Communities of Practice – Page 1319 – Public Intelligence Blog

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Berlin, Germany 2010

In 2010 Interdependence Day will be celebrated in a dynamic global city and cultural melting pot at the heart of Europe.

> INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

In a world where global interdependence is not simply an aspiration of idealists, but a brute fact of the forces that bind us together— global warming, financial capital, AIDS, telecommunications, crime, migration, and terrorism—many people still think in narrow, insular terms.

Reality is global, but consciousness too often remains local — constrained by town and nation.

In the year 2000, a small group of scholars, civic and political leaders, and artists from a dozen nations met to design a program that might help raise consciousness around the realities and possibilities of interdependence. Their efforts were given impetus by the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and the group created a project that would:

> Make September 12, the day following the memorial of 9/11, an international celebration of interdependence “Interdependence Day”

> Draw up a “Declaration of Interdependence”, making clear that both liberty and security require cooperation among peoples and nations and can no longer be secured by sovereign nations working unilaterally;

> Develop a Civic Interdependence Curriculum that would make interdependence a central concept in Civics and Social Studies programs in middle and high schools in as many schools around the world as possible.

2010/07/30

US, NATO Allies Prepare New Invasion Of Somalia

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Immigration, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Military

The 15th biennial African Union summit in Kampala, Uganda ended on July 27 with mixed results regarding support for U.S. and Western European plans to escalate foreign military intervention in nearby Somalia.

The 35 heads of state present at the three-day meeting were reported to have authorized the deployment of 2,000 more African troops to back up the beleaguered Western-backed Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Mogadishu and to bring the full complement of forces doing so to 8,000, but the new contingent will probably consist solely of troops from Uganda and Burundi, which supply the approximately 6,000 already serving with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). Reports of another 2,000 reinforcements from Djibouti and Guinea are problematic and their deployment remains to be seen, not that pressure will not be exerted on those two nations and others from outside the continent.

AMISOM is the successor to the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) Peace Support Mission in Somalia (IGASOM) set up in 2005 by the six-member group which includes Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda and which also was to have provided 8,000 troops for deployment to Somalia. The 53 members of the African Union except for Uganda and Burundi have been loath to commit military units to intervene in fighting in Somalia, whether against the Islamic Courts Union five years ago or against al-Shabaab insurgents currently.

In late 2006 U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Ugandan Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa to plan the earlier IGASOM operation and in January of 2007 Uganda pledged its first troops which, along with those included in a reported offer by Nigeria, were to total 8,000.

Three and a half years later, there are only 6,000 foreign troops in Somalia (now under AMISOM, the only difference being the acronym now employed) and all of those from Uganda and Burundi, both nations U.S. military clients and surrogates.

The African Union (AU) initially approved AMISOM on January 19, 2007 and granted it a six-month mandate. In July of 2010 the real prime movers behind the mission, the U.S. and its NATO allies in the European Union, are pushing for an escalation of armed intervention in Somalia with more Western-trained Ugandan troops conducting open combat operations: Changing the mandate from, to use the terms employed to mask military aggression, peacekeeping to peace enforcement. Continue reading “US, NATO Allies Prepare New Invasion Of Somalia”

2010/07/302010/08/16

Journal: Wikileaks Afghan Collection Assessed

02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Media, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends

Below is a good summary of the wikileaks database. It is also a good example of how the secretive conspiratorial mind, trained in the wilderness of mirrors that is the US intelligence establishment, conjures motivations out of the ether. The author builds a an inferential case to insinuate the massive leak of intelligence data via the wikileaks website was an orchestrated info-operation aimed at influencing the American polity by building the case for leaving Afghanistan. Left unsaid, but dangling tantalizingly in the last two paragraphs, is a subtle (and unsubstantiated) suggestion that this leak came from very high levels, perhaps the highest level, of the Obama Administration. Too clever by a half?????? Chuck

Thousands of reasons to leave

By George Friedman, Asia Times, 29 July 2010

On Sunday, The New York Times and two other newspapers published summaries and excerpts of tens of thousands of documents leaked to a website known as WikiLeaks. The documents comprise a vast array of material concerning the war in Afghanistan. They range from tactical reports from small unit operations to broader strategic analyses of politico-military relations between the United States and Pakistan. It appears to be an extraordinary collection.

