Cultural Intelligence – Page 983 – Public Intelligence Blog

Among the food scares in recent years was a deadly E. coli outbreak tied to spinach. In most cases, it's unknown how or why people get ill from what they eat. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images / September 15, 2006)

Phi Beta Iota: The second sentence is ignorant. It is well-known that between industrial farming with zero regard for either the spill-over of animal shit into fields growing fruits and vegatables, combined with an exotic array of antibiotics for the animals (living in ghetto conditions) and pesticides for the plants, most of which have NOT been tested and are NOT regulated because of multiple legal loopholes, most of what we eat is mostly comprised of oil and corn and neither safe nor nutritious. Corporate irresponsibility survives because government complacency has been purchased. This is a superb example of “true cost” economics that will hit the marketplace like a tsunami in the next five years. When man-made illnesses are combined with over-kill on man-made antibiotics, we end up with untreatable bacterial and other diseases, all of this forecast in the strongest possible terms in the past 20 years.

The below book selections are pulled from Chapter 20 on 21^st Century Counterintelligence: Evaluating the Health of the Nation. The fragementation of knowledge, and the ignorance of the media, the government, and the academy are now profoundly pathological.

Continue reading “True Cost: Cost of food-borne illnesses is deemed much higher than earlier estimates”

2010/03/022010/03/02

Journal: Robert Baer on Transparency of Assassinations

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Peace Intelligence

A Perfectly Framed Assassination

Stepped-up surveillance technology may be tipping the scales in the cat-and-mouse game between spies and their targets. Robert Baer on the current state of spycraft.

EXTRACT:

Full Story Online

I can only speculate about where exactly the hit went wrong. But I would guess the assassins failed to account for the marked advance in technology. Not only were there closed-circuit TV cameras in the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated and at the airport, but Dubai has at its fingertips the best security consultants in the world. The consultants merely had to run advanced software through all of Dubai's digital data before, during and after the assassination to connect the assassins in time and place. For instance, a search of all cellular phone calls made in and around the hotel where Mr. Mabhouh was assassinated would show who had called the same number—reportedly a command post in Vienna. It would only be a matter then of tracking when and where calls were made from these phones, tying them to hotels where the team was operating or staying.

Phi Beta Iota: Robert Baer, who spoke to the international OSINT conference before the movie was made about his life as a case officer, is a most valued colleague who apart from being a speaker of truth and an author, has doubts about the 9/11 Commission and the general veracity of the U.S. Government. He is a “tough love” patriot. His newest opinion piece exposes the rapidly narrowing space for covert actions including assassinations and other behaviors that can no longer pass undetected. As we pointed out a decade ago, it is no longer possible to create solid covers–instead of stealing or misappropriating them, we have been preaching 1) hire mid-career officers who have already built their covers unwittingly, and keep them in those real-world covers; and 2) stop doing the stupid shit. 95% of intelligence (decision-support) should b e legal and ethical. All its takes is integrity and a leadership that actually knows something about full-spectrum intelligence and the point of it all: to create a Smart Nation.

2010/03/02

Journal: Suicide Bomber–CIA Cluster a Gift from God

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Government

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Bomber Called C.I.A. Target Gift From God

By SCOTT SHANE February 28, 2010

In a posthumously released video message, the suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. employees on Dec. 30 said that his original target had been his handler from Jordanian intelligence, and that an invitation to meet C.I.A. officers at a remote base in Afghanistan had been an unexpected boon.

“We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah, who brought us, through his accompaniment, a valuable prey: Americans, and from the C.I.A.,” said the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian physician who carried out the attack, in a 44-minute video posted on extremist Web sites Sunday.

FOR THE RECORD: Director Panetta has either not seen (because his staff filters his incoming) or has ignored direct offers of help, including one faxed to every seventh floor fax around his personal office.

Phi Beta Iota: CIA Director Leon Panetta is in way over his head, he's not even useful to the President, much less anyone else. He has been deceived by his own people and has no idea how many sordid details of incompetence and plain misrepresentation are being withheld from him. CIA has too many complacent over-promoted people who don't speak a foreign language, don't really understand foreign cultures, and have gotten by for decades on scraps from the table of foreign liaison and the tried and true practice of pretending that anyone who will take money is a valuable asset–all the while ignoring open sources and keeping the analysts locked in a closet far removed from reality. His whining about public and professional observations of “poor tradecraft” inspired a riposte on “poor management.” A careful examination of the individuals who died would have shown that only two of them should have been there at all, the Jordanian and one case officer–analysts, especially materal women with no field or combat experience, have no business being on the front lines. By the by, has anyone introduced secure video teleconferencing to the process of analyst-asset interaction? CIA is once again playing the numbers game, pretending that warm bodies and mediocre meaningless reports add up to “presence.” Slow burn, once again.

Journal: CIA as Poster Child For Dull US Intelligence

Journal: CIA’s Poor Tradecraft AND Poor Management

2010/03/012010/03/01

Journal: Israel Joins USA in the Psycho Ward

Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

The attached opinion piece by Juan Cole is an excellent summary of how the self destructive nexus of Israeli and US foreign policies has pushed both countries into the grand-strategic equivalent of a psycho ward.

