group normally comprises 13 ships, one submarine and four patrol aircraft from ten countries. It is separate from the US anti-piracy Combined Task Force, as well as ships of Russia, Iran and Asian countries.
Naval forces disrupted 59 pirate groupings in the Somali basin between March and May this year, one of the two main piracy seasons of the year, up sharply from last year. Pirates hold more than 350 sailors and 17 ships.

Seminal Article on Maritime Threat & Response (Declined by the US Naval Institute Proceedings as either controversial or inconsistent with the prevailing flag views on reality)

Phi Beta Iota:  Despite twenty years of robust thinking by a few about asymmetric warfare, those in positions of power are still without a clue.  General Al Gray, USMC (Ret), then Commandant of the Marine Corps, got it right in 1989, as did a number of other Marines including honorary Marines Bill Lind and Col John Boyd, USAF (Ret), Col G.I. Wilson, USMC (Ret), still a top mentor on this topic, and Robert Steele, who has disappeared into Latin America.  Illegal parallel structures will continue to proliferate for two big reasons:

1.  Governments are failing across the board–not just the 175+ “failed states” (up from 25 at the start of the Bush-Cheney regime)–but the states of the Americas, Asia, and Europe that are failing to represent their publics and failing to do holistic strategic analytics.  If you screw enough people all of the time, eventually they do something about it.

2.  That lead's to the second half of the equation: the impotence of imperial “state on state” forces in the face of asymmetric challengers that combine morality (in their view), ruthlessness, a willingness to die trying, and a plethora of “surprise” techniques not least being the ability to strike anywhere.

Below are just a couple of references long-ignored by anyone with a modicum of power–as was written in 1997, the gap between people with power and people with knowledge has grown catasclysmic–that was in 1997.  Daniel Elsberg had it right when he lectured Heny Kissinger in the 1970's: given enough power and enough top secret waste products, our political and policy leaders have become like morons, unable to learn from others, however knowledgeable.  Here is the complete quote:

The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].

See Also:

1989 General Al Gray on Global Intelligence Challenges

1990 Expeditionary Environment Analytic Model

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extract: Anti-Piracy Without A Clue…”

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