Category: Peace Intelligence

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Call for Criminal Investigation of Bush-Cheney

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence
Mohamed ElBaradei

(AP) – 22 April 2011

NEW YORK (AP) — Former chief U.N. nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei suggests in a new memoir that Bush administration officials should face international criminal investigation for the “shame of a needless war” in Iraq.

Freer to speak now than he was as an international civil servant, the Nobel-winning Egyptian accuses U.S. leaders of “grotesque distortion” in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then-President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei's and other arms inspectors inside the country.

The Iraq war taught him that “deliberate deception was not limited to small countries ruled by ruthless dictators,” ElBaradei writes in “The Age of Deception,” being published Tuesday by Henry Holt and Company.

The 68-year-old legal scholar, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) from 1997 to 2009 and recently a rallying figure in Egypt's revolution, concludes his 321-page account of two decades of “tedious, wrenching” nuclear diplomacy with a plea for more of it, particularly in the efforts to rein in North Korean and Iranian nuclear ambitions.

Read full article…

Phi Beta Iota: We endorse the truth & reconciliation process and believe that if the USA is to restore its promise as a contributor to the international community of nations, it must first disclose the truth.  In our view, the investigation should begin three months prior to 9-11, when Dick Cheney first mandated a nation-wide counter-terrorism exercise that assured his complete control over the entire US Government on 9-11….an assurance he and his planners needed to not just let it happen, but to execute all the trimmings and then carry on with the Weapons of Mass Deception that committed America to an elective multi-trillion dollar war against multiple countries.  Dick Cheney hijacked the Presidency.  We all need the truth on the table.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

See Also:

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Disinformation, Other Information Pathologies, & Repression

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit

Worth a Look: Impeachable Offenses, Modern & Historic

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On Intelligence–Out of Touch Squared

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence
DefDog Recommends...

A very interesting article by Chuck. Earlier I was thinking along similar lines about how the Military Intelligence System has devolved in the same manner as our air strategy.

When I first signed up, the Army had a number of sites in far flung places with strange sounding names.  The advantage was the people working their were somewhat in tune with the psychological mindset of the people who lived in proximity to the “threat”.  When they were concerned it raised our awareness of activities by the “other side”.  The local population always had better intelligence than we did, but it was an indicator that we picked up on and used to focus our efforts.

Enter technology (re: US Air Force) resulting in the consolidation of intelligence activities to major fixed bases (somewhat like our overall military strategy – hunker down).  We no longer have that view of the population, hell, we don't have any concept of the human terrain in those areas or anywhere else (with the exception of Korea where we have not run away).

Continue reading “On Intelligence–Out of Touch Squared”

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Historical Backgrounder on Libya

05 Energy, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Military, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

The author of this long but very useful historical analysis on the history of Libya is also the author of Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq, one of the very best books I have ever read on the subject of guerrilla warfare.

Whence Libya?  Why Libya?  Whither Libya?

William R. Polk, March 31, 2011

Since the Libyan regime was established by a coup d’état in 1969,  Americans and Europeans — with a three-year intermission from 1986 to 1988 — found it acceptable enough to recognize it, sell it arms and buy its petroleum.  In that one interval, on April 15, 1986, the American government under President Ronald Reagan attempted to kill Colonel Muammar Qaddafi by bombing his residence and did wound his wife and kill about 75 Libyans including his adopted daughter.  Two years later, Qaddafi retaliated by bombing an American airliner.  That attack killed 270 people including 190 Americans among whom were at least four intelligence officers.  These were just the major events; there were many others.  Of course, Americans and Libyans took very different views of them.  But both sides eventually smoothed over their angers, and relations again became profitable and “correct” on both sides, as they remained until early this year.

So, what is the basis of those attitudes and the causes of those actions?  Who are the Libyans anyway?  And what is the position of Qaddafi among them?  What motivates the Libyans?  What governs their action?  And what is likely to be the outcome of the revolt, the regime’s resistance to it and the Western intervention?

