Government – Page 875 – Public Intelligence Blog

by: Melvin A. Goodman, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

CIA Deputy Executive Director John Brennan. (Photo: CSIS: Center for Strategic & International Studies / Flickr)

Last month, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a blistering report that documented a secret drug interdiction program in Peru that was responsible for the death of an American missionary and her infant daughter in 2001. The report provided a detailed study of the efforts of senior CIA leaders, including Deputy Director John McLaughlin and Deputy Executive Director John Brennan, to cover up the crime by stonewalling the White House, the Congress and the Department of Justice (DOJ) on the flaws of the interdiction program.

Brennan, who was President Obama's original choice to be CIA director until the report complicated the confirmation process, is currently the deputy director of the National Security Council (NSC).McLaughlin was the “villain” in the politicization of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, according to the chief of the Iraq Survey Group, David Kay. Few people remember that it was McLaughlin who actually delivered the “slam-dunk” briefing to the president in January 2003. Nevertheless, the Obama administration named McLaughlin to lead the internal investigation of the CIA's intelligence failures in the attempted bombing of a commercial airliner and the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

The detailed report on Peru documents a culture of corruption and deceit at the highest levels of the CIA as well as the interventions of CIA lawyers to stop the DOJ from pursuing prosecutions in the case. The CIA office of general counsel's aggressive campaign to prevent a criminal prosecution of the agency officers culminated with Deputy Director McLaughlin's letter to the assistant attorney general that promised “significant disciplinary action” if CIA officers “lied or made knowingly misleading statements” to the Congress, DOJ, the NSC or office of inspectors general (OIG) investigators. The report carefully documents the lies and the stonewalling, but there was never any genuine punishment.

Read rest of this detailed article….

Melvin A. Goodman is national security and intelligence columnist for Truthout. He is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. His 42-year government career included service at the CIA, State Department, Defense Department and the US Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

See Also:

Journal: Mel Goodman on CIA Myths

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Lack Of)

and especially;

Continue reading “Journal: CIA and the Culture of Corruption”

2010/12/032010/12/03

Journal: Smoke, Mirrors, and Hades Burning on the Hill

Budgets & Funding, Government, Law Enforcement, Military

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

This is a great example of the kind of gaming that keeps defense budgets high. Kudos to Winslow Wheeler for smoking it out.

On Dec 3, 2010, at 7:56 AM, Winslow Wheeler wrote:

In a midnight switch, the Deficit Commission changed the dividing line between discretionary spending elements. Was 050 (DOD,DOE, Misc.) versus the rest; now it's 050 plus VA, plus State, plus Homeland security versus the rest. The split remains 50-50 (I'm pretty sure); the total discretionary savings went up a bit, but now DOD is a lesser part of the “security” share of cuts, plus it gets to raid its new (trembling) partners in its deficit reduction cage. This was the idea not of the Republican defense apologists on the Commission but of the Democrat budget process “reformers” who were aping a long term goal to declare State a national security entity.

I bet the idea originated among the Pentagon milcrats, who fed to pliable democratic apparatchiks working for Gates, who in turn fed it to so-called democratic budget “reformers” on hill, on the commission, and/or in pro-dem thinktanks. Be interesting to see if/how Pentagon's wholly owned subsidiaries at the Post and NYT play this.

It is almost as if Frank Carlucci was back in the Pentagon and it is 1981 … remember how Carlucci snookered David Stockman (Reagan's OMB director) in early 1981 into approving even higher defense budgets than Reagan campaigned for (I wrote about Carlucci's “nature” trick on pages 14-17 of Defense Power Games – also attached).

Chuck

Phi Beta Iota: Given integrity of intent and process on the Hill, neither of which exists today, this would actually be a good change, with the proviso that Commerce be added and Newt Gingrich be made Vice President for Global Engagement, as we propose in our Virtual Cabinet at The Huffington Post. The misrepresentation of the defense budget has long been fraudulent (completely apart from the missing $2.3 trillion that DoD still cannot account for and never will), with externalized personnel and health costs not “visible” to most. Getting a grip on the US budget process is not rocket science. It requires just two elements: integrity in those at the top, and the enlistment of the public through the promised but not yet delivered transparency of process.

2010/12/022010/12/02

Reference: Policy Agendas Project Database

Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Policies, Policy

“Online Database Tracks Congressional, Presidential and Public Priorities”

November 22, 2010 23:10

From a University of Texas at Austin Announcement:

As a new Congress prepares to take office, a powerful online tool from University of Texas at Austin political scientists can help answer questions about lawmakers' shifting focus over time, differences between Republican and Democratic priorities and whether wave elections correlate with policy changes in Washington.

