How Should We Measure Intelligence Community Performance?, by Joseph Mazzafro. As the Congress and the DC dignitary debate if health care is affordable given the nation's first trillion dollar annual debit incursion, I am wondering where the money would come from should the United States need to defend its national interests against another Al Qaeda attack or worse. The President has already frozen budgetary growth for all discretionary spending not related to national security, but can the Defense Department and Intelligence Community remain fenced for much longer given the increasing national debt – the size of which already is a national security concern in its own right?
by Tim StevensThe facts of cyberterrorism, or state-sponsored cyberattacks, are heavily-guarded by national security protocols, but the case has yet to be made that these are really significant risks, despite what you hear senior officials say. And this is the point: you cannot use the darkest imaginings of those with high-level security clearances to promote ends with little consideration of the ethical and practical implications of the means of achieving them. Crime and espionage are not necessarily acts of war, and the fact that they are being subsumed under the rubric of “war” should worry those who care about international relations, diplomacy, the role of security agencies, the relationship between state and industry, and about the constitutional contracts between the individual and the state.
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Critical analysts like James Der Derian have long noted the existence of a military-industrial-media-entertainment network (MIME-NET), a thesis it is more and more difficult to write off as paranoid post-structuralism.
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In a recent issue of Race & Class, journalist and writer Matt Carr tackles this phenomenon head-on, in a readable and non-academic article, Slouching Towards Dystopia: the New Military Futurism. Carr claims that “a new genre of military futurology has emerged which owes as much to apocalyptic Hollywood movies as it does to the cold war tradition of ‘scenario planning'.”
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Carr interprets this as a sign that institutions like the US military perceive themselves as “the last bastion of civilisation against encroaching chaos and disorder. The worse the future is perceived to be, the more these dark visions of chaos and disorder serve to justify limitless military ‘interventions', techno-warfare, techno-surveillance and weapons procurement programmes, and the predictions of the military futurists are often very grim indeed.” I’ve sat in enough horizon-scanning workshops to have some sympathy for this view―little positive emerges from these discussions, and the outcome is almost always appeals for more regulation, bigger budgets, and better tools for the projection of power.
[DoD] Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants
KABUL, Afghanistan — Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.
It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.
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Justice, CIA clash over probe of interrogator IDs
The CIA and Justice Department are fighting over a secret investigation into a controversial program by legal supporters of Islamist terrorists held at Guantanamo Bay that involved photographing CIA interrogators and showing the pictures to prisoners, an effort CIA officials say threatens the officers' lives.
The Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax is rapidly gathering momentum thanks to a bid by British Labour Party MPs to save themselves from looming defeat at the hands of the Tories by playing this great economic populist card. If the Labour Party succeeds with this gambit, it will tend to transform the situation in the US as well, with desperate Democrats embracing the Tobin tax as a means of getting some populist credibility. The Republicans, by contrast, will be forced to line up in defense of their Wall Street backers, stripping away all their Tea Party camouflage. Obama-Summers-Geithner will also be put into a bind. I have been campaigning for the Tobin tax for a number of years, and it is an idea whose time has come.
If a sales tax on financial transactions (Tobin tax, trading tax, securities transfer tax, Robin Hood tax) can bring the British Labour Party back from the dead, it can defeat Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Wall Street, and the reactionary Republicans here in the US. It is time to make this a world-wide campaign to force the bankers to pay for the world economic depression they have created.
Webster Tarpley
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A tiny tax on bankers that would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change, here and abroad.
This tax on banks – not you or I – has the power to raise hundreds of billions every year. It could give a vital boost to the NHS, our schools, and the fight against child poverty in the UK – as well as tackling poverty and climate change around the world.
Not complicated. Just brilliant.
Phi Beta Iota: We support the elimination of the Federal income tax as being unconstitutional in the Unted STATES of America. Individuals should pay taxes to localities; businesses should pay taxes to all states where they do business; and federal operations should be based on the Tobin tax and strictly limited to the narrow administrative services of common concern that are consistently authorized and approved by Congress acting on behalf of the STATES.
In his new book The Watchers, (Penguin Press, 2010), Shane Harris chronicles what he calls “the rise of America's surveillance state,” a process he's been following since he was a reporter and technology editor at Government Executive from 2001 to 2005.
