Category: Communities of Practice

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Journal: Suicide Bomber–CIA Cluster a Gift from God

08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, Government

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Bomber Called C.I.A. Target Gift From God

By SCOTT SHANE February 28, 2010

In a posthumously released video message, the suicide bomber who killed seven C.I.A. employees on Dec. 30 said that his original target had been his handler from Jordanian intelligence, and that an invitation to meet C.I.A. officers at a remote base in Afghanistan had been an unexpected boon.

“We planned for something but got a bigger gift, a gift from Allah, who brought us, through his accompaniment, a valuable prey: Americans, and from the C.I.A.,” said the bomber, Humam Khalil Abu Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian physician who carried out the attack, in a 44-minute video posted on extremist Web sites Sunday.

FOR THE RECORD: Director Panetta has either not seen (because his staff filters his incoming) or has ignored direct offers of help, including one faxed to every seventh floor fax around his personal office.

Phi Beta Iota: CIA Director Leon Panetta is in way over his head, he's not even useful to the President, much less anyone else.  He has been deceived by his own people and has no idea how many sordid details of incompetence and plain misrepresentation are being withheld from him.  CIA has too many complacent over-promoted people who don't speak a foreign language, don't really understand foreign cultures, and have gotten by for decades on scraps from the table of foreign liaison and the tried and true practice of pretending that anyone who will take money is a valuable asset–all the while ignoring open sources and keeping the analysts locked in a closet far removed from reality.  His whining about public and professional observations of “poor tradecraft” inspired a riposte on “poor management.”  A careful examination of the individuals who died would have shown that only two of them should have been there at all, the Jordanian and one case officer–analysts, especially materal women with no field or combat experience, have no business being on the front lines.  By the by, has anyone introduced secure video teleconferencing to the process of analyst-asset interaction?  CIA is once again playing the numbers game, pretending that warm bodies and mediocre meaningless reports add up to “presence.”   Slow burn, once again.

See also:

Journal: Washington Post Explains CIA Suicide in AF

Journal: CIA as Poster Child For Dull US Intelligence

Journal: CIA’s Poor Tradecraft AND Poor Management

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Journal: False Consciousness, False Government?

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Policies
Chuck Spinney

My good friend Werther has been beavering away again in the US manure pile and this time has resurrected Engels' theory of False Consciousness to help explain the mismatch between ideology and reality that has become enshrined in contemporary American political psychology.

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False Consciousness

By Werther*

“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers.”

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

EXTRACTS:

Or so the conventional wisdom.

Barry Lynn of the New America Foundation has written an interesting refutation of that widely held notion. [1] He asserts that the last 30 years' of so-called free market doctrine have not aided, but rather retarded the cause of small business. Intriguingly, he cites, but does not expand upon, the following finding: “One recent study, based on data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, placed the United States second to last out of 22 rich nations in the percentage of workers who run their own businesses. Only Luxembourg ranked lower.”   . . .

Lynn argues that a key inflection point in government policy towards small business came in 1981, when the Reagan administration essentially stopped enforcing anti-monopoly and small business-protection statutes.

Phi Beta Iota: Reagan, whom we generally admired, also busted labor with his unconstitutional use of the military to break the air-traffic controller strike.  We ureg one an all to read the entire Op Ed and the three linked references.  American anti-intellectualism and American delusion are cresting at precisely the time we need ground-truth, truth at any cost.

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Journal: Is US Destabilizing Baluchistan to Take Over Gwadar Port? Is the Terrorist Iran Just Captured a CIA Asset? Is China Going to Sit Still?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Military, Strategy
Webster Griffin Tarpley

The Battle for Baluchistan: Iran Nabs Top NATO Terrorist with Help from Pakistan

February 25, 2010

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.

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Journal: Cuba Makes Its Move–Hasta La Vista OAS?

07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Strategy
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There is no reason why Latin America and the Caribbean should not have their own body of political consensus

Boys on the Beach

Speech by General of the Army Raúl Castro Ruz, president of the Councils of State and Ministers, at the plenary session of the Summit of Latin America and Caribbean Unity, February 23, 2010

The decision that we have just adopted to create the Community pf Latin American and Caribbean States is of great historical significance.

Cuba considers that the conditions are present to rapidly advance toward the constitution of a purely Latin American and Caribbean regional organization, comprising and representing the 33 independent nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Continue reading “Journal: Cuba Makes Its Move–Hasta La Vista OAS?”

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Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Peace Intelligence
Marcus Aurelius

Hurdles Stymie Counterterrorism Center

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER, The New York Times (Syndicated)

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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.

. . . . . . .

Continue reading “Journal: US Counterterrorism Hosed, EOP/OMB AWOL”

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Journal: Individual Dignity & Collective Defense

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, Civil Society, Law Enforcement, Mobile, Tools

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Google execs convicted in Italy for Down syndrome video

MILAN (Reuters) – A Milan court convicted three Google Inc executives on Wednesday for violating the privacy of an Italian boy with Down's syndrome by letting a video of him being bullied be posted on the site in 2006.

Phi Beta Iota: The Italians made a mistake.  Instead of using the video to aggressively convict the bullies of the Down's syndrome boy, they are shooting the messenger.  This is just as ignorant and ill-advised as the police trying to criminalize Twitter  texts and cell phone video of police brutality.  The right of the people to bear witness cannot be undermined by the courts, IOHO.

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Journal: Multi-Lingual Social Networking, Arabic First

04 Inter-State Conflict, 08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Technologies, Tools
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Site Hopes Automatic Arabic-English Translation Translates into Peace

A new site hopes the seemingly simple idea of eliminating the language barrier, letting you write in English and be read in Arabic — and vice versa — will cultivate citizen diplomacy between the Middle East and the West. It aims to reduce tensions at the grassroots level between two cultures that increasingly co-exist but seem a world apart.

Meedan, which officially launches Monday, lets users post stories and comments in English and have them automatically translated into Arabic, or the opposite. People who don’t share a common language can have an online discussion in near real time. The name, appropriately, means “gathering place” or “town hall” in Arabic.

Think of it as a social network filled with people you don’t know, but want to understand.

Phi Beta Iota: This is righteous, but as Howard Bloom addresses in Global Brain, it will taqke 50 years and it will not achieve the intended result until the children who START with this are adults in power.  In the meantime, the adults in power who are both digitally and ideologically impaired, will continue to favor war to profit the few over peace to provide prosperity to the many.