Phi Beta Iota: Posted with permission. We strongly recommend the Intelligence Online offerings. We have received a number of commentaries around this topic, and they boil down to the situation being much, much worse than depicted here:
2. Nose-dive to the lowest common denominator, completely destroying regional and country expertise and having no linguistic capabilities or grasp of history and culture (CIA, DIA)
3. Completely out of control procurement, rotten requirements definition, no full life-cycle planning (e.g. buy collection, do not buy processing), and generally disconnected from reality (NSA/Cyber-Command)
4. We are reminded that there are 1,200 distinct “organizations” wasting money and going through the motions on counter-terrorism–meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security gropes little girls, confiscates aftershave, and is generally on the underside of institutionalized tyrannical idiocy.
Cards on the table. I’ve been a “truther” since early 2002 when I came across the first major challenge to the official 9/11 story in the shape of the wonderful “Hunt the Boeing” site created by French researcher Thierry Meyssan. Until then I’d accepted the standard “Left” version of the government account – that a group of daring Muslims acting on behalf of the victims of US foreign policy had struck back at the great tyrant. The photographic and other evidence presented by Meyssan demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that whatever it was that had caused the damage to the Pentagon, it certainly wasn’t a large Boeing jet. If the government’s story was a lie on that major point, then the whole story was brought into question. I knew at once that I had to find out as much as I could about the event which everyone was saying had “changed the world”.
. . . . . .
Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, hit the headlines just recently. He’d committed the cardinal sin of expressing doubts about the official story of 9/11 in a personal blog. The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, rushed to condemn him and demanded he be sacked. UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, joined in, saying that Falk’s remarks were “an affront to the memory of the more than 3000 people who died in that tragic attack”. Someone needs to remind the Secretary-General of the affront which gullible acceptance and repetition of the official lie of 9/11 causes to the memory of the more than 3 million dead and mutilated Afghan, Iraqi and now Pakistani men, women and children sacrificed on the altar of neo-imperialism as a direct consequence of the phoney ‘war on terror’ – based on the lie of 9/11 and the other false-flag crimes perpetrated for and/or by agencies of western governments.
From Afghanistan for ACOS: I have not seen so much BS in a while. The 10th Mountain deployed to Afghanistan without the proper equipment to operate in the mountains. They lacked adequate cold weather gear and our lift capability does not fly well here either. With the exception of 40 year old Chinooks, most can't climb over the lofty peaks that permeate this country.
I attended a farewell for a friend of mine, there were 33 people there, 11 of them in the rank of 06, two in the rank of 08. What these guys did everyday is beyond me, but little work gets done in the palace of King David I can assure you. There are Green Berets out in villages that depend on their families to help them with the Hearts and Minds that Petraeus so often says he is trying to win, but doesn't support. That type of warfare does little to increase the coffers of the MICC….
Chuck Spinney–we read all your stuff and his–has it right: this guy lives in a palace, Versailles on the Potomac, and is totally out of touch with reality.
Phi Beta Iota: It is not at all clear that the new Army Chief of Staff (ACOS) understands that the standard issue weapon is worthless beyond 300 meters, or that his force in combat (4% of the total force) takes 80% of the casualties while receiving 1% of the total military budget. We know what our troops are fighting for–what is this guy fighting for on behalf of his troops?
Relying on a UN Security Council Resolution, but without asking Congress or the American people, President Obama attacked Libya on 19 Mar 2011. He finally got around to explaining his actions on 28 March 2011 in a nationally televised speech given at the National Defense University. Attached below are two analyses of that speech:
Story 1 by Ed Felien appeared in The Rag Blog on April 5, a spunky left-leaning website based in the hinterlands of Austen Texas. It is harshly critical of the speech by comparing Obama's assertions to conditions in Libya and the tensions within Libya that have created a civil war.
Story 2 by Anne Marie Slaughter appeared in the the New York Review of Books blog on 20 March 2011. The New York Review of Books appeals to a far more high-falutin readership than The Rag Blog, and is a kind of a forum for the panjandrums in what's left of the American Left. Dr. Slaughter gushes over Obama's speech, saying it made an “important contribution to the Libya debate.” She bases her conclusion (“let us protect the Libya's civilians by any means necessary”) by analyzing (a word I use charitably) some impenetrable comparisons of interests versus interests to interests versus values, but curiously, she says nothing about actual conditions in Libya, or who is fighting whom, or why they are fighting.
The contrast between information and puffery in these two essays is stunning and says a lot about what's wrong with the American Left.
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Slaughter means well, but has drunk the kool-aid. No one in Washington appears capable of reconnecting with reality and using clarity, diversity, and integrity to actually understand how far the US Government has diverged from core values of the Republic, and the public interest. The right/neo-conservatives have cost the US tens of trillions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse–Dick Cheney and the Iraq/Afghanistan faux wars on terror being the current classic–but so also has the left/Demopublicans so intent on keeping their own money flowing they have completely lost sight of basic principles of governance. These are all good people trapped in a bad system–all it takes to fix this is ONE LEADER committed to transparency, the truth, and trust. Barack Obama is clearly NOT that leader.
This is the TOP SECRET OSCAR SIERRA Intelligence Analysis Orientation created to deal with the shared problem of CIA and DIA. It is so real it scares the most hardened veterans years after retirement.
Short Video
This one is funny sad. For funny hysterical see the colliding sexual fantasies between pilots and intelligence officers:
by: Roy Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz, Truthout
Why is the world's largest organization of psychologists so aggressively promoting a new, massive and untested military program? The APA's enthusiasm for mandatory “resilience training” for all US soldiers is troubling on many counts.
The January 2011 issue of the American Psychologist, the American Psychological Association's (APA) flagship journal, is devoted entirely to 13 articles that detail and celebrate the virtues of a new US Army-APA collaboration. Built around positive psychology and with key contributions from former APA President Martin Seligman and his colleagues, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) is a $125 million resilience training initiative designed to reduce and prevent the adverse psychological consequences of combat for our soldiers and veterans. While these are undoubtedly worthy aspirations, the special issue is nevertheless troubling in several important respects: the authors of the articles, all of whom are involved in the CSF program, offer very little discussion of conceptual and ethical considerations; the special issue does not provide a forum for any independent critical or cautionary voices whatsoever; and through this format, the APA itself has adopted a jingoistic cheerleading stance toward a research project about which many crucial questions should be posed. We discuss these and related concerns below.
Since the Libyan regime was established by a coup d’état in 1969, Americans and Europeans — with a three-year intermission from 1986 to 1988 — found it acceptable enough to recognize it, sell it arms and buy its petroleum. In that one interval, on April 15, 1986, the American government under President Ronald Reagan attempted to kill Colonel Muammar Qaddafi by bombing his residence and did wound his wife and kill about 75 Libyans including his adopted daughter. Two years later, Qaddafi retaliated by bombing an American airliner. That attack killed 270 people including 190 Americans among whom were at least four intelligence officers. These were just the major events; there were many others. Of course, Americans and Libyans took very different views of them. But both sides eventually smoothed over their angers, and relations again became profitable and “correct” on both sides, as they remained until early this year.
So, what is the basis of those attitudes and the causes of those actions? Who are the Libyans anyway? And what is the position of Qaddafi among them? What motivates the Libyans? What governs their action? And what is likely to be the outcome of the revolt, the regime’s resistance to it and the Western intervention?
With the prejudice of a historian, I find that seeking answers to these questions requires at least a glance at the past. That is the aim of this essay.
