Government – Page 870 – Public Intelligence Blog

Former Blackwater Bought By Investment Group

by The Associated Press

RALEIGH, N.C. December 17, 2010, 10:38 am ET

An investment group with ties to the founder of the company formerly known as Blackwater announced Friday that it has bought the security firm, which was heavily criticized for its contractors' actions in Iraq.

USTC Holdings said in a statement that the acquisition of the company now called Xe Services includes its training facility in North Carolina.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the statement said owner and founder Erik Prince will no longer have an equity stake and no longer be involved in Xe's management or operations. The company will be managed by a board appointed by the equity holders and will include independent, unaffiliated directors, the statement said.

The ownership group is led by two private equity firms, including New York-based Forte Capital Advisors. Forte managing partner Jason DeYonker has been a longtime financial adviser to Prince, helping him expand the Moyock, N.C., training grounds and negotiating Blackwater's first training contracts with the U.S. government.

“The future of this industry belongs to those companies with the highest standards of governance, transparency, and performance,” DeYonker said.

Read rest of article (includes photos)…

Phi Beta Iota: Winston Churchill is known for saying Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first. Similarly, Russell Ackoff is known for saying that we have to stop doing the wrong things righter, and instead do the right thing. Private Military Contractors (PMC) are the wrong thing! Multinational hybrid task forces are the right thing–cheaper, faster, better in all respects. All we need to bring is integrity and intelligence (decision-support). PMC's loot our own highly qualified human resources; cheat the taxpayer twice over (the government does it once first by hiring them in the first place); and are one step short of air dropping liquid feces over an entire area of responsibility (AOR). Not cool at all. Everyone means well, but this is about as dumb as it gets on all levels of thinking.

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: History is repeating itself in Afghanistan

05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Multinational, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

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History is repeating itself in Afghanistan

One hears again and again Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked but that the US is distrusted, even hated

Patrick Cockburn – The Independent 18/12/10

During the mid-1960s, America's goal during a crucial stage in the Vietnam war was to defeat the enemy militarily. But it had no realistic political strategy to underpin the goal, and it was this which ultimately led to failure.

America's strategy in Afghanistan is now suffering from a similar weakness. Barack Obama made the edgy claim this week that the US army is stabilising the military situation, but neither he nor his national security advisers show any signs of understanding the speed at which, politically, the US is losing ground.

Again and again in Kabul one hears Afghans say that the Taliban may not be liked, but that the Afghan government and its US allies are increasingly distrusted, even hated, by the mass of the population.

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: Whole of Government Competence & Contractors

02 Diplomacy, Government, Peace Intelligence

David Isenberg

Author, Shadow Force: Private Security Contractors in Iraq

Posted: December 17, 2010 11:17 PM

Will the Real Hillary Clinton Please Step Forward?

It appears that the old Hillary Clinton, the one who ran for president of the United States has managed to travel forward in time and merge with the current Hillary Clinton, the one who is Secretary of State.

For those who don't remember, the old Clinton vowed to ban the use of private security contractors. As perennial PMC critic Jeremy Scahill of The Nation reported back in July, “”These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq,” Clinton said in February 2008. “The time to show these contractors the door is long past due.” Clinton was one of only two senators to sponsor legislation to ban these companies.

Scahill was upset that Clinton had since moderated her views and that she was “presiding over what is shaping up to be a radical expansion of a private, US-funded paramilitary force that will operate in Iraq for the foreseeable future–the very type of force Clinton once claimed she opposed.”

But on Wednesday the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (AID) unveiled the much-awaited Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review entitled “Leading Through Civilian Power.”

The report seeks to put some distance between State and the private sector.

Read rest of article…

2010/12/182010/12/18

Journal: 12,000+ Killed in Mexican-American Drug War

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Multinational, IO Sense-Making, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence

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30,000 killed in Mexico’s drug violence since 2006 (AP)

Mexico said Thursday that more than 30,000 people have been killed in drug violence since President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown against cartels in late 2006.

The government said the violent La Familia cartel in western Mexico has been “systematically weakened” by recent arrests and deaths of leading members of the gang.

