Professor Brenner gave me permission to distribute and post the attached essay. Without saying so, he describes a way that seems tailor-made to systematically violate just about all the criteria for a sensible grand strategy.
NSA returned to center stage last week thanks to revelations that it has tapped the phones of European leaders. The resulting ruckus raises three questions: why? how far will the targeting governments go in demanding redress? how will Washington respond? In considering them, I look at the political/psychological underpinnings of the Euro-Americans relationship.
1. Ricks fails to understand that military strategy and policy do not exist in a vacuum. The White House and Congress both have votes that can be decisive. Shinseki and Franks were closer to right w/r/t force requirements for Iraq than was Rumsfeld. Further, Jerry Bremer unbelievably complicated Iraq by de-Baathification and dissolutionn of the Iraqi army.
2. The Edward Snowden problem is not a contractor/military/civil service issue. It is an NSA personnel security clearance issue. As it turns out, the largest theoretical risks in the NSA workforce comes from military personnel because their screening is less rigorous on the premise they are involuntarily assigned there. Of course, NSA's personnel security screening model seems fatally flawed conceptually as does that of the USG more generally.
3. General/Flag Officers have been going down like ten pins recently. Many have simply screwed up in terms of basic integrity, morals, officership, leadership, commandership. I have read a number of the DoDIG reports and they usually show clear failings. There is traffic circulating this weekend positing an Obama Administration purge of senior military officers. I can't prove or disprove that. If I were advocate that theory, I'd point to the cases of GENs Ham and McChrystal.
4. The documents at the links contained in article are worth looking at.)
Privacy: This week, the European Parliament voted to immediately suspend the sharing of European financial tracking data with the United States in a 280-254 decision, as well as calling for criminal investigations of the NSA. This follows in the footsteps of mass surveillance revelations that the NSA has illegally hacked into the SWIFT financial data. This appears to be yet another public wake-up and backlash against the secretive wiretapping industry.
Attached is a thoughtful essay in which Israeli war hero (1948), ex-Knesset member, and peace activist Uri Avnery examines the likenesses and differences between Israel and Apartheid South Africa.
Chuck Spinney
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WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 25-27, 2013
South African Apartheid was Brought Down by the Blacks Themselves
Is Israel an apartheid state? This question is not going away. It raises its head every few months.
The term “apartheid” is often used purely for propaganda purposes. Apartheid, like racism and fascism, is a rhetorical term one uses to denigrate one’s opponent.
But apartheid is also a term with a precise content. It applies to a specific regime. Equating another regime to it may be accurate, partly correct or just wrong. So, necessarily, will be the conclusions drawn from the comparison.
RECENTLY I had the opportunity to discuss this subject with an expert, who had lived in South Africa throughout the apartheid era. I learned a lot from this.
Is Israel an apartheid state? Well, first one must settle the question: which Israel? Israel proper, within the Green Line, or the Israeli occupation regime in the occupied Palestinian territories, or both together?
It is easy to look at the shutdown and the concomitant chaos in federal government as the product of incompetence and corruption. But it was a deliberate effort by a vocal congressional minority from safe, cynically gerrymandered, congressional districts to sabotage the functioning of the entire federal government.
One would think that a deliberate effort to turn the entire US government into an incompetent global laughing stock would be seen as an act of treason (and it certainly would have been if the effort was focused on the Pentagon), but to date, this has not been the case. Yet as Bruce Barlett observes in the attached essay, there was indeed a systematic method to the destructive objectives of the government shutdown. His critique is important, because Bartlett is no weepy effete liberal from the salons of the upper west side. cHe is a long time card-carrying conservative Republican, having worked for Congressmen Ron Paul and Jack Kemp in Congress, before serving in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Bartlett argues the goals of the Republican radicals in Congress are (1) to wreck the domestic functions of the Federal Government as we know it and (2) mutate the feds into some idealized vision of limited government front for the ubiquitous tentacles of untouchable authoritarian national security state. Borrowing from the work of my good friend Mike Lofgren (another lifelong Republican), Bartlett names this method the Lofgren Corollary to the definition of the Republican chutzpah: which is shorthand for the premeditated self-reinforcing strategy to intentionally sabotage government programs (except defense) by denying them the resources and stability to function efficiently, then attacking those programs when they do not work as advertised, thus justifying further strangulation, which creates more problems and confusion … and adds ammunition for further attacks. In short the goal is to put the Federal Government (defense excepted) into a dead man's spiral.
