Military – Page 206 – Public Intelligence Blog

A quest for truth about the last days of bin Laden

Declan Walsh

The New York Times, 8 March 2012

via NDTV (India)

Rawalpindi (Pakistan): In his quest for the truth about his country's most notorious guest, Shaukat Qadir started where it all ended: the room where Osama bin Laden was killed.

Last August, Mr. Qadir, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier, retraced the steps of the American commandos who stormed through the corridors of Bin Laden's hide-out on May 2.

Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Mr. Qadir passed a body outline that marked the spot where Bin Laden's 22-year-old son, Khalid, was shot dead. Then he turned to a small room with a low ceiling, an empty wardrobe and a tight cluster of bullets holes in one wall, he said. Above that, on the ceiling, was a fading splash of blood that, his Pakistani intelligence escort told him, belonged to Bin Laden.

“As a former soldier, I was struck by how badly the house was defended,” Mr. Qadir said in an interview. “No proper security measures, nothing high-tech – in fact, nothing like you would expect.”

Continue reading “Bert Laden – The Quest for Truth Continues”

2012/03/09

Eagle: NSA Whistle-Blower: Obama Worse than Bush

Corruption, Government, Military

NSA whistle-blower: Obama “worse than Bush”

Thomas Drake on life inside the National Security Agency and the price of truth telling

Matthew Harwood

Salon, 7 March 2012

Thomas Drake, the whistle-blower whom the Obama administration tried and failed to prosecute for leaking information about waste, fraud and abuse at the National Security Agency, now works at an Apple store in Maryland. In an interview with Salon, Drake laughed about the time he confronted Attorney General Eric Holder at his store while Holder perused the gadgetry on display with his security detail around him. When Drake started asking Holder questions about his case, America’s chief law enforcement officer turned and fled the store.

But the humor drained away quickly from Drake’s thin and tired face as he recounted his ordeal since 2010 when federal prosecutors charged him with violating the Espionage Act for retaining classified information they believed he would pass on to then Baltimore Sun reporter Siobhan Gorman. While Drake never disclosed classified information, he did pass on unclassified information to Gorman revealing that the NSA had wasted billions of taxpayers’ dollars on Trailblazer, a contractor-heavy intelligence software program that failed to find terrorist threats in the tsunami of digital data the agency was sucking up globally — and sometimes unconstitutionally. While Trailblazer [SAIC] burned through cash, in the process enriching many NSA employees turned contractors, Drake found that another software program named ThinThread had already met the core requirements of a federal acquisition regulation that governed the proposed system at a sliver of the cost, all while protecting American civil liberties at the code level. The NSA leadership, however, had already bet their careers on Trailblazer. So Drake blew the whistle, first to Congress, then to the Department of Defense Inspector General’s Office, and finally, and fatefully, to Gorman.

Full story with emphasis added below the line.

Continue reading “Eagle: NSA Whistle-Blower: Obama Worse than Bush”

2012/03/072016/03/26

Richard Wright: USMC “Learns” From StratFor – Integrity? – We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Integrity

Corruption, Military

Robert,

I have given up on the U.S. Intelligence Community; it simply reflects the fact that the U.S. Federal Government and the Political System that it is based on are devoid of both common sense and integrity at all levels.

The coruption has undermined our entire National Security Establishment. Clapper's departure (if valid) is just another symptom. I give you an excerpt replayed in various sources on a leak published by Wkileaks from their penetration of Stratfor:

“Apparently the entities charged with keeping us safe now require full-blown lessons from the private sector in how to do their jobs. According to leaked email written by Stratfor's CEO, George Friedman: ‘We have also been asked to help the United States Marine Corps and other government intelligence organizations to teach them how Stratfor does what it does, and train them in becoming government Stratfors. We are beginning this project by preparing a three-year forecast for the Commandant of the Corps. This is a double honor for us.'” Read it and weep.

Richard

Robert Steele Comments and Links Below the Line

Continue reading “Richard Wright: USMC “Learns” From StratFor – Integrity? – We Don't Need No Stinkin' Integrity”

2012/03/052012/03/05

Winslow Wheeler: Drones Dead on Arrival

Budgets & Funding, DoD, Government, Military, Office of Management and Budget

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

A Final Word on Drones and Reaper (doc 20 pages)

A Final Word on Drones and Reaper

Last week I distributed a five part series on drones, specifically the MQ-9 Reaper. It was published at Time Magazine's Battleland blog. This last message on the series distributes each of the five parts and the entire paper as originally written for any who might be looking for a missed part or to read the paper as one piece. But also, I attempt here to raise some broader issues.