Chuck SPinney

The Decline of the Israeli Right and the Increasing Desperation of the ‘Anti-Semitism' Charge

The great divide between liberal Jewish Americans and the Israeli Right has lurked as an issue since the Likud Party first challenged Labor dominance in the late 1970s. It is now coming to a boiling point, even as Israel's reputation in the world is sinking. As rightwing policies more visibly fail, the Likudniks are flailing around making fools of themselves by smearing critics of those policies as racists. (Anyone who knows how Likud supporters talk among themselves about Arabs and other outsiders can only be amused at their impudent hypocrisy in playing the race card.)

The mess that Mossad's mercenaries (some of them possibly from the Fateh Palestinian faction also opposed to Hamas) made of a routine political assassination in Dubai of a Hamas agent funneling arms from Iran is a blow against Ithe image of daring, stone-cold competence cultivated by the Israeli security establishment. The killing went smoothly, but it transpires that the assassins had not only stolen the passport identities of British and Irish citizens, but those of several Israeli dual citizens originally from the UK, as well. Mossad thus made potential problems for those passport holders for the rest of their lives, since Interpol will be interested every time the numbers pop up at an airport check-in.

2010/02/282010/02/28

Journal: Haiti Update of 28 February 2010

Cultural Intelligence, Gift Intelligence

Chile was ready for quake, Haiti wasn't

PHI BETA IOTA EMPHASIS: On Port-au-Prince's streets Saturday, many people had not heard of Chile's quake. More than half a million are homeless, most still lack electricity and are preoccupied about trying to get enough to eat.

Haiti Earthquake — Low Income Housing Survived--Full Story Online

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The earthquake in Chile was far stronger than the one that struck Haiti last month — yet the death toll in this Caribbean nation is magnitudes higher.

The reasons are simple.

Chile is wealthier and infinitely better prepared, with strict building codes, robust emergency response and a long history of handling seismic catastrophes. No living Haitian had experienced a quake at home when the Jan. 12 disaster crumbled their poorly constructed buildings.

. . . . . . .

Sinclair said he has architect colleagues in Chile who have built thousands of low-income housing structures to be earthquake resistant.

In Haiti, by contrast, there is no building code.

a haiti leaning building — Full Story Online

Haiti: recovery beginning in the heart of hellIt took half a minute for last month’s earthquake to destroy Haiti – rebuilding it will take years. Sally Williams watches the Red Cross, which has supplied 600 of the 6,000 aid workers now in the country, in action.

With a population of as many as three million, Port-au-Prince was a vibrant city, its streets choked with buses and motorcycles. Today you see the legacy of the disaster everywhere: surgeons in scrubs walk the streets; dust suffuses everything, irritating the nasal passages and lungs; surfaces are cracked and fractured – nothing seems fixed or hard; government papers from the national archive blow across the street. The decorative pink stone of the Roman Catholic cathedral, built nearly a century ago, is now a scene of utter devastation. Even those buildings that are still standing (up to 50 per cent of the city was destroyed) are at oblique angles, intersecting with a disorientating effect.

Port-au-Prince seems not like a city at all now, but a waking nightmare where even the most ordinary morning walk can turn distinctly lurid. There is a car in one of the streets behind the national palace that has been flattened by falling masonry. The driver’s body is still at the wheel.

Phi Beta Iota: Red Cross collected 90% of the money, is doing 10% of the work, and has reached, at best, 20% of the needy. What's wrong with this picture? We speculate: massive corruption–both industrial (old inefficient processes) and intentional (on-going overhead and endowment padding) inherent in “the Red Cross way.”

Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010

2010/02/242010/02/24

Journal: Cuba Makes Its Move–Hasta La Vista OAS?

07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Strategy

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There is no reason why Latin America and the Caribbean should not have their own body of political consensus

Speech by General of the Army Raúl Castro Ruz, president of the Councils of State and Ministers, at the plenary session of the Summit of Latin America and Caribbean Unity, February 23, 2010

The decision that we have just adopted to create the Community pf Latin American and Caribbean States is of great historical significance.

Cuba considers that the conditions are present to rapidly advance toward the constitution of a purely Latin American and Caribbean regional organization, comprising and representing the 33 independent nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Continue reading “Journal: Cuba Makes Its Move–Hasta La Vista OAS?”

2010/02/242010/02/24

Journal: Vermont Flexes Its Righteous Muscles

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Vermont Senate Votes to Close Nuclear Plant

MONTPELIER, Vt. — In an unusual state foray into nuclear regulation, the Vermont Senate voted 26 to 4 Wednesday to block a license extension for the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, citing radioactive leaks, misstatements in testimony by plant officials and other problems.

Phi Beta Iota: America is fed up with an inept and corrupt federal government that can no longer be trusted to uphold the public interest; and with corporations that lie to the public and constantly manipulate ownership entities to avoid responsibility and liability. Vermont is the canary in the coal mine–it is the most likely to nullify federal laws and it is the most like to announce its secession from the United STATES of America absent a radical resurrection of the integrity of the electoral process and the three branches of government. “Home Rule” is a meme that is spreading fast across America, with corporations learning that they must legally give up their ill-gotten personality status to do business in particular counties; this is complemented by the “move money home” movement and the “buy local” movement.

See also:

Vermont Second Republic

Secession Movement Spreads

Vermont Secession Movement Gains Traction

Nine Statewide Candidates Push for Secession from Union