Saturday 23 January 2010 by: Melvin A. Goodman

It is time for serious soul-searching regarding the role of the CIA and the intelligence community. Last month's operational and intelligence failures led to the deaths of seven CIA officers in Afghanistan and might have resulted in nearly 300 deaths on a Northwest Airlines plane headed for Detroit.Myths Covered:

The Greatest Myth: The 9/11 Commission offered insight into the systemic problems of the CIA and the intelligence community.

Myth Number Two: The intelligence community is a genuine community that fosters intelligence cooperation and the sharing of intelligence information.

Myth Number Three: The Office of the Director of National Intelligence offers a genuine possibility for exercising central control over the intelligence community.

Myth Number Four: The CIA is not a policy agency, but is chartered to provide objective and balanced intelligence analysis to decision-makers without any policy axe to grind.

Myth Number Five: The 9/11 and Christmas Day failures were due to the lack of sharing intelligence collection.

Myth Number Six: The CIA successfully recruits foreign assets.Highlights garnered by a Brazilian observer:

– Centralization
– Lack of cooperation within the Intelligence Community
– Inability to learn from its failure
– A culture of cover-up to conceal failures
– Crazy-quilt Burocratic structure
– lack of centralized authority and responsibility within the community
– much clandestine collection over the years has been designed to collect information that supports policy
– lack of sharing intelligence collection.
– inadequate flow of information between intelligence agencies
– lacks one central depository for all information on national and international terrorism, and the proliferation of intelligence agencies makes sharing of intelligence products even more cumbersome
– Tremendous amounts of useful intelligence are collected, but intelligence analysis has not been appreciably improved.
– there has been a trend toward militarization of the entire intelligence community.
– The absence of an independent civilian counter to the power of military intelligence threatens civilian control of the decision to use military power and makes it more likely that intelligence will be tailored to suit the purposes of the Pentagon.
the Congressional intelligence oversight process has made no genuine effort to monitor CIA's flawed intelligence analysis or its clandestine operations, and failed to challenge the illegal activities of the CIA that were part of the policy process.

2010/01/242010/01/24

Reference: Human Terrain Team (HTT) Round Two

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Military

Slides and Full Story Online

23 January 2010

The New Face of the Human Terrain System:

Goin' to Kansas City on 1 April 2010

by John Stanton

US Army Human Terrain System (HTS) principals recently produced a number of briefings adding up to a total of 133-pages of MS PowerPoint slides. For convenience sake here, we'll use the title of the first presentation titled The Future: Training Directorate Executive Overview, 08 January 2010 (The Future)¹ as the overall title for the series. The presentations contain a dizzying array of information, mostly in living color.

__________

1 http://cryptome.org/hts-rebirth2.zip (3MB)

They are audacious and excellent documents whose purpose seems to be to convince command and funding sources that HTS principals have been working since at least 2008 to improve recruiting practices (rigid check of qualifications), training methodologies (going Socratic, modular and phased) and logistics practices (housing, deployment, transport, move to Kansas City).

Once past the hypnotic affects of the 133 slides that induce a “this is great” feeling, the realization comes that the same people who destroyed the US Army program concept in the first place are the same ones that now claim they can reconstruct it and expand HTS operations to all combatant commands.

Montgomery Clough and Steve Fondacaro still remain at the program's helm in spite of two year's worth of allegations–from former and current HTS employees–that fraud, waste and abuse have been common place throughout the life of the HTS. Further, the substance of The Future is early-collegiate, not professional military/academic pedagogy. Financial figures are presented with no work breakdown structure/allocation. And worse, there is no mention of any academic/university review of the social science effort. This is troublesome given that management's experience in the field is limited. In short, the effort seems somewhat disingenuous.

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer specializing in national security and political matters. His book on the Human Terrain System (entitled General David Petraeus' Favorite Mushroom is available at Amazon and Wiseman Publishing. Reach him at cioran123[at]yahoo.com.