My paper addressed Reaper as a physical system, and I take a few shots at some of the more uninformed things that have been written about drones by some people who, had they looked more into the data, probably would have been a little less effusive about the “revolution in warfare” and expectation that drones should naturally replace manned aircraft for air combat roles in the foreseeable future.

My paper only scratched the surface of the implications of the burgeoning love affair of the US defense community with drones. Some of those issues have already been thoroughly discussed in the press: such as the use of unmanned systems to pursue air to ground combat roles in friendly, ambiguous and hostile countries as a “safe” way to pursue policy makers' objectives. The endnotes in the first part of the series referenced several excellent articles on this issue, or you might want to read Andrew Cockburn's more recent essay in the London Review of Books at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n05/andrew-cockburn/drones-baby-drones.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Drones Dead on Arrival”

2012/03/03

Chuck Spinney: The Arrogance of Ignorance Plus Meta-RECAP

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military

We are fighting Islamism from ignorance, as we did the cold war

The west wasted trillions in needless conflict with the USSR. Now we are being brainwashed into confrontation with Iran

Simon Jenkins, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 March 2012 20.00 GMT

Were we wrong? I have lived through two global conflicts: the west against Russian communism and now the west against political Islam. The latter was caused by western leaders exaggerating a threat from a tiny group of terrorists to win popularity in war. But the former? Surely the cold war was a good war, a Manichean struggle between competing visions of how to order humanity. If not, then it must have been one of the great mistakes of all time, and a horrific waste of resources.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Brother Spinney knows full well that there is no ignorance among the “leaders” who make it so. They are in this for the money. The ignorance is our own, as a public. Absent an educated engaged public, public policy is a tool for enriching the few, not the many.

2012/03/03

David Isenberg: Vice President Condi Rice?

Corruption, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Brought forward from 22 December 2011 because of mention of Vice Presidential option for Mitt Romney (or Jeb Bush if the brokered convention takes place as many have suggested is planned).

Phi Beta Iota: Three observations must be made here. The first is that that intelligence was not faulty — Charlie Allen got it right with line crossers and the debriefing of the defecting son-in-law. George Tenet prostituted his office and betrayed the public trust. The second is that the book does not do justice to Dick Cheney and his shadow government behind the President's back. Finally, the third observation, that no secretary of state in recent memory seems to have a strategic analytic model or the ability to actually address the ten high-level threats to humanity. They are, instead, in the immortal words of Madeline Albright (we do not make this stuff up), “a gerbil on a wheel.” We can do better. A good start would be a foreign policy of peace, commerce, and friendship, a rejection of secret agendas, and a pursuit of a prosperous world at peace — a world that works for all. Anything less is, in our collective view, a betrayal of the public trust.

The Rocky Ascent of Condoleezza Rice

Joseph Lelyveld

The New York Review of Books, 22 December 2011

No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington
by Condoleezza Rice
Crown, 766 pp., $35.00

Read full review.

Phi Beta Iota Book Reviews: Diplomacy (104)

2012/03/02

DefDog: $15 Billion for Cyber-Command, Zero for Actual Needs + Meta-RECAP

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military

The myths behind the spending — disavowed by true subject-matter experts, manipulated by the military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) to spend more on vaporware….

RSA Conference: On the Subject of Cyber War and Industrial Espionage

Talk of an impending ‘Cyber Pearl Harbor’ is not an uncommon image evoked during discussions of cyber threats to the critical infrastructure of the United States. But the countries with the most capability do not necessarily have the most interest in launching the types of attacks against the United States that make for movie plots, a panel of experts said at the RSA Conference Wednesday.

“There are nation-states that absolutely have the capability (to launch a major attack), but they don’t have the intent – mostly because it wouldn’t be in their own interest, and the spillover effects would be very damaging to the world economy and a lot of other things,” said Eric Rosenbach, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Cyber Policy in the Department of Defense. “The other reason is, that type of attack, contrary maybe to what the conventional wisdom is, I think would be very difficult to disguise.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The alarm was sounded — and the solution proffered — in 1994. What we should have been doing all this time is going with full open source software across the board, and an end to buggy irresponsible proprietary code and even worse, buggy irresponsible secret code. It now appears that intelligent cities and states are going to have to take matters into their own hands — this is consistent with what some states are already doing (planning for federal collapse, refusing corporate business absent a waiver of corporate personality).