Government – Page 909 – Public Intelligence Blog

a a flournoy official — Michèle Flournoy

Phi Beta Iota: We don't make this stuff up. The Pentagon has no strategy because the U.S. Government has no strategy. The National Security Council is managed by a General who emphasized getting along with the Chief of Naval Operation, never-mind leaving Marines wounded on the battlefield for lack of Naval Gunfire Support (NFS).

Join us in savoring what passes for a strategist and nominal policy making savant with the below headlines.

Below item is full text to avoid inconvenience. It is followed by several linked headlines that make quite clear the shallowness of the Pentagon strategy-policy pool.

Executive Summary: The gentle lady has no idea what the ten high-level threats to humanity are, nor does she care. She's a place-holder for the disappointed John Hamre, and a token female at the top who goes with the flow. She has neither any grasp nor any conceptual framework for actually creating grand strategy, harmonizing Whole of Government policies nor even–this really did surprise us–how many failed states there are in the world.

PBS March 27, 2010

Interview With Michele Flournoy, Under Secretary Of Defense For Policy

Charlie Rose (PBS), 1:00 A.M.

CHARLIE ROSE: The United States military is engaged around the world. It is withdrawing combat troops from Iraq as it builds up troops in Afghanistan. It is partnering with Pakistan in an aggressive counterterrorism campaign including drone attacks in the tribal areas. It’s working with the Yemeni government to counter a resurgent al Qaeda there. And U.S. troops are still in Haiti for the humanitarian relief efforts.

But the military has to do more than respond to the conflicts of the day. It must prepare for future wars, adoptive enemies and a shifting security environment.

The person at the Pentagon who spends the most time working on these issues is Michèle Flournoy. She is under secretary of defense for policy and the highest ranking female official in the Defense Department. I am very pleased to have her with me in the night studio at the Newseum in Washington.

Tell me what it is that you do at the Pentagon, how do you define this responsibility?

Continue reading “Journal: Pentagon Strategy & Policy Oxymoron Squared?”

2010/03/252010/09/02

Journal: Legality of US Drones as Killing Machines . . .

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Government, Military

berto small — Berto Jongman Recommends...

U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs Subcommittee Hearing:

“Rise of the Drones:

Unmanned Systems and the Future of War”

Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 2:00 pm 2154 Rayburn House Office Building Written Testimony Submitted By Kenneth Anderson March 18, 2010

2010/03/192010/03/25

Journal: Pentagon as VERY Slow Learner….

03 Economy, 04 Education, 10 Security, 11 Society, Government, Military

Time.com March 18, 2010

To Battle Computer Hackers, The Pentagon Trains Its Own

By Mark Thompson, Washington

“More than 100 foreign intelligence organizations are trying to hack into U.S. systems,” Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn warned last month. “Some governments already have the capacity to disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.” So the Pentagon recently modified its regulations to allow military computer experts to be trained in computer hacking, gaining designation as “certified ethical hackers.” They'll join more than 20,000 such good-guy hackers around the world who have earned that recognition since 2003 from the private International Council of E-Commerce Consultants (also known as the EC-Council).

Continue reading “Journal: Pentagon as VERY Slow Learner….”

2010/03/182010/03/22

Journal: OUT OF CONTROL–The Demise of Responsible Government “Intelligence” III

Civil Society, Government, Law Enforcement, Media, Military

Message from sender:

I am sure they do see a threat. If the Pentagon were not engaged in such a broad spectrum of illegal and corrupt practices wikileaks would not be seen as such a threat.

Phi Beta Iota: We ran this story earlier, but now that the New York Times is running it, it merits emphasis in conjunction with the other two “OUT OF CONTROL” posts. The Pentagon is nuts on the inside and criminal on the outside” They have lost sight of their mission, their roots within the Republic, and their responsibility to be responsible. Wikileaks, in sharp contrast, is an non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public.

Pentagon Sees a Threat From Online Muckrakers

By STEPHANIE STROM March 18, 2010

WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information that governments and corporations would prefer to keep secret, published an Army report about itself.

