After ten years of operation by private military and security (PMSC) contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq, what ethical lessons should we draw from their use?
Namely, that private sector contracting has become an integral part of modern international operations, and in Afghanistan and Iraq contracting has been largely fruitful, despite some well-publicized problems and the enormous difficulties inherent to reconstructions in the midst of violent conflicts.
Considering that Chapter 12 is best known as a chapter of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, the authors may have wished for another chapter number. On the other hand, considering the gap between some claims and evidence, perhaps it is appropriate.
In light of Sunday Times’ revelations concerning MEPs being paid cash to place amendments on financial reform, a report published today by SpinWatch exposes financial lobbying in Brussels.
The report, entitled, Doing God’s Work: How Goldman Sachs Rigs the Game details Goldman Sachs’ secret lobbying activities in the UK and Brussels and links to politicians. It exposes:
The extensive links between Goldman Sachs and the Conservative Party;
* Political donations totalling £8.5million to British politicians in the past decade from Goldman and ex-Goldman people;
* Goldman Sachs’ immense lobbying machine in Brussels, including active membership of over a dozen financial sector lobby groups;
* Extensive meetings between Goldman Sachs and Conservative MEPs including: 9 meetings in six months with a key MEP on the Parliament’s Economics and Monetary Committee; and a total of 36 meetings between just four Tory MEPs and Goldman Sachs, its lobby groups or PR companies acting on their behalf;
* The bank’s lobbying campaign to undermine political reform on derivatives and alternative investment funds including: private dinners and unminuted “after office hours” meetings, high-level conferences and targeted campaigns to Commission officials, MEPs and their assistants;
* How Goldman Sach’s lobbyists tried to undermine amendments in a key report on derivatives, seen as “financial weapons of mass destruction”;
* The bank’s lobbying enabled them to gamble on food futures and drive up prices.
Report author, journalist Andy Rowell said: “A year ago, David Cameron said that lobbying was the next big scandal waiting to happen. This report shows that banks like Goldman Sachs – who are intricately connected to the Tories – continue to lobby to get what they want.”
Rowell continued: “The entire regulatory process – and the lobbying activity that surrounds it – has to become significantly more transparent and accountable. If it is allowed to be captured by bankers, the next financial crisis will only be a matter of time.”
The report is being published just as the debate on financial reform in Brussels reaches a crucial stage. The parliament and commission are finalising plans for reform of the OTC Derivatives market as well as Credit Default Swaps.
It also comes as the government is due to launch a consultation on a statutory register of lobbying, for the UK.
The mainstream media does not know it, and far too many high steeple church folk do not want to know it.
But in Tampa, Florida, this week, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church will make a decision.
They will spend the week writing and rewriting. Some, like Alissa Bertsch Johnson, a campus minister at Washington State University (at right), will passionately state their case.
Before the gavel falls on the last session of the 2012 General Conference, the people called Methodists will have responded, one way or another, to the call from Palestinian Christians that they take one small step toward ending the Israeli Occupation.
They may vote to endorse a targeted divestment resolution.
Phi Beta Iota: Israel is the old South Africa, morally disengaged, committing genocide and atrocities against the Palestinian people. Not only should everyone be boycotting companies whose services and equipment are being used to gheto-ize the Palestinians, but every US citizen should consider a tax boycott until such time as the US Government stops paying 20% of the Israeli budget with money borrowed in our name, and stops funding dictators who perpetuate societies of fear. Ironically, both the US and Israel are now much closer to Nazi Germany they they are to either the Founding Fathers or the theology of Jesus Christ. We note only have a crisis of Zionism, we have a crisis of neo-fascism on the right and neo-socialism on the left in the USA, both spawned by political and financial crime families.
The growth of social media poses a dilemma for security and law enforcement agencies. On the one hand, social media could provide a new form of intelligence – SOCMINT – that could contribute decisively to keeping the public safe. On the other, national security is dependent on public understanding and support for the measures being taken to keep us safe.
Social media challenges current conceptions about privacy, consent and personal data, and new forms of technology allow for more invisible and widespread intrusive surveillance than ever before. Furthermore, analysis of social media for intelligence purposes does not fit easily into the policy and legal frameworks that guarantee that such activity is proportionate, necessary and accountable.
This paper is the first effort to examine the ethical, legal and operational challenges involved in using social media for intelligence and insight purposes. It argues that social media should become a permanent part of the intelligence framework but that it must be based on a publicly argued, legal footing, with clarity and transparency over use, storage, purpose, regulation and accountability. #Intelligence lays out six ethical principles that can help government agencies approach these challenges and argues for major changes to the current regulatory and legal framework in the long-term, including a review of the current Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.