If Bartlett is correct, and I think he is, he ends by showing why those wishful thinking lefties who think Obama won the shut down debate should think again. To borrow from Winston Churchill (with a twist): the end of the shutdown is not the end, nor is it the beginning of the end … and, given the destabilizing nature of continuing resolutions and public confusion over very basic bytes of information (for example 59% of the people think the deficit is increasing when it is decreasing), it is perhaps not even the end of the beginning.
Last week I explained that Congress has become an incompetent institution, unable to do its most basic work of passing annual appropriations bills to keep the government running. We usually think of incompetence as being the result of ineptness, stupidity or ignorance. But in the case of Congress, it is often intentional and deliberate, part of a long-term strategy by some Republicans to undermine government itself.
An exceedingly important article / blog is copied below. It involves the War on Terror.
The very important rule rule is “Follow-the-Money.” So, when applied to the War on Terror what do we find? Perhaps, we find a tremendous strengthening of the Military-Industrial-Complex, a substantiation for unconscionable U.S. military budgets (to the determent of other budget areas such as education) and exceedingly huge profits of such corporate giants as Halliburton. According to a 2012 article in the Huffington Post, the U.S. spends more than China, Japan, UK, France, and Russia combined. More than all these added together. Russia spent 52.7 billion while the United States spent 695.7 billion (Not counting off the books stuff such as ‘black ops.”)
Could the War on Terror really be, substantially (and pivotally), about power and money? And until the majority of we, the people, become realistic about the ‘why’ of ‘things’, shine light into the shadows of secrecy, and demand appropriate responsible action from government and corporate leaders, the very few will control the many to the determent of the citizen-public. Consider this; existing corporate-government relationships are insidious in nature and dangerous in fact. President Eisenhower warned us about the this relationship (military-industrial complex) as he left office. Why do you think he waited to do so at the end of his presidency? Think about it. A more balanced relationship can be created. Actually, it must be if our country is to be sustainable and viable in the future. I want a sustainable and viable country. I assume that you do too.
Charts Show that U.S. Policy Has Increased Terror Attacks
The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) Global Terrorism Database – part of a joint government-university program on terrorism – is hosted at the University of Maryland.
START is the most comprehensive open source terrorism database, which can be viewed by journalists and civilians lacking national security clearance.
A quick review of charts from the START database show that terrorism has increased in the last 9 years since the U.S. started its “war on terror”.
Click on Image to Enlarge
This chart shows the number of terror attacks conducted in Iraq:
Phi Beta Iota: The article and the charts do not address the financial terrorism of the City of London and Wall Street that have destroyed entire national economies, and particularly those of the USA, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece. Iceland, alone, had the integrity and intelligence to stuff the bankers into jail.
Algeria-Libya: Algerian soldiers found a large weapons cache on 24 October in Illizi in east central Algeria, near the border with Libya. The weapons included 100 anti-aircraft missiles, more than 500 MANPAD shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles and hundreds of rocket launchers, rifles, landmines and rocket-propelled grenades.
Comment: Algerian authorities have not commented about whom they suspect stored the weapons, except to suggest they came from Libya. Illizi is on the road several hundred kilometers southwest from Tripoli, Libya. This is one of the routes used to smuggle Libyan weapons to militants and terrorists in Mali.
The cache contents help confirm where some of Libya's large store of man-portable shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles (MANPADS) went after the weapons depots used by Qadhafi's forces were ransacked and their contents carried off. This is an important discovery, but only a portion of the weapons that are unaccounted.
Five hundred MANPADS would be more than enough to neutralize French air superiority in Mali, had they reached the militants there. Libya has become the arsenal of Muslim terrorists.