More than 12,000 killed in Mexican drug war this year, officials say (Los Angeles Times)

Forensic workers carry a body inside a body bag that was found at a clandestine grave in the town of Asencion, near the northern border city of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, Saturday Dec. 11, 2010. At least 5 bodies have been found in three separate clandestine graves found in the site. (AP Photo/Raymundo Ruiz)

Phi Beta Iota: Both Mexico and the USA are “unintelligent” countries lacking in strategic analytics able to clearly demonstrate “cause and effect.” If they were “smart nations” as we have been advocating since 1995, marijuana would have been legalized long ago, corruption among local officials squelched, pay and training for the police substantially increased….and so on. Everything is connected. For example, the weapons do not really come from US handgun stores–they come from the Guatemalan military that sells entire shipments of “old” weapons provided to the US, and then tells the US the weapons were destroyed. The serial numbers on the captured weapons tell the truth. Until nations learn to think honestly and holistically, any single flaw can be fatal, and multiple flaws will interact in unanticipated and increasingly costly ways. In the USA, crime runs from the border to Wall Street, where drug money laundering has long been known to be a major source of liquidity. Politicians in both countries are paid to be anemic in their thinking and ineffective in their duty to the public. Under these circumstances, neither law enforcement nor the military can be effective. Integrity is the missing factor.

2010/12/172010/12/17

Obama’s March to Folly: The Myth of Liberal Intervention & the Arrogance of Ignorance

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Weekend Edition
December 17 – 19, 2010

The Myth of Liberal Intervention and the Arrogance of Ignorance

Obama's March to Folly

By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY, Counterpunch

http://www.counterpunch.org/spinney12172010.html

In a recent opinion piece, “Kosovo and the Myth of Liberal Intervention,” Neil Clark in the Guardian on 15 December gave the reader a good summary of the some of the myths surrounding the Kosovo war, although he helped to perpetuate one myth, namely that the so-called genocide of Kosovar Albanians by the Serbs could be as high as 10,000. While Clark fudged the issue by using a range of 2,000-10,000, the fact remains that examination of mass burial sites by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) exhumed 2,788 bodies in Kosovo, some of whom were undoubtably Serbs; nor could the ICTY distinguish how many of these bodies were victims of war crimes or were the unintended detritus of NATO's “precision” bombing. The number of 10,000 was a face-saving, last-ditch, “statistical” estimate produced by the US State Department (its earlier estimates were far higher), which had a vested interest in proving the genocide it claimed Serbia had committed as a justification for NATO's “humanitarian” bombing campaign. The estimate of 10,000 was based on dubious (to put it charitably) statistical methods for estimating the number of bodies the State Department said existed but could not find — once illustrating government's propensity to confuse the a priori with the a posteriori

Continue reading “Obama's March to Folly: The Myth of Liberal Intervention & the Arrogance of Ignorance”

2010/12/17

Journal: Lost in the White House–What Might be Best for America….

11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government

In this thoughtful piece, Bob Burnett uses the word progressive, with which
I don¹t disagree. But from another vantage, I see him articulating a
transpartisan message that Jim Turner and Lawry Chickering put forward in
their seminal book Voice of the People: the Transpartisan Imperative in
American Life and that Bruce Shuman describes in The Emerging Transpartisan
Politics

Not only progressives, but independents, moderate Republicans, third party
and third force members and those who don¹t vote for whatever reason will
resonate with Burnett's three pillars of a progressive message — a
significant majority of Americans. Robert Fuller might add that the three
pillars Burnett articulates are core elements in overcoming ranksim and
building a dignitarian society, which is also a transpartisan society.

Phi Beta Iota: There are 65 parties in America, and the ostensible front for the Independents, IndependentVoting.org, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Michael Bloomberg that sold out early to No Labels. For a hard-hitting piece on three things America needs that the White House (or any billionaire) could sponsor, see Personal for Mike Bloomberg.

2010/12/162010/12/16

Reference: The Private War of LtCol Tony Shaffer

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Shaffer’s book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda’s number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer’s book.

Private War JPEG — Playboy Article Online

PDF Copy without Advertising

Phi Beta Iota: The Playboy folks did not do their homework–the destruction of an entire first edition is not unprecendented, it was done by CIA to the first printing (1972) of Col L. Fletcher Prouty's The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse, 2008). While the title is hyped and the good Colonel was not aware of the over-arching financial crime families that the US Government has secretly supported and in some instances actually spawned from scratch, his general point to the public was clear: what is done in our name under the guise of secrecy is often criminal, generally unconstitutional, and almost always very costly in long-term blood, treasure, and spirit over both the short and the long term. What is at issue here is straight-forward: either we have a government that works in the public interest and displays integrity at every level, or we do not. It is not only the political “leaders” who have lost their integrity, but the professional “leaders” as well. Until the truth of this is understood by the majority of the American people, nothing will change.

See Also:

Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy

Reference: Mortgage Fraud in Detail

Journal: Wall Street Financial Crime Spree Spins On….

Journal: The Wall Street Pentagon Papers–Biggest Scam In World History Exposed–Are The Federal Reserve’s Crimes Too Big To Comprehend?