Tactical intelligence on firefights is intermingled with reports on confrontations between senior US and Pakistani officials in which lists of Pakistani operatives in Afghanistan are handed over to the Pakistanis. Reports on the use of surface-to-air missiles by militants in Afghanistan are intermingled with reports on the activities of former Pakistani intelligence chief Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, who reportedly continues to liaise with the Afghan Taliban in an informal capacity.

FULL APPRAISAL ONLINE

2010/07/302010/07/30

Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud

09 Justice, Commerce, Corruption, Open Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

By Dave Levinthal on July 29, 2010

Charles Wyly Jr. and Samuel Wyly, Texas businessmen and brothers who are among the nation's most generous campaign donors to Republican political candidates and causes, were today hit with a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing them of fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The SEC accuses the Wylys of pocketing $550 million in undisclosed money over 13 years.

“The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws,” Lorin Reisner, the SEC’s deputy enforcement director, said in a statement this afternoon. “They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for corporate insiders.”

Beneficiaries of Wyly brothers cash together compose a who's who of the decade's most notable Republicans, with dozens of top GOP partisans' campaign coffers touched by Wyly money.

Together with their wives, the Wyly brothers have donated nearly $2.5 million to Republican candidates and committees during the past 20 years, a Center for Responsive Politics analysis reveals. Continue reading “Wyly Brothers, Top Republican Bankrollers, Accused of Massive Fraud”

2010/07/302010/07/30

Graphic: “The True Cost of Coal”

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 10 Security, 12 Water, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Graphics, Peace Intelligence, True Cost, True Cost

See the graphic and the process by the Beehive Design Collective

After two years of collaborative research, storysharing, metaphor crafting, and meticulous illustrating, the bees have completed an epic illustration about mountaintop removal coal mining.

See the graphic and process by the Beehive Design Collective

Related:
+ True Cost Meme
+ True Cost T-Shirt

2010/07/292010/07/30

Reference: Trafficking in Persons Report 2010

01 Poverty, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Immigration, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, Law Enforcement

cover trafficking — Home Page with Maps & Data

“The 10th annual Trafficking in Persons Report outlines the continuing challenges across the globe, including in the United States. The Report, for the first time, includes a ranking of the United States based on the same standards to which we hold other countries. The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America. This human rights abuse is universal, and no one should claim immunity from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.”

Phi Beta Iota: The Department of State has so much potential, if they could just get a grip on the fact that the only thing standing between them and owning the Open Source Center with the Multinational Decision-Support Centre embedded, is the fact that her gate-keepers are blocking every piece of paper on this 9-11 Commission recommended new agency because CIA “claims” it and no one at State is willing to stand up to them. Human trafficking, like other kinds of smuggling including narcotics and arms and blood diamonds, cannot be addressed in stove-pipes. It can be represented by stove-pipes, but the collection and analysis must be REGIONAL. Neither CIA nor any other part of the US get that yet–the Joint Intelligence Centers at the theaters are travesties, just look at the travesty of USSOUTHCOM pretending to help Haiti. The Nordics and the Netherlands have it right–Multinational, Multifunctional Information-Sharing and Sense-Making Centres is the only way to go–Centres that do both the all-source integrated processing the secret world cannot do, and do not lose sight of the human factor working in 183 languages the US secret world, at least, does not speak.

See Also:

Graphic: President and Humanity

Graphic: Whole of Government Intelligence

Graphic: Intelligence Maturity Scale Continue reading “Reference: Trafficking in Persons Report 2010”

2010/07/292010/07/29

Bringing Martin Luther King to China (and back)

01 Poverty, 02 China, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

Gandhi’s movement for non-violent social change challenged America. Can Martin Luther King, Jr. do the same for China?

Bringing King to China is a documentary film about culture, race and human rights. The film takes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of equality and peace to China—and then brings it back to the U.S. It's the story of a young American teacher in Beijing, whose failed protests against the Iraq war inspire her to produce a play in Chinese about Martin Luther King, Jr. Her journey begins after worldwide demonstrations fail to stop the invasion of Iraq and she learns (mistakenly) that her father, an ABC journalist covering the war, has been killed by a suicide bomber.

Video Trailer

Continue reading “Bringing Martin Luther King to China (and back)”

Category: Communities of Practice

Event: 10-12 Sept 2010, Berlin, Interdependence Day