I am ambivalent about whether Chuck Hagel has the managerial and bureaucratic skills to make the kind of Sec of Defense we need to clean out the Pentagon's Augean Stables — but the outrageous neocon assault on him because he does not kowtow to the Likud party line is over the top, as Steven Walt explains below.
Special NightWatch Comment: The most important finding of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) on the Benghazi tragedy is that al Qaida is alive and well and living in Benghazi. The rest is pretty much well known, with a few exceptions.
As harsh as the words of the ARB Report seem about high level failures in the State Department, no one is held accountable. The Board found that mistakes were made. The report is essentially a white wash. Three people at State resigned today, but that is not the same as facing legal proceedings for civil or criminal negligence in wrongful death. The Board gave everyone a pass.
A few things that are confusing in the Benghazi report.
1.The Board found that the ambassador was responsible for mission security and he should have pushed harder for improvements. The implication is the ambassador ultimately was responsible his own death. Hmm….The ambassador made at least three pleas for improved security, including the last on the day of his demise. Other parts of the report make clear that no amount of pushing to improve security would have made a difference with senior State Department leadership.
2.The Board found that mistakes were made. The use of passive voice means the Board refused to find anyone, except the dead ambassador, to blame for the mistakes. The message is that things went wrong; people were murdered, but it was no one's fault. This is the core of the whitewash. This viewpoint evades questions of causality, incompetence, negligence and blame.
My good good buddy Dr. Newk Mindshaftgap has written a juicy little report, attached below, in which he politely exposes the emptiness of the fact-free fiscal debate that is now electrifying the synapses of the pols, pundits, and courtiers in Versailles on the Potomac. To be sure, our nation has a debt problem, but, as the chart the below shows, the big elephant in the room is private debt, which must be paid off, or written off, or repudiated. This is not the case with federal debt, which can be rolled over in perpetuity, as long as the U.S. has a sovereign currency. The reality of the private debt bomb, particularly that of the financial institutions, may well explain why the Federal Reserve is busily struggling to dump private debt, especially the shakey debts undermining the balance sheets in the financial sector, onto the Federal Gov't (that is, on you, the public) via its policy of quantitative easing. Such is the nature of welfare in the neoliberal world where the mentality of Citizens United reigns supreme.
President Obama is on the verge of selling out Medicare and Social Security, punting on tax increases to the top 1 percent, while protecting huge and wasteful defense budgets — all to avoid the non-existent cliff. Maybe someone ought to show him Newk's handiwork. That won't happen, of course, but I nevertheless urge you to carefully read Newk's handiwork.
Chuck Spinney
Click on Image to Enlarge
The History of Budget Deficits and Economic Growth in Relation to Taxes and Unemployment
by NEWK MINDSHAFTGAP, Counterpunch, 19 December 2012
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
— George Santanyana
Over the course of the last few years, there has been much propaganda from politicians of all persuasions on what factors are conducive to economic growth and/or the emergence of budget deficits or surpluses. Regardless of the political viewpoint being represented, these claims have usually been supported by essentially no facts, and this absence of facts implies a lack of analysis in a political debate that has displaced by competing ideologies. The breakdown of reason is taking on great importance as the so-called fiscal cliff approaches, and with it, the increasing possibility of a full-blown constitutional crisis. My aim is to identify factors that have been associated with budget surpluses and/or solid economic growth (as measured by annual growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) in fiscal year (FY) 1931 through FY 2012 and to relate them to the emotionally-charged question of taxes.
Thomas Leo Briggs is a retired CIA operations officer with 3 years military experience in US Army military police, 3 years as a Special Agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration and 26 years in the CIA. He tried to make use of computer capabilities to aid and assist humint operations in a variety of ways throughout his last 18 years as an operations officer. He is also the author of Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos (Rosebank Press, 2009).
Intelligence Agencies Move Towards Single Super-Cloud by Heny Kenyon, Aol Defense, 17 December 2012
So, what we have here, according to Mr. Kenyon, is an effort to develop a pan-agency set of computer servers so that the analysts of all intelligence community (IC) agencies may share data and resources. One reported hope being that such a system will break down existing boundaries between agencies and change their insular cultures.
The first thing a reader notices is that the alleged motivations for this super-cloud are lower costs and higher efficiency. Secondly, the CIA already operates a cloud slightly separate from an NSA cloud consisting of five other intelligence agencies and the FBI. Is that like being slightly pregnant? Does that provide truly lower costs, higher efficiency, and shared resources and data? Wouldn't one expect to find different data and resources on each cloud, though some data and resources may be the same? Moreover, the NSA cloud incorporates the smaller organization-wide clouds of its partner agencies and, in addition, the National Reconnaissance Office has its own plan to build its own cloud. Seems all of that that does not make for lowest costs and highest efficiencies – nor one super-cloud.
“Most Americans, their minds focused at the moment on the tragic slaughter of 20 young children aged 5-10, along with five teachers and a school principal in Connecticut by a heavily-armed psychotic 21-year-old, are blissfully unaware that their last president, George W. Bush, along with five key members of his administration, were convicted in absentia of war crimes earlier this month at a tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
They are unaware because the US corporate media have ignored the story, just as that same corporate media have failed to note that the crimes of which Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five White House lawyers, were convicted all could apply equally well to current President Barack Obama and his administration.
This piece quotes Charlie extensively and generally he is supportive of the concept, but noted that it would require strong leadership from the DCI and that a new “business model” for intelligence would be needed. He warned that:
“Specifically, the data connectivity requirements will be huge, Allen said. The intelligence community already has a prodigious appetite for data of all kinds, from live streaming video from unmanned aerial vehicles to signal and data intercepts. All of this data must be collected, processed and analyzed quickly to make operational decisions, he said.”
What he is obliquely referring to is that the inter and intra IT infrastructures of the intelligence agencies are not up to dealing with the volume of data that will be made available through cloud technology. This was the case ten years ago and I suspect the situaiton has not changed.
At that time the scientific advisory board of SSCI warned that NSA's iT infrastructure was “falling apart” and that a major collapse was coming (which is exactly what happened). And NSA had an IT infrastructure better than any other intelligence agency or FBI. Allen knows about this and the processing problems that continue to plague the NSA.
Parts of the intelligence community's cloud effort have reached an initial operating capability, mostly the CIA and NSA portions, but he said the entire system won't be fully operational for at least another five years.
In my “quickie” article published less than an hour after the news broke about the Connecticut school shooting, I tried to inject some historical context into the discussion – and do it as fast as possible. Since we know that many if not most “lone nut” massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.
THEN we can get around to picking apart the details. Enter Lori Price and Clare Kuehn.
Lori Price of Citizens for Legitimate Government quickly and brilliantly deconstructs false-flag massacres. If you are going to subscribe to one email news service, other than VT, it should be CLG News.
Lori asks a very good question here: Was Adam Lanza’s internet record scrubbed?