To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.

The Pentagon assessed the danger WikiLeaks.org posed to the Army in a report marked “unauthorized disclosure subject to criminal sanctions.” It concluded that “WikiLeaks.org represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, OPSEC and INFOSEC threat to the U.S. Army” — or, in plain English, a threat to Army operations and information.

2010/03/182010/03/22

Journal: OUT OF CONTROL–The Demise of Responsible Government “Intelligence” II

Ethics, Government, Military

Admin Threatens Veto Over GAO Role in Intel Oversight

March 17th, 2010 by Steven Aftergood

One of the simplest, most effective ways to strengthen congressional oversight of intelligence would be for Congress to make increased use of specially cleared investigators from the Government Accountability Office. This is such a straightforward step towards improving oversight that it was even championed by CIA Director Leon Panetta when he was a Congressman.

But the Obama Administration told Congress on Monday that new language to reinforce the GAO’s role in intelligence oversight was among several provisions in the pending FY2010 Intelligence Authorization Act that were objectionable to the White House and that might prompt a presidential veto of the bill.

Continue reading “Journal: OUT OF CONTROL–The Demise of Responsible Government “Intelligence” II”

2010/03/18

Journal: Bush-Era Cover-Up on 9-11 Interrogations

Ethics, Government

Revealed: Ashcroft, Tenet, Rumsfeld warned 9/11 Commission about ‘line’ it ’should not cross’

Posted on March 17, 2010 by willyloman

by Sahil Kapur, Raw Story

Senior Bush administration officials sternly cautioned the 9/11 Commission against probing too deeply into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, according to a document recently obtained by the ACLU.

The notification came in a letter dated January 6, 2004, addressed by Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and CIA Director George J. Tenet. The ACLU described it as a fax sent by David Addington, then-counsel to former vice president Dick Cheney.

EXTRACT:

Eventually, the commission’s co-chairs harshly criticized the administration for having purportedly “destroyed” tapes of its interrogations with terror suspects, as Raw Story reported last year.

9/11 Commission members Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton wrote that although US President George W. Bush had ordered all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the probe, “recent revelations that the CIA destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot.”

“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation.”

They continued: “There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the CIA — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot.

“Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations,” Kean and Hamilton wrote.

The letter can be found on page 26 of the ACLU’s set of unveiled documents.

2010/03/172010/09/03

Handbook: Joint Operating Environment 2010

C4/JOE/Software, Government, Military, Military

This is an absolutely world-class document, and to the best of our recollection, the single best formulation we have seen. The perspectives, insights, professional approach, and over-all treatment of the challenges of the future are truly first class, and superior to CIA's Global Trends and other such offerings in relation to the needs of the military.

It does have flaws that are not the fault of the author's or the Command, but of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, neither of whom know anything at all about Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). Supplemental Observation

The document missed Indonesia as a demographic powerhouse; does not fully understand water; understates the DoD share of the US budget by 50%; ignores Operations Other Than War (OOTW) and especially the vital role that the military can play with the Army Civil Affairs Brigade as a hub, ignores multinational outreach in other than liaison terms, and under-studies defense acquisition which is not a hiring problem, it is a mind-set and information problem.

Despite these flaws, which are beyond the control of the author's since they did not receive any intelligence support worthy of the name, this is a phenomenal document with enormous potential for the future of Whole of Government Operations across the spectrum of high-level threats from Poverty to Crime.

It's time to drain the DoD intelligence swamp, that will actually fix acquisition and support to operations in the real-world at the same time.

Graphic: OSINT DOSC MDSC as Kernel for Global Grid to Meet Stabilization & Reconstruction as Well as Whole of Government Policy, Acquisition, and Operations Support

2009 DoD OSINT Leadership and Staff Briefings

2010: Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Trilogy Updated

Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]

Journal: DoD Mind-Set Time Lags Most Fascinating

Journal: Intelligence & Innovation Support to Strategy, Planning, Programming, Budgeting, & Acquisition