Military – Page 109 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/09/16

Chuck Spinney: Bill Polk Primer on Syria & Chemical Weapons

03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Extraterrestial Intelligence, Government, Military, Officers Call, Strategy

My friend Bill Polk, a well-known historian with extensive experience in the Middle East and Central Asia and author of many books on these areas, has written a backgrounder on how to make sense out of the Syrian chemical weapons issue. He has given me permission to distribute it. Herewith is his most interesting primer on the Syrian chemical weapons issue.

Chuck Spinney

Reflections on the Syrian Chemical Weapons Issue and Beyond

William R. Polk

September 15, 2013

1.The Variety of Weapons and Their characteristics
2 A Short History of Chemical Weapons
3 The Russian Intervention
4 Why the Syrians Have Accepted the Russian Proposal
5. The Prospects for Ridding The Area of Weapons of Mass Destruction
6 The Possibility of Ending the Civil War
7 Who Are the Insurgents and What do they Want?
8 Predictable Results of a Collapse of the Syrian State

Full essay below the line.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Bill Polk Primer on Syria & Chemical Weapons”

2013/09/152013/09/15

Eagle: Cantaloupe vs. al-Qaeda: What’s More Dangerous? (Hint: In 2011, 17 Americans Killed by Terrorists, 33 Killed by a SINGLE Cantelope)

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement, Military

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

One of the most important revelations from the international drama over Edward Snowden's NSA leaks in May is the exposure of a nearly lunatic disproportion in threat assessment and spending by the US government. This disproportion has been spawned by a fear-based politics of terror that mandates unlimited money and media attention for even the most tendentious terrorism threats, while lethal domestic risks such as contaminated food from our industrialized agribusiness system are all but ignored. A comparison of federal spending on food safety intelligence versus antiterrorism intelligence brings the irrationality of the threat assessment process into stark relief.

In 2011, the year of Osama bin Laden's death, the State Department reported that 17 Americans were killed in all terrorist incidents worldwide. The same year, a single outbreak of listeriosis from tainted cantaloupe killed 33 people in the United States. Foodborne pathogens also sickened 48.7 million, hospitalized 127,839 and caused a total of 3,037 deaths. This is a typical year, not an aberration.

Continue reading “Eagle: Cantaloupe vs. al-Qaeda: What's More Dangerous? (Hint: In 2011, 17 Americans Killed by Terrorists, 33 Killed by a SINGLE Cantelope)”

2013/09/142013/09/14

Stephen E. Arnold: Navy Project Pulls Military into the Nineties [Just 20 Years Behind State of the Art]

Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military

Navy Project Pulls Military into the Nineties

September 13, 2013

Sometimes an initiative comes along that causes me to perk up and declare, “wait, you mean they weren’t doing that already?” That is my response to Slashdot‘s article, “Navy Version of ‘Expedia’ to Save DOD Millions.” I know, I should no longer be surprised by the gross inefficiency of large bureaucracies.

The set of bureaucracies that makes up our military, though, is taking a welcome step toward efficiency with this project being tested by the Office of Naval Research. The system would use “an Expedia-like” search to correlate freight and personnel travel needs with open slots worldwide. Writer Kevin Fogarty reports:

“The Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time.”

Though it has taken our government seventeen years to take advantage of this technology, I suppose the fact that they finally are is worth celebrating. The TET system is part of the Logistics Information Technology(LogIT) project, which aims to combine information “from separate systems for travel planning, asset tagging, tracking, location, monitoring and analysis of travel options into a single interface.” Logic is a beautiful thing!

The article includes a few details about how the system will work, as well as expectations for the project’s impact. See the article for more information about this belated but important initiative.

Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

2013/09/12

Berto Jongman: NSA’s War on Encryption

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Government, Hacking, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement, Military

The NSA's War Against Encryption

New revelations about National Security Agency abuses, which now include everything from industrial espionage to reports that the agency can access most data on our smartphones, seem to put everything we know about how business is done on the Internet in danger.

Complete story below the line.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: NSA's War on Encryption”

2013/09/092013/09/09

Vatican Secret Service: MajGen Ed Landsdale’s Confirmed Illicit Assets

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Military, Officers Call

Jesus wept. From the Vatican Secret Service via an Opus Dei mentor. These accounts were still held by Lansdale when he became a Major General. So they are not accounts he only had in the 1940s or 1950s. The sums are vast. And these banks are not among those black banks, including BCCI, set up by Paul Helliwell (attorney of Meyer Lansky) who was employed by General Donovan as chief of station for the OSS in Kunming, and went on to have a long career serving the agency and the Mob, simultaneously.

Continue reading “Vatican Secret Service: MajGen Ed Landsdale's Confirmed Illicit Assets”

2013/09/092013/09/09

Owl: Dark Days in America — Mid-November?

01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 05 Iran, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Media, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

“There are very dark storm clouds gathering around the country and North America as a whole. Things are about to get dark, very dark in just a few short weeks. In just over two months, on November 13-14, 2013, the lights are about to go out. Will the lights come back on? It depends on who you ask. Given the past behavior of those in power, it would behoove all of us to prepare for the fact that we could be living for an extended time with no electricity…The working scenario that has emerged is that World War III is on the horizon. Syria was to be the flash point. However, with American and international sentiment running so high against American involvement in the Syrian conflict, Obama needs a Plan B in order to get America into war, because it does not appear that Congress is going to give him the authorization that he needs to force our way in Syria culminating in a military stand off between the Russians and the Chinese and the United States. Subsequently, if Obama fails to obtain Congressional support to attack Syria, he could very well turn his attention to the take down of the power grid and he could still achieve his goals in under two months.

Continue reading “Owl: Dark Days in America — Mid-November?”

2013/09/052013/09/05

Wayne Madsen: American Generals Stand between War and Peace — John Brennan to Hang, Obama to Face Impeachment Over Benghazi?

Ethics, Military

American Generals Stand between War and Peace

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, General Martin Dempsey, backed by his Joint Staff generals and admirals, stood between a hasty and knee-jerk President Obama who was intent on launching a military attack on Syria and a tenuous peace in the Middle East.
As of the evening of Friday, August 29, President Obama was on track to launch a sustained 72-hour cruise missile and drone attack on pre-selected air defense and other strategic military targets in Syria.

Continue reading “Wayne Madsen: American Generals Stand between War and Peace — John Brennan to Hang, Obama to Face Impeachment Over Benghazi?”