John Stanton's Human Terrain System articles:

http://cryptome.org/0001/hts-stanton.htm

2010/01/232010/01/23

Journal: MILNET US Muscles South, Islamic Genocide

01 Brazil, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 06 Genocide, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Government, Military

Muscling Latin America: The Pentagon has a new Monroe Doctrine (The Nation)

In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote “universal disarmament” and oppose the “imposition” of military bases of “some states in the territory of others.” It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. “We'll renew the lease,” he quipped, “if the US lets us set up a base in Miami.”

Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we'll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified “facilities and locations.”

MAY: Islam's war against others: Ethnic cleansing spreading in Muslim world (Scripps News)

Connect these dots: In Nigeria this week, Muslim youths set fire to a church, killing more than two dozen Christian worshippers. In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been suffering increased persecution including, this month, a drive-by shooting outside a church in which seven people were murdered. In Pakistan, Christian churches were bombed over Christmas. In Turkey, authorities have been closing Christian churches, monasteries and schools. Recently, churches in Malaysia have been attacked, too, provoked by this grievance: Christians inside the churches were referring to God as “Allah.” How dare infidels use the same name for the Almighty as do Muslims!

2010/01/232011/10/22

Journal: MILNET–Loss of Rule of Law, Aviation Insecurity

Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Military

Judge Tosses NSA Spy Cases

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision was a major blow to the two suits testing warrantless eavesdropping and executive branch powers implemented following the 2001 terror attacks. The San Francisco judge said the courts are not available to the public to mount that challenge.

“A citizen may not gain standing by claiming a right to have the government follow the law,” (.pdf) Walker ruled late Thursday.

Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation that brought one of the cases, said the decision means “when you’re trying to stop the government from doing something illegal, and if the government does it to enough people, the courts can’t fix it.”

The Rule of Law Has Been Lost: Security Fools

The greatest human achievement is the subordination of government to law. This was an English achievement that required eight centuries of struggle, beginning in the ninth century when King Alfred the Great codified the common law, moving forward with the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century and culminating with the Glorious Revolution in the late seventeenth century.

The success of this long struggle made law a shield of the people. As an English colony, America inherited this unique achievement that made English speaking peoples the most free in the world.

As Lawrence Stratton and I show in our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions (2000), the protective features of law in the U.S. were eroded in the twentieth century by prosecutorial abuse and by setting aside law in order to better pursue criminals. By the time of our second edition (2008), law as a shield of the people no longer existed. Respect for the Constitution and rule of law had given way to executive branch claims that during time of war government is not constrained by law or Constitution.

Emergency doors, karaoke bombers and other false alarms: When did we become such a nation of scaredy-cats?

This country needs to get a grip. We need a slap in the face, a splash of cold water.

On Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute opened an emergency exit inside the American Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport. Alarms blared and sirens flashed. Bouloute later told police that he'd opened the door by accident.

Which is what you'd assume. Sure, the exit was clearly marked, but it happens all the time, does it not?

All of Terminal 8 was evacuated for more than two hours. Police then swept through the building with dogs and SWAT teams (because, you see, a terrorist wouldn't quietly drop an explosive device into a trash barrel; he would first set off alarms, in order to…?). Before being allowed back in, thousands of travelers were forced to undergo rescreening at the Transportation Security Administration checkpoints, giving guards a chance to snag any butter knives or 4-ounce shampoo bottles they might have missed the first time. Inbound planes were stranded on the tarmac and departures were delayed for several hours.

Continue reading “Journal: MILNET–Loss of Rule of Law, Aviation Insecurity”

2010/01/212010/01/21

Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines

08 Wild Cards, Geospatial, Government, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Military, Reform, Strategy, Technologies

Taliban Overhaul Their Image In Bid To Win Allies

Phi Beta Iota: We've known since 9/11 that the asymmetric war is also marked by an asymmetric excellence in public relations, propaganda and perception management–not only do our opponents spend $1 for every $500,000 to $5 million that we spend, but they are better at this than we are. The USA is spending billions (low billions) on Information Operations (IO) and Strategic Communications, and still has no idea how to do it in languages we still do not speak, from a moral base we still do not have in the context of a Grand Strategy that does not exist because we have a secret intelligence world that is incapable of thinking broadly and deeply or giving the President and the Secretary of Defense what they NEED to know rather than what our expensive ignorant technical systems make possible to give. We are SO reminded of Catholic Mandarin Ngo Dinh Diem in Viet-Nam with his murderous sister Madame Nhu (Karzai's Brother….), only this time you have drugs, religion, and no competent Afghan military we can pretend we are supporting. A reprise of Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam?

