Month: June 2010

Pentagon “To Boost Covert Missions in Middle East”

Phi Beta Iota:  Jim Clapper is a technocrat-administrator, not a leader, and he has consistently undermined both the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI).  The Pentagon's “clandestine” operations are a huge farce–the training, according to one CIA-trained Special Operations Colonel, consists of “push-ups done silently.”  [We do NOT make this stuff up.]  CIA clandestine HUMINT is an equal farce, this is true, but two farces do not make a force.  The US Intelligence Community is a massive waste of the taxpayer's funds–$75 billion and climbing most of it out of control technical and contractor budgets within the Pentagon–because no one in Washington is serious about using intelligence to impact on how we train, equip, and organize Whole of Government in the public interest–the IC, like the Pentagon, is nothing more than a means of transferring wealth from the individual taxpayer to the corporations and banks that fund our corrupt Congress and our corrupt White House.

CIA Report on Soviet War Shows Futility of Military Effort in Afghanistan

Phi Beta Iota:  This is what the “Open Source Center” should have been doing in the first place.  Late, but finally, something intelligent and useful.

Former CIA Officer Says He Was Caught In “Honey Trap”

Phi Beta Iota:  CIA's dirty little secret continues to be the ease with which Third World intelligence services, often aided by the Cubans or others, can wrap up the CIA Stations and selected case officers, in part because case officers operating out of official cover installation live immunity, not cover, and too many of them still drink way more than is good for them, have way too much discretionary spending authority, and generally are not held accountable for being fools.  CIA also continues to harbor sexual predators and to be very–very–hypocritical within the clandestine “boy's will be boy's” club, biased against women and against iconoclasts. 

Former CIA Officer on Iran: Brazil and Turkey are Vital Checks and Balances, by Graham E. Fuller

Phi Beta Iota:  Crystal clear–not being read by the blind.

The Politics Of National Intelligence, by Marc Ambinder

Phi Beta Iota:  Nice try but not serious.  DNI was a wrong turn.  The only thing lacking in national intelligence leadership is integrity. 

The Truth About Drones: They Are Inspiring Homegrown Terror, by Fawaz Gerges in Newsweek

Phi Beta Iota:  Yup.  CIA has taken “collateral damage” to extraordinary new highs, and we fully anticipate the eventual creation a special international tribunal to deal exclusively with the crimes against humanity by the CIA and its elements, going all the way back to the 1950's.  If the USA is a Rogue Elephant, CIA is the turds that elephant keeps dropping around the planet. 

Phi Beta Iota:  The Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) is a precious gem within the landscape of associatioins, most focused on assuring a good living for their officers.  AFIO is consistently ethical, intelligent, and useful.  Visit them at www.afio.org.

Turkey-Israel: For the record. Turkish Defense Minister Gonul said the current crisis with Israel should not delay the delivery of four remotely piloted aircraft (drones), Anatolia news agency reported June 1. Gonul said he expects the drones to be delivered in June or July.

Evidently, the Turks think the plight of the Palestinians is not worth sacrificing one Israeli-supplied remotely piloted aircraft.

Israel-Hamas: Comment: A few myths need to be dispelled that mainstream news commentators have overlooked. First is that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza that requires a sealift. Knowledgeable and objective analysts have reported no such crisis exists.

That means the attempted sealift was a deliberate confrontation, a provocation and a test of Israeli nerve. Thus, the second myth is that this was an innocent, altruistic effort to help suffering Palestinians. This was a setup, as one Brilliant and Well-informed Reader noted in Feedback.

The third myth is that Israel would be swayed by international outrage. Quarantine is meaningless if not enforced and conciliatory gestures invite escalating provocations because Hamas has promised nothing to Israel. Israel did what it said it would do – escort the ships to Ashdod, which is where they are.

A point that has gotten lost is that Hamas refuses to recognize Israel's right to exist. That marmoreal policy position is existential to Hamas and invites contempt even from fellow Arabs.

Hamas never reciprocates acts of generosity by any one, which explains region-wide contempt for Hamas. On the other hand, Hamas does respond to force and intimidation. Israeli asymmetric strikes in retaliation for rocket attacks from Gaza are the only proven approach for persuading Hamas to stop the rocket attacks.

Hamas may be enjoying Israeli discomfit over the bad publicity, but it lost four ships through its own folly. If there were a genuine humanitarian crisis, then Hamas trifled with the plight of its people and should be exposed as irresponsible. Ship captains on genuine missions of mercy are more than willing to prove the innocence of their cargos in order to complete their missions.

Behavior demonstrating innocent passage is common in all war zones, where humanitarian relief is an urgent need. That is not this case. The humanitarian mission seems unimportant and insignificant, a deception. The behavior of the people on the ships justifies a strong suspicion by any maritime security force in the world that the ships carried contraband and required inspection. That is the law of the sea.

So why has the mainstream media not questioned the motives and behavior of the people on the ships?

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH on Turkey, Israel, and Palestine”

Phi Beta Iota Warning Notice:  Do NOT waste ink on the IC report.  We've ordered up what they should have done in the first place, a printer-friendly low-footprint version that prints reliably and should have it delivered to Secrecy News by the end of the week.  Not only does this offering waste a lot of ink, it prints in very tiny font two pages per sheet.  Pending our better offering that retains color and context, go with the text only version.  Our graphics person considers this document to be so deliberately clogged as to be non-usable online to unclude deliberately unprintable in usable form.  Substantive comments below.

Secrecy News:  The development of the 2004 intelligence reform legislation that created the Director of National Intelligence and attempted to modernize and integrate the U.S. intelligence community was examined in detail last year in an unreleased report (large pdf) from the Office of the DNI.

The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act was supposed to “address institutional obstacles that had complicated the IC's struggle to adapt to new technologies and a changing national security environment. The new act would redraw boundaries between foreign and domestic intelligence, set new rules for intelligence and law enforcement, enhance the interplay between civilian and military intelligence, correct the shortfall in information sharing, and meet the needs of traditional and emergent intelligence functions.”

But five years later, many of those original obstacles remain in place.

Continue reading “Secrecy News: A Look Back at Intelligence Reform (By the Perp)”