Phi Beta Iota: Government intelligence is incompetent with what they have now. “SOCMINT” (for Social Media Intelligence) is as silly as claiming that Document Media Exploitation (DOMEX) is a separate discipline. Both will spawn bureaucracies and undeserved promotions along with attendant fraud, waste, and abuse. While well intentioned, this contribution is part of the problem–doing the wrong things righter–not part of the solution. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) covers both of the above, and until the government can make the leap from OSINT to M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making) it is by no means ready to muck about within Social Media. We are quite certain that social media intelligence is emergent, and it will emerge faster, better, cheaper (if not free) than any government bureaucracy could possibly fund, imagine, or execute in several decades.
Stephen Marrin Post-revision draft18 July 2011. Original draft submitted to Intelligence and National Security on 4 February 2011. Accepted for publication on 24 May 2011 pending minor revision.
Dr. Stephen Marrin is a Lecturer in the Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies at Brunel University in London. He previously served as an analyst with the Central Intelligence Agency and US Government Accountability Office. Dr. Marrin has written about many different aspects of intelligence analysis, including new analyst training at CIA‘s Sherman Kent School, the similarities and differences between intelligence analysis and medical diagnosis, and the professionalization of intelligence analysis. In 2004 the National Journal profiled him as one of the ten leading US experts on intelligence reform.
Abstract: Each of the criteria most frequently used to evaluate the quality of intelligence analysis has limitations and problems. When accuracy and surprise are employed as absolute standards, their use reflects unrealistic expectations of perfection and omniscience. Scholars have adjusted by exploring the use of a relative standard consisting of the ratio of success to failure, most frequently illustrated using the batting average analogy from baseball.Unfortunately even this relative standard is flawed in that there is no way to determine either what the batting average is or should be. Finally, a standard based on the decision makers’ perspective is sometimes used to evaluate the analytic product’s relevance and utility. But this metric, too, has significant limitations. In the end, there is no consensus as to which is the best criteria to use in evaluating analytic quality, reflecting the lack of consensus as to what the actual purpose of intelligence analysis is or should be.
Evaluating the quality of intelligence analysis is not a simple matter. Frequently quality is defined not by its presence but rather by its absence. When what are popularly known as intelligence failures occur, sometimes attention focuses on flaws in intelligence analysis as a contributing factor to that failure.
As I said in the interview, the reason I started the letter was because I strongly believe that the most successful, happiest people on the planet in twenty years will be living in resilient communities.
Lots of good stuff in the RC letter — from DiY sewage systems to how to power an entire neighborhood with solar energy.
Phi Beta Iota: Creating resilient communities from the bottom up is what the federal government should be but is not facilitating. We're on our own.
5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Starting Point for National Counterintelligence Outing of Zionist Traitors in US Government and Industry, April 29, 2012
I hate electronic books for many reasons, including being an old guy that still thinks in hand – eye – brain terms, so let me start by saying this is the first e-book that for me has been a pleasure to read. Plenty of white space, clearly separated chapter, a great inter-spersal of photographs, and finally — my most important touch point — really superb sources at the end of each chapter, with many of them actively linked.
As the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories, I read a lot — over 30 books (with a leavening of DVDs) on 9/11, but to put that in context, that is just 0.016 of my reading in the last decade. Do not for a moment think of me as a conspiracy theorist or anti-Semite. I am an intelligence professional, with integrity.
This particular book, unlike all the others I have read in relation to 9/11, does four things no other book has done:
01) Connects the dots of all the dual Israeli-US citizens in the US Government and US commercial circles (mostly in NYC) that were active participants in the 9/11 false flag operation. The role of the owners of the 81st floor and the massive bank of “batteries” that were never used but are precisely where the airlines hit, impressed me.
02) Integrates, for the first time, the history of Israeli false flag operations, the 1980 recognition by Israel that an attack on NYC and specifically against the tallest building in NYC whatever that might be, and the total complex context of 9/11 as both a catalyst for forcing the USA into a “war on terror” and a cover-up for the most massive financial crimes in history, including a special role for AIG and its specifically-identified Zionist leadership.
