Category: Peace Intelligence

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Journal: Federal Judge–NSA Wiretaps Were Illegal

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence
Full Story Online

WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush.

. . . . . .

The ruling by Judge Walker, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, rejected the Justice Department’s claim — first asserted by the Bush administration and continued under President Obama — that the charity’s lawsuit should be dismissed without a ruling on the merits because allowing it to go forward could reveal state secrets.

The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state-secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.”

Phi Beta Iota: The US Intelligence Community is totally out of control and stupid as well.  Keith Alexander,[1]  like Mike Hayden [2] before him, is an administrative piss-ant with zero ethics–he means well, but he simply does not have the strategic brain-power to be honorable in the sense that every US citizen has a right to expect.   Across the board, US intelligence is being administered rather than led, and the time has come for the President–if he wishes to retain a semblance of credibility with the US public as well as the international community–to bring in a wrecking crew.  Not likely, but eminently necessary.

[1]  On very ignorant legal advice, while administering the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), Alexander destroyed ABLE DANGER and destroyed the early warning on two of the hijackers that ABLE DANGER produced, rather than hand over the information to the FBI as he was supposed to.

[2]  While administering NSA, Mike Hayden was the first to violate the Constitution and the  law with warrantless wiretapping, and then went on to pioneer rendition and torture at CIA.  He is the  epitomy of well-intentioned generals who sacrifice their ethics and their integrity in favor of loyalty to a political chain of command that is abjectly corrupt irrespective of which of the two-party tyranny wings holds  the White House.

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Reference: Intelligence Reform Death Notice

10 Security, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Commissions, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Ethics, Government, Hill Letters & Testimony, Law Enforcement, Legislation, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence, Policy, Reform, Strategy, Threats
Full Document Online

Phi Beta Iota: With a tip of the hat to Marcus Aurelius, this document is provided for information.  On balance it is rich with insights that are not available elsewhere and consequently must be very highly regarded as a baseline for where US intelligence reform (and US intelligence) are today: dead, with a $75 billion a year casket that shows no signs of atrophy.  Below are summary extracts both positive and negative.

Continue reading “Reference: Intelligence Reform Death Notice”

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Journal: The Iran Threat–Boogie Woogie Woo Woo

02 Diplomacy, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 10 Security, 11 Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence

The Iran Threat in the Age of Real-Axis-of-Evil Expansion

by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson

It is intriguing to see how whoever the United States and Israel find interfering with their imperial or dispossession plans is quickly demonized and becomes a threat and target for that Real-Axis-of-Evil (RAE), and hence their NATO allies and, with less intensity, much of the rest of the “international community” (IC, meaning ruling elites, not ordinary citizens).  If and when the need arises, any bit of news that is damaging to the targeted state will be fed into the demonization process — and in the marvelous propaganda system of the West, the grossest distortions will be swallowed and regurgitated without much guilt or apology, even upon the exposure of exceptional gullibility and dishonesty. The dishonesty, gullibility, double standard, and hypocrisy are handled with an aplomb that Pravda and Izvestia could never muster in the Soviet era.

. . . . . . .

Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has written extensively on economics, political economy, and the media. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981), The Real Terror Network (South End Press, 1982), and, with Noam Chomsky, The Political Economy of Human Rights (South End Press, 1979), and Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 2002).  David Peterson is an independent journalist and researcher based in Chicago

Phi Beta Iota: See the table at the Monthly Review Zine to truly appreciate the spectacular relevance of the total commentary by the lead author who with Noam Chomsky was a half-century ahead of the pack in understanding how Potemkin Democracy might be foisted on a deliberately disengaged public.

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Journal: CIA Seeks to Influence Opinion on Wars

02 Diplomacy, 04 Education, 10 Security, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Media, Peace Intelligence
Berto Jongman Recommends...

Wednesday 31 March 2010

by: Daan de Wit  |  DeepJournal

photo
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: Patrick Hoesly, CIA)

The CIA recommendations for influencing the European public into continuing their support for the mission in Afghanistan is receiving a lot of attention both in The Netherlands and beyond. But in a military conflict, war is only one stage of the struggle. The biggest struggle is for the hearts and minds of the public at large. What's special about the case of the document is not so much its content, but the fact that it is now available for all to see.