With the prejudice of a historian, I find that seeking answers to these questions requires at least a glance at the past.  That is the aim of this essay.

Read the essay….

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Graphic: Holistic Analytics for Nuclear-Climate

03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 11 Society, 12 Water, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Balance, Budgets & Funding, Citizen-Centered, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Earth Orientation, Ethics, History, Leadership-Integrity, Multinational Plus, Peace Intelligence, Policies-Harmonization, Processing, Reform, Strategy-Holistic Coherence, Threats, Tribes, True Cost
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The End of Engagement in Afghanistan

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace Intelligence, Strategy
Who, Me?

A War College case study for Col Pfaff:

“This Is not the Beginning of the End for the International Community in Afghanistan — This is the End”

A bit more on that story we brought you earlier about the horrific killings in Afghanistan which followed lunatic Pastor Terry Jones' Qu'ran-burning stunt.

I wrote this a while back:

Those reactionaries within our own society who are pushing the Clash of Civilizations are mirror-images of the terrorists that inspire their hyperbolic fear; they're just as xenophobic, just as irrational and, ultimately, are just as great a threat to our security. Both have to be challenged aggressively before they give birth to another, even bloodier generation of culture warriors.

This latest spasm of bloodletting seems like a perfect example. Radical Cleric Terry Jones burns some Qu'rans in an intentional provocation, extremists in Afghanistan kill some people, which ultimately emboldens people like Terry Jones, and so on. A vicious cycle, with the vast majority of people in the middle.

But over at the must-read UN Dispatch, Una Moore, an international development professional based in Afghanistan, says that there's a lot more going on with this attack:

Continue reading “The End of Engagement in Afghanistan”

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International Law or Imperial License?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence
Who, Me?

What kind of law is this?

Anne Orford 29 March 2011

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Many aspects of the Libyan situation remain unclear: the scope of the mandate given to UN member states by Security Council Resolution 1973, the broader aims of the intervention, how many civilians have been killed and by whom, and who the rebels represent. One thing, however, seems clear: the international intervention is considered to be legal. International lawyers have agreed with the UK government’s advice that Security Council Resolution 1973 ‘provides a clear and unequivocal legal basis for the deployment of UK forces and military assets to achieve the resolution’s objectives’. Legal experts have been quick to suggest that Resolution 1973 gives authority for any action thought necessary not only to protect civilians, but to protect areas inhabited by civilians.

. . . . . .[read entire article]

If today’s Western leadership is really ready, in the words of William Hague, to support the people of the Middle East in their ‘aspirations for a better future’, it will need to do more than use international law to target its enemies while protecting its friends. In rejecting their authoritarian leaders, the current wave of Arab revolutionaries is also rejecting the international system that has profited from their existence. As the US declares yet again that Israel has the right to defend itself against terrorists while bombs rain down on Libya, as protesters continue to be killed in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and as the numbers of people detained continue to grow, the idea that Nato is working to support the freedom fighters of this Arab spring rings increasingly hollow. The bombing of Libya in the name of revolution may be legal, but the international law that authorises such action has surely lost its claim to be universal.
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Ushandi Moves Forward with Crisis Mapping Check-In

Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Gift Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Mapping, Mobile, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Real Time
Michael Ostrolenk Recommends...

Crisis Mapping Meets Check-in

New features could make a Web tool that has helped track events in Japan and the Middle East even more useful.

Monday, March 28, 2011, By David Talbot

MIT Technology Review

EXTRACT:  The new feature is known as “check-in,” also used by social sites like Foursquare—in that case as a way of alerting friends to your presence at a particular location.

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For Ushahidi, this is “a pretty powerful step forward,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a board member of the nonprofit, and a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. “Adding check-in to this equation allows me to pull my data apart from the whole. That makes maps usable for multiple purposes—group reporting as well as tracking of my own movements.”

Enabling such tracking simply requires a GPS-equipped phone to allow a quick log-in to record whereabouts