The new defense chief says intelligence uncovered in the Bin Laden raid showed that 10 years of U.S. operations against the terror network had left it with fewer than two dozen key operatives. Panetta is visiting Afghanistan for the first time as defense secretary.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta had so much potential at CIA, and failed to rise to the possibilities. Now at Defense there would be no more sublime illustration of lunacy than this. As we recall, Al Qaeda started in 1988 with fewer than two dozen key operatives. Four trillion borrowed dollars later, this is the best he has to offer as a success story? The US military is bad for real business.
Strike One was posted by Marcus Aurelius, on Petraeus and torture as an option. Here is Strike Two.
East-Asia-Intel.com, July 6, 2011
CIA Director-designate Gen. David Petraeus told Congress last week that he is going to focus heavily on cyber threats to U.S. security, a focus that will likely mean greater intelligence-gathering efforts against China, among the most aggressive at conducting cyber attacks.
“As one of the CIA's enduring missions, I will focus on CIA's efforts to collect intelligence on foreign cyber threats,” Petraeus said in written answers to questions to the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said he plans to make cyber security a top priority at CIA, which has been reoriented in recent years as a human-intelligence gathering spy service.
Phi Beta Iota: There are three parts to achieving cyber-security. Part I is to build robust open source systems that have no bugs. The US Government refuses to be responsible about Part I. Part II is to build robust cyber-detection and response capabilities. This is not possible without Part I, but the US Government is spending $12 billion a year on this with Cyber-Command. Part III, which Petraeus is now alleging he will take on, is to achieve human penetration as well as close-in technical penetration of foreign-based cyber-war farms. CIA has never been competent in this area, and the chances of its being able to achieve anything, especially against China (while ignoring Israel, Japan, France, and Germany), is laughable. Petraeus is a smart man with no clue. His CIA courtiers will lie to him, he will pass on those lies to Congress, and the lunacy will continue. All of this is bad for business–real business concerned with real production.
A fundamental understanding of the Pashtun would make evident the problem with election rigging in Afghanistan. As a tribal group, nobody is elected to serve as a leader. Thus, voting, regardless what the West thinks, is not something that most Pashtuns care about or partake in. Thus, Karzai knew he had to rig the elections to win. The Hazara understand politics and thus have energized their ethnic grouping to participate as government bureaucrats and advance through educational means (there are more and more private Hazara private schools coming into existence than any other grouping, to include government sponsored). This was the crux of the problem with the last Parliamentary election, Hazaras won most of the seats from Ghazni Province, a primarily Pashtun area. Very few Pashtun voted but almost every Hazara did.
The past presidents of Afghanistan have all come to power through the Coup method, not through the electoral process.
And besides, the rural Afghan population could care less about a Central Government. This is more true among the Pashtun that do not look on Kabul as nothing more than a gathering point not a seat of power.
Operation Mockingbird was a secret Central Intelligence Agency campaign to influence domestic and foreign media beginning in the 1950s.
The activities, extent and even the existence of the CIA project remain in dispute: the operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis' 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire. Davis' book, detailing how the media had been recruited and infiltrated by the CIA for propaganda purposes, was controversial and not always accurate.
Whitaker argues that the basis of environmental degradation is not capitalism or market relations. Environmental degradation is supremely caused by unrepresentative state elite decisions and how they manipulate markets to serve particular consolidated materials, so solutions should focus on additional formal checks and balances against these informal ‘ecological tyrannies', via more green constitutional engineering.
The House of Representatives will soon be debating the new Department of Defense (DoD) appropriations bill. It's expensive – $649 billion, close to another post-World War II high. The bill covers almost all of DoD's expenses for fiscal year 2012 – both routine expenses, such as basic payroll, training and weapons acquisition (known as the “base” budget), and war spending – for Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
Pretending reform and frugality, members of the House Appropriations Committee – Democrats and Republicans alike – packed the bill with pork and gimmicks.
The bill would spend $17 billion more than last year. But House appropriators are calling this increase a cut because it's less than the original defense budget request President Obama sent to Congress in February. That request was made irrelevant by the president's subsequent decision to reduce long-term security spending by $400 billion.
In addition to pretending frugality, the committee apes reform. It explicitly denies the existence of earmarks in the bill, saying in its own committee report, “Neither the bill nor the report contains any congressional earmarks, limited tax benefits, or limited tariff benefits as defined in clause 9 of rule XXI.”
Phi Beta Iota: There is nothing wrong with the US Government–or the economy–that could not be corrected quickly if the public-private sector partnership restored integrity as a non-negotiable starting point. This is what woke George Soros up–he finally realized that the degree of legalized corruption negated all reasonable operating assumptions for doing business.
I received this email from an Afghan (Pashtun) friend, who now lives in Europe and has a doctors degree from Oxford
Chuck
I’m sending you this email for two reasons:
1. The account of what has happened is fairly accurate.
2. Because the author's type of belief beggars the imagination: Namely, that a “democracy” can be imposed over-night on a social system that evolved over 2000 years with its own highly developed, deeply ingrained social dynamics, by a bunch of self-interested crooks.
I love his prescription: “The crisis created by Karzai's Court underscores the necessity for a genuine Afghan led dialogue on democratic reform. Options must be explored to strengthen the independence and resilience of Afghanistan's democratic institutions.”
If this could not be done during the past ten years, with this bunch in power, what hope is there that it’ll be ever accomplished with Karzai & Co. still at the helm ?
On the other hand, it’s understandable that he peddles this type of nonsense, because otherwise he’d be out of a job.
In January of this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai yielded to domestic and international pressure and endorsed the seating of the new Afghan parliament against the recommendation of a Special Court he created to evaluate election fraud claims. Few would have predicted then that six months later Karzai's Court would bring the country to the brink of complete political collapse.