At the top of the CIA-document it states: ‘Why counting on apathy might not be enough'.

Phi Beta Iota: CIA and the Pentagon both stink at Information Operations because neither is interested in putting the truth on the table and working from there, only in manipulating perceptions to achieve ends that are neither strategic nor just.  For an alternative perspective that treats the truth with respect, see INFORMATION OPERATIONS:  All Information, All Languages, All the Time (OSS, 2006), and more recently, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability (EIN, 2010).

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Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA

04 Education, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Full Story Online

Marcus Aurelius Recommends...

A Dagger to the CIA

On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage

If we take Khost as a metaphor for what has happened to the CIA, the deprofessionalization of spying, it's tempting to consider that the agency's time has passed. “Khost was an indictment of an utterly failed system,” a former senior CIA officer told me. “It's time to close Langley.”

I'm not prepared to go quite that far. The United States still needs a civilian intelligence agency. (The military cannot be trusted to oversee all intelligence-gathering on its own.) But the CIA—and especially the directorate of operations—must be stripped down to its studs and rebuilt with a renewed sense of mission and purpose. It should start by getting the amateurs out of the field. And then it should impose professional standards of training and experience—the kind it upheld with great success in the past. If it doesn't, we're going to see a lot more Khosts.

Phi Beta Iota: Robert Bear, a most-respected colleague, only scratches the surface.  While we endorse his condemnation of Clinton and Deutch specifically, Robert misses the  deeper history and the broader implications.  CIA was “Flawed by Design” as Amy Zegart puts it so well, and has always been a loose-cannon shoot from the hip organization with what Tim Weiner now calls the “Legacy of Ashes”.

Continue reading “Journal: CIA Leads the “Walking Dead” in USA”

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Journal: Israel’s Government a Mutant Cancer

04 Inter-State Conflict, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, 12 Water, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

If the peace settlement does not include relocation assistance (economic), the settlers who want to relocate will be left ruined–at the same time that the government has ruined them, it plans to once again ruin Lebanon.  Apart from economic equity for the relocatable settlers, a regional water management treaty that is fully transparent and enforceable through international sanctions against Israel as needed, are essential elements of any sustainable regional peace plan that integrates prosperity for all.

Israel Threatens Lebanon … Again

A New Middle East War?

By CONN HALLINAN, Counterpunch, 30 Mar 2010

When Israeli Minister without Portfolio Yossi Peled said recently that a war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah was “just a matter of time” and that such a conflict would include Syria, most observers dismissed the comment as little more than posturing by a right-wing former general. But Peled’s threat has been backed by Israeli military maneuvers near the Lebanese border, violations of Lebanese airspace, and the deployment of an anti-missile system on Israel’s northern border.

The Lebanese are certainly not treating it as Likud bombast.

“We hear a lot of Israeli threats day in and day out, and not only threats,” Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri told the BBC. “We see what is happening on the ground and in our airspace…during the past two months—every day we have Israeli airplanes entering Lebanese airspace.” Hariri added that he considered the situation “really dangerous.”

By Tobias Buck in Karnei Shomron
Financial Times,March 30 2010 20:06

Benny Raz put up a “For Sale” sign outside his home last year, but he admits there is little hope of finding a buyer. The house itself is a three-bedroom property on a quiet street, with a garden and terrace offering views across rolling hills dotted with olive trees.

The problem is one of location: Mr Raz’s house sits on the outskirts of Karnei Shomron, a Jewish settlement built in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He bought the house 15 years ago for $130,000 (€97,000, £87,000). Today, Mr Raz says, no buyer is willing to pay more than $70,000 for the property – not nearly enough for the family to afford another place inside Israel itself.

Like thousands of so-called “economic settlers”, the 57-year-old moved to the West Bank for the cheap housing, the tax breaks and the promise of a comfortable life. Now, many of them find they are stuck. “The government said: I will help you buy a house in Karnei Shomron, so I went with my family. I came for economic reasons, not ideological reasons. I came because I wanted a cheaper house,” says Mr Raz.

Phi Beta  Iota: There is nothing wrong with Israel, or the United States of America, that could not be fixed by restoring informed participatory democracy.  Right now both governments are out-of-control and totally corrupt monsters, both cancers encroaching on everything they touch.

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