It's a story with all the elements of a spy thriller: political intrigue, shadowy federal organizations and a compelling cast of characters desperately seeking to prevent the next Sept. 11. At the center is the enigmatic John Poindexter, former national security adviser and architect of the ill-fated Total Information Awareness data collection and analysis effort.
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What I discovered was that it really was the Beirut attack that shocked the intelligence system in a very similar way to 9/11. You have the Marines in Beirut, ostensibly on this international peacekeeping mission. They're hunkered down at the airport. For various political reasons, they're not allowed to go out very much in public. They are sort of sitting ducks. What happens is in the aftermath of the bombing, the intelligence community finds out there were all these warnings that something bad was about to happen to the Marines at the airport. So you had, in the spring of 1983, more than 100 individual warnings about car bombings fielded by the intelligence community.
Full Interview Online
The Marines were blind, deaf and dumb sitting at the base. And the golden nugget of it all is that NSA intercepted, in the days before the attack, this phone conversation going from a minister in Iran to presumably one of these organizing terrorist groups–directing this group to go and take this spectacular action against the Marines. You add all these up and it looks a lot like 9/11. There's all this information sitting there and it's like, how come nobody's putting it together? And Poindexter is the guy who looks at this and says, “This shouldn't happen and we can take steps to make sure it doesn't happen. There has to be a way to logically approach this problem, systematize the whole process and connect those dots.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Intelligence Community is badly managed, grotesquely over-funded, and incapable of changing its culture for the simple reason that instead of finding and empowering leaders with new ideas and open minds, we continue to give more money to old leaders, like pouring gasoline on a fire. We still cannot process 90% of what we collect; we still cannot speak foreign languages; and we still do not play well with others. The IC is managed by people who know nothing of intelligence–they are essentially staffers who went through the motions of moving money around–and their only real accomplishment is that they have not burned any bridges. Unfortunately, they have been so busy not burning bridges they have not built anything worthwhile. The IC is a shell game–move money, move the harem around, repeat the same testimony over and over to Congress again–ultimately the IC is a $75 billion a year tragic farce.
Thursday evening's shootout between Pentagon police officers and a gunman apparently motivated by anti-government sentiment was the latest in a spate of attacks on federal employees and facilities and serves as a stark reminder that public servants too often find themselves unexpectedly in harm's way. The following timeline reviews major attacks during the past two decades.
Feb. 18, 2010. A small jet is flown into a building housing a federal tax office in Austin, Texas, injuring 13 and killing two. The pilot, Joseph Andrew Stack, was angry with the Internal Revenue Service.
Nov. 5, 2009. An Army psychiatrist goes on a rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding dozens. The alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was a Muslim who had been in contact with a radical Imam and was about to be deployed overseas.
June 1, 2009. A gunman opens fire on a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., killing one soldier and wounding another. The suspect, a Muslim convert, opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but was not affiliated with a larger terrorist network.
It has been evident for some time that the ongoing speculative attack on Greece, along with such other countries as Spain, Ireland, Portugal, and Italy, was not primarily a reflection of their economic fundamentals, nor yet a spontaneous movement of “the market,” but rather an orchestrated action of economic warfare.
Phi Beta Iota: There is no question but that Dr. Tarpley is correct at the moment, the hedge funds are waging economic war on Europe, are out of control, and need to be stomped down. HOWEVER, what is not evident in his longer report is the fact that Europe welcomed help from Goldman Sachs and others in concealing its long-term debt, and it is for this reason that the hedge funds now have an “information advantage” that gives them a “sure bet” against the Euro generally and Greece specifically. Until the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)–to name just a few–get a grip on the totality of the information relevant to their safety, security, and efficiency, predatory capitalism, virtual colonialism, and unilateral militarism will continue to rule. Our new book, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability, provides a game plan for creating a prosperous world at peace by arming the UN, EU, AU, UNASUR, and SCO with the means to do multicultural, multifunctional information-sharing and sense-making. Our favorite line from the book: a woman with a cell phone is vastly more powerful than a man with a gun.
Tim Stevens
