January 2012 – Page 4 – Public Intelligence Blog

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

Discussing OWS (3): #OccupyWallStreet as a Culture Change Movement

Excerpted from William Gamson:

“The single most important thing to understand about the Occupy movement[deleted plural ending] is that it is primarily a movement about cultural change, not institutional and policy change. Cultural change means changing the nature of political discourse and the various spheres in which it is carried on, especially mass media. Changing what is salient on the public agenda can open discursive opportunities for various groups seeking specific institutional and policy changes.

The cultural mission of the Occupy movement is to raise consciousness about the corporate domination of American political, social, and economic institutions – and to the enormous inequalities in income and wealth produced by this domination. At the same time, it attempts to build a collective identity within its constituency by making personal suffering a shared experience. While I have no systematic data to prove it has done so, I am quite confident that, when such data is available, it will show that in various forums there has been a sharp increase since September, 2011 in references to corporate power and actual or potential abuse of corporate power and to statistics showing the dramatic increases in wealth and income controlled by the richest one percent or fewer families. Hence, it seems reasonable to argue that, whatever future institutional and policy changes may or may not take place in the future, this movement has already been a major success by changing the nature of U.S. political discourse.

Continue reading “Michel Bauwens: Occupy as a Culture Change Movement”

2012/01/292012/01/29

Chuck Spinney: Should We Fear Nuclear Iran or Nuclear Israel?

05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

Fact #1: Only one country in the Middle East has nuclear weapons – Israel. The quantity is unknown, with estimates of the Israeli arsenal range between 60 and 400 bombs, the upper range of 200-400 being the most often cited. Fact #2: Only one country in the Middle East has refused to the sign the Non Proliferation Treaty – Israel. These two facts are not in dispute.

While most observers (except for the leadership of Israel and its agents of influence in the west, especially the US) believe making the Middle East a nuclear free zone would be a positive step toward peace, no one is pressuring Israel to give up its weapons. The goal of a nuclear free zone may be great for raising grant money, but without a commitment to pressure Israel into giving up its weapons, it will remain a pipe dream.

On the other hand, Israel and the US claim the unilateral right to insure that all of the Middle East other than Israel remains a nuclear free zone, by preemptive military action, if either country deems it to be necessary. To this end Israel, attacked the Osirak reactor without warning in Iraq (1981) and an alleged Syrian nuclear site without warning in 2007. Ironically, at the time of the Osirak attack, the Iraqi program was moribund and going nowhere, but the attack spurred Saddam into developing a more vigorous covert program. [Pillar] The real purpose of the alleged “nuclear” site in Syria remains in dispute, with some arguing that recent evidence proves it was a textile factory. Ironically, the Osirak attack set in course a chain of events that eventually combined to lead to the US attacking and destroying Iraq in 2003, justified primarily by false claims that Saddam Hussein was close to fielding nuclear weapons.

Now Iran is in the crosshairs for the same reason, although Iran is complying with IAEA nuclear safeguards and inspection requirements. Given the sorry history of “nuclear preemption,” perhaps it is time to ask the unmentionable question: So what? What is the debate really about? The attached essay by William Pfaff takes a stab at this question. One interesting point, an Israeli general indirectly confirmed Pfaff's hypothesis about Israel's real reason for going beserk over the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear weapon — you can find it here, but read Pfaff's op-ed first.

Is a nuclear Iran really to be feared?

By William Pfaff,

Tribune Media Services, 01/24/2012

PARIS — The obsession of the American foreign policy community, as well as most American (and a good many international) politicians, by the myth of Iran's “existential” threat to Israel, brings the world steadily closer to another war in the Middle East.

Read full article.

2012/01/29

Marcus Aurelius: Khost Kathy Rides Again – Who’s to Blame?

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

(1) See particularly page 5; (2) Mr. Baer, perhaps a somewhat controversial CIA retiree, may have more credibility than Matthews' husband gives him credit for with respect to knowing what women can and cannot do operationally. According to the book “The Company We Keep,” which Baer co-authored with his wife, his wife Dayna was a CIA security officer who served overseas in some challenging circumstances; (3) I know a female with traits similar to those ascribed to Matthews.)

For CIA family, a deadly suicide bombing leads to painful divisions

Washington Post, 29 January 2012

EXTRACT:

“The suicide bomber was a bad guy, but at the time, nobody could clearly see it,” Anderson said. “I think the agency prepared my wife to be a chief of the Khost base, but not in terms of preparing for this asset. This guy wasn’t vetted.” And the mother of his three children is dead because of it.

Phi Beta Iota: Bauer has it right–this is not about “girls” being inept, it is about “analysts” being inept at command in the field, especially in a paramilitary environment. CIA is a bureaucracy and most if not all of its managers are so out of touch with reality as to be a danger to the current director and the agency as a whole. 90% of the Human Intelligence (HUMINT) that CIA produces is from foreign liaison hand-outs and domestic overt collection by the domestic division from legal travelers.

See Also:

Journal: The Truth on Khost Kathy

Journal: CIA Ghosts of Khost Ride Again….