The Policy Agendas Project database allows journalists, scholars and interest groups to easily track and compare the issues that presidents and members of Congress have taken up since 1947 and to assess how those actions reflected the mood of the country.

The interface lets users sift through dozens of issues and sub-issues — health care, the environment, taxes — to look at the topics leaders dealt with in congressional hearings, new laws, executive orders and State of the Union addresses, as well as public opinion about problems facing the nation.

[Clip]

The data generated by the project are free and publicly available. They come with software that allows them to be used in classrooms. Jones and his colleagues released earlier versions of the Policy Agendas Project while he was a professor at the University of Washington.

Tip of the Hat to Gary Price at LinkedIn.

Phi Beta Iota: This has some promise, especially if they design it to be scalable across countries and down to the state and local level. However, since nothing is policy until it is in the budget, the real truth tellers will be if they can link this to actual budgetary authorizations, allocations, and obligations; factor in “true costs” of any given policy element; and open it up to fact-based citizen dialog and deliberation.

2010/12/022010/12/02

Journal: Wikileaks Exposes How NYT and Washington Post Shill for US Government on Iran Missile “Threat”

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Peace Intelligence

Iranians (Persians) have viewed Russia (Soviet Union) with distrust and as a menace or outright threat for hundreds of years, at least since the Russian Tsars cemented their expansion into Turkestan (or the Turkic countries in what is now called Central Asia). The fact that Iran sits on top of one of the world's largest reservoirs of oil and gas adds to their fears. Russia is also much closer to Iran than the United States. So from a Russian perspective, the emergence of an Iranian nuclear delivery capability would be a far more dangerous ramifications for Russia than for the US, at least in raw geopolitical terms.

With this in mind, the attached report by Gareth Porter begs the question: Why are the Russians less concerned about the so-called Iranian ballistic missile/nuclear threat than the United States? Why would the Washington Post and New York Times bias their reporting in a way that downplays the Russia's more moderate view?

To ask this question is to answer it. (hint: Simply ask what other country is most obsessed by Iran?) Chuck

December 1, 2010

Documents Show NYT and Washington Post Shilling for US Government on Iran Missile “Threat”

Wikileaks Exposes Complicity of the Press

By GARETH PORTER

Counterpunch

A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.

But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.

The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles – supposedly called the BM-25 – from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.

Read the rest of this article….

2010/12/022010/12/02

NIGHTWATCH EXTRACT: STRATFOR Does Not Understand Intelligence

Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

NIGHTWATCH For the record. STRATFOR published an essay on intelligence that posited that the tension in the intelligence world is between collectors and others and analysts. That mischaracterizes of the source of the tension and shows very limited insight.

At the national level, among national agencies, there is an overwhelming volume of information sharing on thousands of topics, but not necessarily on the right topics. The sources are well protected. An experienced professional can scan more than 2,000 reports per hour from 16 different agencies, if he has tweaked his message profile.

The tension is not between collectors and analysts, but between Security and the information flood. How do an agency's security people protect more than 50,000 electronic messages per hour in computer profiles for – or from — disgruntled employees with clearances, every hour of every day?

State Department's effort to be a team player after 9/11 by making most SECRET-classified State cables accessible to anyone with a SECRET clearance now appears to have been excessive. It enabled the Wikileaks event this week.

In an earlier time, no PFC in the Army would ever have had such access to diplomatic traffic. Prior to 1986 the government had no personal computer work stations. Then, a PFC got to read the paper reports that senior personnel gave him to read and evaluate. He was accountable for them, usually had to sign a custodian's receipt and had a deadline for his evaluation. That system was inflexible to the point of near uselessness, but it was secure.

The US intelligence confederation of agencies still has not found a formula for balancing security and access that is any better than “need to know.” 9/11 showed that “need to know” is too restrictive for efficient counter terror cooperation. The Wikileaks event showed that the “need to share” initiative is too broad to ensure security of critical information and systems.

This is a domain still waiting for a new good idea.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: STRATFOR does not understand the intelligence discipline, but this is not a surprise since most senior managers of US secret intelligence do not understand it either. Our earnest NIGHTWATCH colleague has it half-right: the security (and legal) mind-sets are both death rattles for US intelligence. He is incorrect on the meaning of WikiLeaks–what WikiLeaks actually represents is the visible collapse of government relevancy and the end of government (as well as corporate) legitimacy as a means of organizing global to local security and sustainability. The government is–as one journalists called George Bush I–an “empty suit.” It lacks citizen-centered structure, purpose, and maturity. With respect to intelligence, there has been no lack of good ideas, only a total resistance to ideas that threaten the status quo, which is totally devoted to keeping the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex (MICC) going, at taxpayer expense. Conflicts include those between inputs (empire building) and outputs (no accountability for relevance and timeliness); between technical collection (very high profit margins) and processing (too hard, low profit, analysts don't have money to spend and also lack substantive knowledge of what to demand); between technical disciplines (very high profit margins, no accountability) and human/open disciplines (very low profit margin, hard to do, actually requires professional skill); and between “secrets for the President” (no accountability despite a 4% accomplishment record) and decision-support for everyone else (which would actually make intelligence timely, relevant, actionable, and a profit center for the public). US Intelligence could double or triple its utility overnight with three simple steps:

1. Open Source Agency (OSA) outside the wire, civil affairs representing the military

2. Multinational Multiagency Multidiscipline, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) with OSA funding for regional intelligence centers funded by US but manned by indigenous nations and controlled by indigenous nations (all eight tribes of intelligence)

3. Whole of Government redirection of resources from dysfunctional national security state to a new hybrid model that melds the eight tribes with a slightly restructured government (three Vice Presidents for Commonwealth, Education-Intelligence-Research, and Global Engagement) that scrubs fraud, waste, and abuse while waging peace and empowering the five billion poor starting here in the USA.

The demise of the US Government began immediately after World War II, as President and General Ike Eisenhower warned it would, with the MICC taking control of the government budget while the banking world began experimenting with “exploding the customer” and getting away with it. Each decade has seen a severe upward climb of both of these pathologies, coincident with–after Viet-Nam–with a decline in the efficacy of investigative journalism and citizen activism. The good news is that the decline of the later was what Bill Moyer in Doing Democracy calls “stage five” or “the darkness.” 2012 is a convergence and emergence year. No one–least of all Phi Beta Iota–knows what it will bring, with one observation: the game will change.

If there is anyone out there able to focus Presidential attention on the fundamentals, here are the four references that matter:

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

2010 M4IS2 Briefing for South America

2009 Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A Twenty-Year Restrospective

2000 ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World

2010/12/012010/12/01

Journal: ONE Party–the Wall Street Party–“Owns” USA

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

The documentary film “Inside Job” makes it perfectly clear that there is only one party in DC: The Wall Street Party. With five Wall Street minders for every elected official in DC, why are we surprised? There are of course a few exceptions, but their legislative record suggest they are essentially ineffective.

The Wall Street Party has constructed a circular tautology that incorporates 1] Wall Street; 2] Government; 3] Academia, and 4] The Press — the American Gang of Four.

It is no surprise that the Wall Street Party has a principle goal of privatizing wealth via tax cuts for themselves, while socializing the pain and suffering by slashing public spending for security in employment, health and education.

Tautologies, such as the ones that prop up the Wall Street Party, are constructed for the sole purpose of being unarguably true and are by design incapable of disproof. A prime example of the Wall Street Party's abuse of reality is their hijacking and distortion of the works of Adam Smith.

Of course tautologies are false reality distortion bubbles. They can only paper over the diversion from reality just so long. Then they fail in a big way. A prime example of this would be the former USSR.

The best way to deal with this is most likely an open source refutation [refudiation?] of the claims of the Wall Street Party.

Phi Beta Iota: Reprinted from Facebook with permission of the author.

2010/12/012010/12/01

Journal: Taking a WikiLeak

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Sense-Making, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence

Taking a Wikileak

In my obligatory post about Wikileaks as the story du jour, I point to the great set of questions Dan Gillmor has posted in his column at Salon. These are especially lucid. I like especially Dan’s point about the character of the communications that were leaked, that many of the messages are gossip. Journalists are dutifully reporting “facts” gleaned from the leaked material without necessarily digging deeper, verifying and analyzing. Of course, they don’t have time – the information environment moves too quickly, he who hesitates is lost, accuracy be damned.

Then again, journalism is so often about facts, not truth. Facts are always suspect, personal interpretations are often incorrect, memories are often wildly inaccurate. History is, no doubt, filled with wrong facts and bad interpretations that, regardless, are accepted as somehow “true.”

The high-minded interpretation of this and other leaks, that people need to know what is being said and done by their representatives in government, especially in a “democratic society,” is worth examining. We’re not really a democracy; government by rule or consensus of a majority of the people doesn’t scale, and it would be difficult for the average citizen to commit the time required to be conversant in depth with all the issues that a complex government must consider.

Do we benefit by sharing more facts with more people? (Dan notes that 3 million or so in government have the clearance to read most of the documents leaked – this seems like a lot of people to be keeping secrets… is the “secret” designation really all that meaningful, in this case?) But to my question – I think there’s a benefit in knowing more about government operations, but I’m less clear that this sort of leak increases knowledge vs. noise.

I’m certain about one thing: we shouldn’t assume that the leaked documents alone reveal secrets that are accurate and true. They’re just more pieces of a very complex puzzle.

See Also:

Graphic: Information Pathologies