Julie Dermansky – Julie Dermansky is a multimedia reporter and artist based in New Orleans. She is an affiliate scholar at Rutgers University's Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights. Visit her website at www.jsdart.com.
The Atlantic, 27 September 2011
They're calling it America's answer to the Arab Spring. In July, the anti-capitalist magazine Adbusters urged readers to “flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there,” it continued, “we shall incessantly repeat our one simple demand until Barack Obama capitulates.”
Click on Image to Enlarge
As planned, thousands began gathering on September 17, but 10 days into their demonstration, it's not entirely clear what that “one simple demand” might be. Many of the hand-scrawled signs lash out against corporations. But as the days go by, new issues emerge. The execution of Georgia prisoner Troy Davis four days into the protest made the death penalty into a central theme. And the NYPD has become a major target for rage, especially after Saturday's reports that a police officer (improbably named Anthony Bologna) had aimed pepper spray at a protester's face.
Photographer Julie Dermansky, who covered the protests in Tahrir Square, headed to New York after seeing videos of the Wall Street demonstrations on Facebook. These photos capture some of the scenes she encountered yesterday.
Joshua Foust – Joshua Foust is a fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net.
The Atlantic, 20 September 2011
This morning I testified at the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs' Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia (a mouthful, I know) about how we can better manage and administer contractors within the intelligence community. I'm pasting a brief excerpt of my written testimony below, followed by a link to the full text of my remarks.
Every contract the government issues for a company to perform work is defined by the Statement of Work (SOW). This is a document that defines the parameters of the work the contractor will perform, including a description of the project, expected duties the contractor must fulfill, and the outputs and metrics by which performance will be measured. These are often poorly written, kept intentionally vague, and wind up not actually addressing the stated intent of the contracts.
As one example, every SOW I've had to either administer, edit, review, or write has stated as a basic metric of performance the number of employees the contractor should hire. That is, the basic means by which the government measures the contractor's performance is based first and foremost on the number of people hired to work on the contract. This has two serious consequences that affect the contracting environment: it removes the distinction between employees that would make work products better, and it confuses the number of employees with contract performance.
The frankly bizarre system of hiring intelligence contractors is born from several interdependent processes: getting a security clearance, getting hired, and getting “read on” to work at a government site. The system of getting a clearance is structured such that those with clearances are given preference above those without clearance, regardless of the relevant experience of either employee. In other words, if two candidates are competing for a job with a contractor, and one has deep relevant experience but no clearance, she will most likely lose to a candidate with less relevant experience but a current and active security clearance.
There is a great deal more to this, and I would suggest anyone interested in this topic to download both my own testimony (At SCRIBD, or PDF here), and checking out the Hearing page, which includes written remarks from Daniel Gordon from the Office of Management and Budget, DHS Chief of Intelligence Charles E. Allen, Scott Amey from the Project on Government Oversight, and Dr. Mark Lowenthal.
Five miles southeast of the gleaming Capitol dome, on a scenic bluff overlooking the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the future office of the secretary of Homeland Security sits boarded up and abandoned.
Four years ago, U.S. officials announced plans to renovate the dilapidated, castle-like structure —opened in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane — to anchor Washington’s largest construction project since the Pentagon was built 70 years ago.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The goal was to unite on a single campus the 22 agencies that were stitched together to form the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
But the $3.4-billion headquarters project stalled as Congress tried to cut the federal deficit.
Phi Beta Iota: There is no evidence that in the meantime, the CIA is using the facility as a secret prison for US citizen dissidents. As clear as it is to the public that DHS needs to be eliminated immediately, DHS has clearly not gotten the memorandum. We believe there will be a one-third cut in federal funding and federal employment beginning in 2012. The current leadership of the two parties, of Congress, and of the Executive appears to be grotesquely out of touch with reality, out of control, and operating completely against the public interest.
Monday 26 September 2011
by: Ron Boyer, Truthout | Interview
EXTRACT:
A few years later, with the nation plunged into what appears to be a sequel to the Great Depression and another presidential campaign season taking shape, signs of mass populist resistance to the global dominance of the robber-baron class are widely in evidence, both here and abroad. In this exclusive Truthout interview, the October2011 Coalition co-founder and physician Margaret Flowers discusses the conditions that helped bring this emerging movement of citizen activists into being and outlines the key differences between October2011's mission and that of superficially similar emerging “movements” such as Van Jones' Rebuild the Dream.
SOMETIMES, attention should be paid to the absence of news. America’s economic miseries continue, with unemployment still high and home sales stagnant or dropping. The gap between the wealthiest Americans and their fellow citizens is wider than it has been since the 1920s.
President Obama's craven performance at the UN has both humiliated the United States and made a mockery of what little remains of America's pretensions to the principles of freedom, democracy, fair play, and simple human decency. Like Colin Powell, he made the wrong turn at the “to be” or “to do” fork in the road; he put career and short-term ambition ahead of common sense and personal honor; and ironically, he made the same faustian bargain publicly on the same world stage for all to see. For a men of such great promise to stumble so miserably is not only a personal tragedy of Shakespearian proportions: their pusillanimity under pressure opens the door to unpredictable grand strategic* ramifications that menace the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people at home and abroad.
Below is one thoughtful observer's exploration of some of these ramifications; there will be other assessments … and very few of them will be pretty.
At least LBJ, who tried to do some things, recognized when his time was over, and left gracefully. But in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac at the dawn of the 21st Century, that won't happen again, and Mr. Obama's ultimate disgrace will be to prove that the easy being was far more important than the hard doing when engineering the moral and material decline of a nation.
________
* The criteria underpinning a sensible grand strategy are explained here.
[CS Note: I reformatted this insightful essay to highlight important points, but did not change any text or the order of presentation]
BOSTON — It remains to be seen what actually changes on the ground in the months ahead following the Palestinian initiative to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state in the 1967 Israeli-occupied territories as a UN member or observer state. The move could be a substantive gain for the Palestinian people, a symbolic victory only, or a measurable setback if the United States and Israel translate their vindictive rhetoric into hard policies. While we wait for the impact of the UN move to become clearer, we should acknowledge nevertheless that this has been a historic week in several ways.
I.The most important new development that future historians will record is that this last week in September represented the moment when the Arab-Israeli conflict structurally transformed into the Arab-Israeli/American conflict, because of the profound and explicit manner in which the U.S. government has come down on the side of Israel. The United States historically has tried, without much success but with visible endeavor nevertheless, to express its support for Israel’s survival and security while also trying to mediate a resolution of the conflict that sees the birth of a Palestinian state in much of the 1967 occupied lands. That balancing act, unconvincing as it was, is formally dead for now — repeatedly shot in the heart by a firing squad of American politicians who have unleashed volleys of shotguns at the weak and doomed phenomenon that was once called “American mediation”.
Brian Kelley, 68, a CIA counterintelligence officer who was falsely accused of being a Russian mole in an espionage case that ended in the arrest of perhaps the nation’s most damaging turncoat, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, died Sept. 19 at his home in Vienna.
The Brennan Center for Justice will sponsor a panel discussion October 5 at the National Press Club in Washington DC on overclassification and “Curbing Needless Secrecy” to accompany the release of a new report on the subject. Participants include former Rep. Christopher Shays, former ISOO director J. William Leonard, former NRO director and chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board Martin C. Faga, and Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center.
