[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.
Full Story Online
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.
Phi Beta Iota: We strongly recommend McGovern's article be read in its entirety. Key points:
1. US has no mutual defense treaty with Israel and no order to the US military to support Israel is Constitutionally valid without a Senate validation.
2. Israel will not get away with a USS Liberty atrocity on Admiral Mike Mullen's watch.
3. Washington is remains a moral and intellectual cesspool with the White House lacking a strategic analytic model, intelligence (decision-support) or any clue as to how to restore democracy and prosperity in America and peace in the rest of the world. Partisanship–uninformed partisanship–is what runs the White House today and it is NOT WORKING.
4. C/JCS has the right idea but the wrong company–no one now working in the US national security “establishment” has the combination of brains and integrity to actually propose a strategic analytic model; a reconstruction of secret intelligence so it provides non-secret decision-support to everybody now flying deaf, dumb, and blind in the NCA; and a redirection of the Pentagon so its budget funds the four forces after next–reform can be revenue and jobs neutral!
President Obama is at a fork in the road. He can stick with business as usual–partisanship, polling, and proxies that pay lip service to concepts like “national security,” or he can commit to creating a national strategy that gets a grip on reality and then connects means, ways, and ends to achieve a prosperous world at peace. From where we sit, C/CJS is the only person with both the right idea and the courage to speak the truth in public. Three immediately useful references:
The cover story in the February 2010 edition of Middle East Magazine, “Hunting Bin Laden“, leads with the statement that time may be running out for Osama bin Laden. It goes on to say.
“Over the last two years or so, the elusive leader of Al Qaeda has seen dozens of his lieutenants and allies assassinated one after the other in Afghanistan and Pakistan in a whirlwind of attacks, often in the dead of night, by remote-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The stealthy craft, operated by the Central Intelligence Agency and the US air force, have become a weapon that has revolutionised warfare.”
Full Story Online
Anyone studying military history could not agree more. The technological advances developed by the U.S. military since the first Gulf War have been staggering. The combination of global positioning systems, laser guidance, detailed maps, radar, J-Stars, and moving target indicators made the delivery of bombs by piloted aircraft extremely accurate. Now, with unmanned aircraft, tactical and strategic bomb delivery is ever more a major force multiplier. Make a note here, however, that accurate and timely intelligence is the difference maker between bombing mistakes and successful air strikes.
The article alleges that American intelligence has improved over the last two to three years because of improved cooperation from Pashtun tribes.
“As the US braces for a major escalation in the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is engaged in a new drive to kill or capture Bin Laden, declaring that he is the key to defeating Al Qaeda as a global threat.”
“That may be a rather fanciful rationale, but eight years after the Americans let him slip through their fingers at his Afghan mountain redoubt of Tora Bora, his last confirmed location on or about 16 December, 2001, they admit they haven’t a clue where he is now. The best guess is that he’s holed up in the lawless Waziristan tribal belt that runs along the rugged border with Afghanistan.”
On Tuesday Feb. 23, Iran announced the capture of Abdulmalek Rigi, the boss of the terror organization Jundullah, which works for NATO. The capture of Rigi represents a serious setback for the US-UK strategy of using false flag state-sponsored terrorism against Iran and Pakistan, and ultimately to sabotage China’s geopolitics of oil.
Strategic Port Gwadar
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Tarpley's complete overview is well worth reading and we also recommend watching the short video of his interview with Russian television. To the right is a snapshot of the Port of Gwadar linked to its Wikipedia page–we have felt for some time that the USA is over-extended, out-foxed, and fooling no one, least of all the Chinese.
Strategic Port Gwadar
When US supply ships start going dead in the water from electromagnetic scrambling of their propulsion and navigation systems, we will know that China has had enough of this foolishness. The days of secure non-attributable false flag operations are OVER.
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)
Full Story Online
WASHINGTON — The nation's main counterterrorism center, created in response to the intelligence failures in the years before Sept. 11, is struggling because of flawed staffing and internal cultural clashes, according to a new study financed by Congress.
The result, the study concludes, is a lack of coordination and communication among the agencies that are supposed to take the lead in planning the fight against terrorism, including the C.I.A. and the State Department.
KABUL — On their first day of class in Afghanistan, the new U.S. intelligence analysts were given a homework assignment.
First read a six-page classified military intelligence report about the situation in Spin Boldak, a key border town and smuggling route in southern Afghanistan. Then read a 7,500-word article in Harper's magazine, also about Spin Boldak and the exploits of its powerful Afghan border police commander.
The conclusion they were expected to draw: The important information would be found in the magazine story. The scores of spies and analysts producing reams of secret documents were not cutting it.
“They need help,” Capt. Matt Pottinger, a military intelligence officer, told the class. “And that's what you're going to be doing.”
The class that began Friday in plywood hut B-8 on a military base in Kabul marked a first step in what U.S. commanders envision as a major transformation in how intelligence is gathered and used in the war against the Taliban.
Last month, Maj. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, published a scathing critique of the quality of information at his disposal. Instead of understanding the nuances of local politics, economics, religion and culture that drive the insurgency, he said, the multibillion-dollar industry devoted nearly all its effort to digging up dirt on insurgent groups.
“Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy,” he wrote in a paper co-authored by Pottinger and another official and published by the Center for a New American Security.
Phi Beta Iota: DoD mind-set time lags are quite consistent with those of other bureaucracies. They are just 21 years late. See the two original publications below:
and so on…..sadly, DoD is still in lip service mode and is about to implode DIOSPO. In Ripley's “Believe It Or Not” column, the joint briefing created by Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele, with help from loyal frustrated DoD personnel who do want to get it right, has not been read and is not being acted on. If anyone is interested, see both briefings here:
The homemade IED is the extremists’ deadliest weapon and America is spending billions on trying to combat it. We are granted access to this secret, smart and bizarre world
Phi Beta Iota: In 1988 the US Marine Corps told the emerging MASINT community that their highest priority was the detection of explosives at a stand off distance regardless of the container. This was based on USMC experience in El Salvador, where wooden containers were used to defeat mine detectors. The article is incorrect about mines replacing small arms as the weapon or casualty-causer of choice; mines in Viet-Nam took out more people (and the able-bodied needed to carry the wounded) than any other capability. The Israeli solution is a well-trained dog.
