The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Please find below links to several press reports on potential AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] actions to poison food in US restaurants.
Report: Terrorists Seek to Poison Food at U.S. Restaurants, Hotels (Global Security Newswire)
The American public is getting a very high return on its investment in our current crop of junior officers. The are bright, industrious, and typically working significantly above their experience and training. And, day after day, they deliver for us. Iraq and Afghanistan are junior leaders' wars. And OUR junior leaders — officer AND non-commissioned officer — are serving us very well.
Phi Beta Iota: Viet-Nam deja vu, El Salvador deja vu, MASINT deja vu– in 1988-1989 the Marine Corps' highest priority for MASINT was the detection of mines based on explosives not the container, at a safe distance. $80 billion a year and the IC still cannot find anomalous objects buried in the ground. As MG Robert Scales points out, 4% of the force is taking 80% of the casualties, and we are spending less than 1% of the Pentagon's total budget on protecting them.
New York Times
December 21, 2010
Pg. 1
A Year At War: In Command
Life And Death Decisions Weigh On Junior Officers
Articles in this series are chronicling the yearlong deployment of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, based in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan. The series follows the battalion’s part in the surge in northern Afghanistan and the impact of war on individual soldiers and their families back home.
QURGHAN TAPA, Afghanistan — The hill wasn’t much to behold, just a treeless mound of dirt barely 80 feet high. But for Taliban fighters, it was a favorite spot for launching rockets into Imam Sahib city. Ideal, American commanders figured, for the insurgents to disrupt the coming parliamentary elections.
Why Civilians Must Reclaim Stabilization Aid
Michael Young
Foreign Affairs, December 19, 2010
Summary: Today, billions of dollars in aid is delivered by soldiers and private contractors at the behest of the political and military leadership. But this so-called “militarized aid” is ineffective, wasteful, and puts lives at risk.
MICHAEL YOUNG is Regional Director for Asia, Caucasus, and the Middle East at the International Rescue Committee. He has worked in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya, and Pakistan.
From Virtual Secretary of Defense
Purpose
The purpose of this memorandum is to establish priorities for my strategic objectives through 2012 and pending the concurrence of a new president with a proper staff, 2020. There is no such thing as strategic guidance for one year. This document informs without directing anyone.
Intent
My intent is to establish a baseline of truth–the truth at any cost reduces all other costs–so as to return our Armed Forces to a condition of readiness, responsiveness, and effectiveness in the face of all threats to the Republic, both domestic and foreign. At a minimum this means an Air Force capable of long-haul lift; a Navy capable of distributed littoral operations; an Army able to fight uncomfortable wars while also reinforcing legitimate governments and where appropriate helping insurgents holding the moral high ground to displace despotic regimes. It also means a Marine Corps able to put air-land-sea forces on any spot in 24 hours (platoon landing team), 48 hours (company landing team) and 72 hours (battalion landing team), along with a Coast Guard able to fulfill all of its homeland safety and security missions. Underlying my intent for the Armed Forces is a strategic intent to demand clarity, integrity, and sensibility from the Whole of Government–sustainable legal orders consonant with our public's culture.
Our blood must only be shed when our brains are engaged and all other means–cultural, diplomatic, economic, educational, and political–cannot achieve the objectives that are open, legal, ethical, moral, and validated by both Congress and the public. My intent therefore consists of creating the conditions for getting a grip on reality and being able to deal with reality, with a particular emphasis on assuring that all information necessary to inter-agency effectiveness and multinational engagement is both known to us, and shareable with others.
Comprehensive Architect, Prime Design
Posted: December 21, 2010 08:27 A
Diversity of Voices & Values (Huffington Post)
Poor No Labels. A million dollars wasted, all because the donors and the recipients are so out of touch with America they simply don't “get” the fact that the two-party tyranny is a “walking dead man,” and a diversity of voices & values has emerged across America and around the world.
With today's posting, I point to twelve of the lists of books reviews from Book Review Lists (Positive). For each list, I highlight two books from within that list. My intent is to demonstrate that America does not lack for authentic, coherent, integral voices & values — right now it lacks for honest leadership. Labels or No Labels, America has no leaders worth a warm bucket of spit. From wing-nuts to buffoons to frauds, we have no bench. The time has come, in my view, to retire an entire generation of local, state, and national “leaders,” and to make way for the younger generation, the digitally literate generation, for whom secrecy is a connectivity outage to be routed around.
Book Reviews on Conscious, Evolutionary, Integral Activism & Goodness
Review: Evolutionary Activism by Tom Atlee
Review: Society's Breakthrough!-Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Book Reviews on Dialog for Truth & Reconciliation
Review: All Rise-Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity
Review: The Power of the Powerless-Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern Europe
Robert L. Brown
Temple University
August 16, 2010
Abstract:
The risk of nuclear terrorism is hyped by some as possible and high consequence (Allison 2006) while others dismiss the strategy as too difficult and too risky for terrorist organizations (Jenkins 2008). However, analysts have no data from which to directly analyze the probability of terrorist acquisition and use. One methodological solution is to extend the range analysis to include analogous cases: private military corporations (PMCs) are one class of non-state actors (NSAs) who may possess the capacity and autonomy to pose a risk of nuclear terrorism for their state masters. I find that the while the technical and military capabilities of PMCs may be greater than those of terrorist organizations with respect to nuclear weapon construction or delivery, they are still be insufficient (and PMCs must also somehow acquire fissile materials). Also, PMCs benefit from agency slack, as demonstrated by Blackwater’s performance in Iraq, but this autonomy does not appear sufficient to carry out an illicit nuclear plot. Therefore, PMCs may be more capable than most terrorist organizations if they sought to acquire nuclear weapons but they are still unlikely to succeed.
Keywords: Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, Private Military Corporations, Blackwater, Xe
Working Paper Series
Brown, Robert L., Private Military Corporations: A Non-State Actor-Nuclear Terror Nexus? (August 16, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1659785
See Also:
David Isenberg, Jack Bauer Beats Blackwater, Huffington Post 20 december 2010
Updated 30 December 2010
Robert David Steele