03) Introduces me for the first time to the facts about the Estonia that the Swedish government evidently covered up–it was carrying Russian contraband to Estonia, and two explosions blew off the front loading doors, dropping the ferry and 800 Swedes into a point almost halfway between Estonia and Sweden, as planned in a previous exercise. The author also covers NATO, the NATO presence that night, and the confounding combination of NATO being “asleep” the whole time, with the outage of the regional telephone networks for the duration.
04) Clarifies the depth of Israeli involvement in the drug trade — not just laundering the money in NYC and elsewhere, but actively nurturing the drug trade and drugs toward the US in particular — as a budget item. What comes out clearly is that Israel is not just bribing the US Congress, controlling the US White House, and castrating US intelligence and counterintelligence, but that Israel is using the USA as a two-track piggy bank — stealing all that it can from the US Treasury (Goldman Sachs provides the Secretary of the Treasury), while earning all that it can from running drugs into the US with the active collaboration of elements of the US Government and the Texas crime families including the Bush Cartel.
For some time I have been concerned about US false flag operations and corruption within the US government and US commercial circles. Although I have from time to time recognized that Israel treats the USA as a “shicksa” (as in gentile girls don't count, they are “fair game before and after marriage to a Jewish princess”), and I have been as outraged as any at the USS Liberty–the point at which I realized Israel is actually the enemy of the USA, a parasitic animal sucking the life out of the USA–I must say that this book moves me to place Israel and American citizens who are more loyal to Israel than to the Republic and the Constitution, in first place as the primary target for the emerging national counterintelligence network.
For years I have been talking about the need for religious counterintelligence. Originally I was concerned about Mormon penetration of the CIA and FBI, and with Mitt Romney being rumored to be the banker for at least one major drug cartel, one has to ask, when do we stop being an Idiot Nation? Then my focus shifted to Opus Dei, which has done quite well in US Navy circles and elsewhere. It is only in the past ten years, with the USS Liberty, the USS Cole (almost certainly another Israeli false flag operation), 9/11, and then a series of truly idiotic plots including the underpants bomber and the print cartridges on UPS, that I have realized that apart from political and appointed officials committing treason every day, Israel is the #1 enemy of the United States of America.
This is not anti-Semite. We are all Jewish in one way or another, and I have had the operation. This is about a Zionist cabal in Israel marrying up with the neo-con and rabid-Christian cabals in the USA, leveraging the global drug and arms trade to do evil to others all in the sake of saving Israel. The atrocities against the Palestinians, and the walls that out-do Hitler (there is one excellent picture of an Israeli wall with watchtower, three times higher than any prison wall), in combination with all that Israel and its embedded traitors have done to undermine the US and UK and to disgrace us all while stealing from us all, bring me to the line. ENOUGH.
I ran for President in the USA, accepted by the Reform Party as a candidate, for two reasons: 1) to put in one place (BigBatUSA.org) the four core ideas necessary if we are to restore the rule of law in the US; and 2) to be able to write to all other presidential candidates urging them to unite with Occupy, the Tea Party, Independents, and one another (six of the eight parties in the USA are treated as if they were shicksa Palestinians–of no account, access blocked) to restore the integrity of the electoral process, to create a coalition cabinet and a balanced budget, and to present America with a legal, ethical, non-violent revolutionary choice. I failed. From Ron Paul to Dennis Kucinich to Jill Stein, Buddy Roemer, Rocky Anderson–I reached all of them and all of them were, to the man, egotistical selfish deer in the headlights candidates, playing their own personal game with no thought of how to actually rescue America.
Zionist Israel (not Jews) is a cancer. I am glad to see the Arab dictatorships begin to fall, they are as responsible as Israel and the USA for the plight of the Palestinians, but Israel is hypocritical — it has cut deals with every dictator on the planet — as has the US — to its own ends. In a nutshell, the era of government Of, By, and For We the People is over. Governments have failed to maintain their integrity. We the People now need to create public intelligence in the public interest; to engage in massive non-violent tax revolts; and to begin using open source information to empower hybrid networks that route around corrupt governments, corrupt banks, corrupt media, corrupt universities, corrupt religions, corrupt labor unions–and reconstitution society from the bottom up. George Soros to his credit has finally recognized the Enlightenment Fallacy. I now recognize the Israeli Terror.
At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, halfway down the middle column, you can find a single link to all of my 9/11 reviews, all leading back to Amazon, but please do not stop there. I am the proponent for the third era of national intelligence, the era of Smart Nations, World Brain, Global Game, and connecting all people to all information in all languages all the time — only such a tsunami of public consciousness will overcome the evil that is done in our name and at our expense. I am optimistic.