Journal: CIA Continues to Ignore Published Critics

ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (2000)

No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence (2011)

The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, & Trust (2012)

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)

2012/01/28

Marcus Aurelius: Five Articles on Defense Reductions

Military

Five press articles follow. First four describe efforts DoD and Army senior leaders to paint force reductions as good and necessary things. If you believe that reducing DoD is keystone to saving Nation, some of what leaders are saying possibly sounds plausible. As a private citizen, I don't believe that White House, Congress, or DoD have done right thing so I don't subscribe to what is being said in support of it. I'm glad my job does not, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff's and Chief of Staff, Army's do, require that I give public statements supporting this stuff. Wonder how they sleep at night…

Fifth article, by SmallWarsJournal.com, presents probably best summary of impacts of DoD's actions I have seen. They seem to endorse necessity of DoD's actions, so I disagree there.

Army Chief Sees Greater Role For Guard And Reserves

Army's Top General Backs Troop Rollback

Army Must Cut Energy Costs To Balance Budget

How Pentagon Budget Cuts Will Reshape The Army

Winners And Losers Of The Defense Budget

Phi Beta Iota: 4% of the force (the infantry) take 80% of the casualties and cost 1% of the total military budget. In this context, the only winners are members of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.

2012/01/282012/01/28

Theophillis Goodyear: Role of the Internet After the Crash

Autonomous Internet

After the world economy crashes there's bound to be a lot of cvil unrest. Obviously the internet can be used to organize civil unrest, which will make authorities want to control it, perhaps even eliminate it.

But after the crash, the most pressing problem will be organizing the basic necessities of life, like water, food, shelter, clothing, energy for power, and a means of exchanging all these things.

After the global economy crashes, the system of organization that once provided us with the necessities of life—the global aggregate of national economies—will be at a standstill. But the internet will be available, at least in the beginning, to replace it. Even so, it will take a while before it becomes an efficient replacement.

If citizens become more interested in organizing unrest than they are in organizing the basic necessities of life, then authorities will see the internet as a threat. So if citizens want to keep the internet after the crash, they better immediately start using it for organizing the basic necessities of life rather than organizing unrest and they better start creating what some call the Autonomous Internet. Otherwise the one system that might save them will be under attack from the government. And I doubt humankind can survive being thrown back into the stone age like that during an economic collapse that will be unprecedented in every respect and along every dimension.

2012/01/282012/01/28

Berto Jongman: US National Supply Chain Security

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military

US strategy with respect to supply chain security.

PDF (16 pages)

Phi Beta Iota: Delusional fluff. The good news is that most of the stuff that is vulnerable to single point of failure interruptions is not all that important if you have a proper strategy that is based on reality and true cost information. What they do not get is the urgent need to create jobs that are directly related to resilience and sustainability from the local level up.

2012/01/282012/01/28

Berto Jongman: Russian Sixth Generation Warfare and Role of Openness

Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, Military

Russian Sixth Generation Warfare And Recent Developments

Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 9 Issue: 17

While press attention on developments in Russia focused on the disputed parliamentary elections and the following protests, which seemed to revive political activism in Moscow and other urban centers, there have been some military developments that deserve some attention. One such theme is an old topic, sixth generation warfare and its impact upon the nuclear threshold – do advanced conventional systems, which approach nuclear effects, blur the line on nuclear deterrence? The Russian press has had several recent articles that suggest this issue is becoming more acute.

In the aftermath of Desert Storm in 1991, the late Major-General Vladimir Slipchenko coined the phrase “sixth generation warfare” to refer to the “informatization” of conventional warfare and the development of precision strike systems which could make the massing of forces in the conventional sense an invitation to disaster and demand the development of the means to mass effects through depth to fight systems versus systems warfare. Slipchenko looked back at Ogarkov’s “revolution in military affairs” with “weapons based on new physical principles” and saw “Desert Storm” as a first indication of the appearance of such capabilities. He did not believe that sixth generation warfare had yet manifested its full implications (Vladimir Slipchenko, Voina budushchego. Moscow: Moskovskii Obshchestvennyi Nauchnyi Fond, 1999).

global systems — Click on Image to Enlarge

However, Slipchenko did believe that sixth generation warfare would replace fifth generation warfare, which he identified as thermonuclear war, and had evolved into a strategic stalemate, making nuclear first use an inevitable road to destruction (from the end of the Soviet Union until his death in 2005, he had analyzed combat experience abroad to further refine his conception until he began to speak of the emergence of “no-contact warfare” as the optimal form for sixth generation warfare; Vladimir Slipchenko, Beskontaktnye voiny. Moscow: Izdatel’skii dom: Gran-Press,” 2001). In his final volume, Slipchenko redefined sixth generation warfare as involving the capacity to conduct distant, no-contact operations and suggested that such conflict would demand major military reforms. Slipchenko made a compelling case for the enhanced role of C4ISR in conducting such operations (Vladimir Slipchenko,Voina novogo pokoleniia: Distantsionnye i beskontaktaktnye, Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2004).

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Russian Sixth Generation Warfare and Role of Openness”