Continue reading “Journal: MILNET Selected Headlines”

2010/01/202010/09/02

Journal: Al Qaeda, Yemen, Somalia, and USG

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence

berto small — Berto Jongman Recommends...

Welcome to Qaedastan: Yemen's coming explosion will make today's problems seem tame.

Yemen has so many dire problems that it's easy to be overwhelmed. Al Qaeda is growing in prominence, a Shiite rebellion is expanding in the north, and the threat of secession is renewed in the south. There's a brewing fight over what comes after President Ali Abdullah Saleh, age 67, who has ruled Yemen for 31 years; the country's elites are locked in a closed-door struggle to take power once he departs. Finally, and perhaps most intractably, Yemen is an environmental and resource catastrophe in the making. The country's water table is nearly depleted from years of agricultural malpractice, and its oil reserves are rapidly dwindling. This comes just when unemployment is soaring and an explosive birthrate promises only more young, jobless citizens in the coming years.

Testimony of Gregory D. Johnson, PhD Candidate, Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University, Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee January 20, 2010

Too many problems of too severe a nature to be dealth with in isolation from one another. “Yemen and its challenges have to be understood and dealt with as a whole.”

AQAP in Yemen and the Christmas Day Terrorist Attack By Gregory D. Johnsen

Al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia: A Ticking Time Bomb: Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, January 21, 2010

Standard party line “prep” for invading both countries. Most interesting tid-bit: 36 American convicts reached Yemen, ostensibly to study Arabic. Given the number of convicts the USA produces, most jailed for marijuana possession, and in combination with the bankruptcy of the USA and the meltdown of its social and physical infrastructure, we read this in a much more catastrophic homeland manner than might be the case in the cozy ambiance of Capitol Hill. Al Qaeda is no longer the center of gravity–domestic anger easily converted into violence is the center of gravity.

2010/01/202010/01/20

Journal: US Government Good, Bad, & Ugly

Government, Military

Full Glorious Story Online

GOOD

January 11, 2010

The Obama Reversal That Might Save Your Life (Sierra Club)

Washington, DC — The first anniversary of the Obama administration is only a week away. Perhaps the greatest untold story of the past year is the reversal of George Bush's eight years of environmental counterrevolution. When Bush and Cheney stopped a century-long tradition of environmental progress, the media was flabbergasted by the unrelenting intensity of the assault. But the Obama reversal has been largely unheralded (in fact, virtually unnoticed), even though it has arguably been even more intense.

BAD

Military Helps Fund Congressional Trips (WallStreet Journal)

Records Show Pentagon Aides Who Chaperone Overseas Excursions Spend Thousands of Dollars to Foster Ties to Lawmakers

Instead, the records shed light for the first time on how the military exploits its official escort role on these trips to foster relationships with lawmakers who approve departmental budgets and top appointments. The disclosures also underscore the military's pervasive pursuit of congressional access. Indeed, the military aides who accompany lawmakers overseas are usually the same people who lobby Congress at home; their offices are in buildings shared with lawmakers.

Haiti Earthquake — See Also Brazil Soliders Handing Out Food

UGLY

Soldiers Told To Stop Handing Out Food (USA Today)

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Food handouts were shut off Tuesday to thousands of people at a tent city here when the main U.S. aid agency said the Army should not be distributing the packages.

“We are not supposed to get rations unless approved by AID,” Maj. Larry Jordan said.

Jordan said that approval was revoked; water was not included in the USAID decision, so the troops continued to hand out bottles of water. The State Department and USAID did not respond to requests for comment.

Phi Beta Iota: It will be interesting to see at what point ANYONE in the US military chain of command realizes that AID has issued an illegal order that should not only be ignored, it should be reported to the President via the chain of command.

Category: Military

Journal: Mel Goodman on CIA Myths

CIA and Intelligence Community Mythologies