Category: Communities of Practice

Posted on

Journal: Al Qaeda, Yemen, Somalia, and USG

08 Wild Cards, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Peace Intelligence
Berto Jongman Recommends...

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

Full Story Online

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.

See also:

Continue reading “Journal: Al Qaeda, Yemen, Somalia, and USG”

Posted on

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.

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.

Posted on

Reference: BGen McMaster at ODNI on Afghanistan

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Memoranda, Military, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Memo corrected to remove (Ret).  BGen McMaster was promoted to his present rank on 29 June 2009 after being twice passed over (2006, 2007), presumably for having the integrity to be outspoken.  He is the author of the widely-admired book Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

Nine key factors are examined by BGen McMaster in his talk to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).  Answers question on why we were so unprepared.  Final paragraph of trip report:

Can’t get much from a database and IT networks, but contractors keep pushing and we keep buying.   But what really need is experts from anywhere, context, and also need to ask the soldiers!  Make Phebe Marr a general!  Also pay attention to: Charles Tripp, R. Kadeiri, Sarah Chayes, Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid, Michael Howard, Frontline piece on Children of the Taliban, Fariad Ali Han on borders.  Educate analysts (and self-educate) on the place, don’t waste time training them on the process.

Posted on

Journal: What Voters Want

10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Civil Society, Reform
Webster Griffin Tarpley

In a depression, voters want populism.  If they can find potent New Deal economic populism, they will vote for it every time, as US elections between 1932 and 1944 show without a shadow of a doubt.  But if they do not find economic populism, they can easily fall prey to the cynical demagogy of cultural populism.  That is what has happened in Massachusetts.

The only way to be an economic populist is the shift the cost of the world economic depression and the tax burden generally onto Wall Street financial interests, that is to say onto the malefactors of great wealth who created this crisis in the first place.  That is the recipe for winning elections in a depression.

Most Democrats appear to be too far gone on the road to plutocracy to learn that lesson.  It therefore may well be time to create a new party to represent the one major political current in American life which is not represented by either of the two big parties of the day.  In other words, we desperately need, one way or another, a New Deal economic populist party to lead this country and much of the world out of the world economic depression.

Posted on

Journal: Intelligence Priority Theater, Weak Strategy

08 Wild Cards, Ethics, Government, Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Military, Reform

China Removed As Top Priority For Spies

The decision downgrades China from “Priority 1” status, alongside Iran and North Korea, to “Priority 2,” which covers specific events such as the humanitarian crisis after the Haitian earthquake or tensions between India and Pakistan.

One new area that has been given a higher intelligence priority under the Obama administration is intelligence collection on climate change, a nontraditional mission marginally linked to national security. The CIA recently announced that it had set up a center to study the impact of climate change.

Phi Beta Iota: The priorities are primarily influential on collection by the National Security Agency (NSA), determining whether the “system” stays on Beijing or goes to Central Asia instead, and this is probably the heart of the matter.  HOWEVER, in combination with the DoD concerns that CIA is totally ineffective with respect to China, Afghanistan, or anything else of immediate concern (e.g. Somalia, Sudan, Yemen), and the idiocy of creating a Climate Change Center rather than restructuring to attack all ten high-level threats to humanity, this latest “theater” must be labeled for what it is–naked Emperors parading their very expensive rags.  CIA is an utter travesty in all respects.  The DNI is treading water for lack of vision, understanding, authority, and the will to confront “the system.”  DoD is not much better–paper-pushing stuffed shirts and politically-correct uniforms disconnected from ground truth and the real needs of policy directors, acquisition managers, and operational commanders down to the company level.  Not pretty at all.

See also:

Continue reading “Journal: Intelligence Priority Theater, Weak Strategy”

Posted on

Journal: Europe is Reading….

Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement
Berto Jongman Recommends...

Suggestions to improve American intelligence: think as a brain

What’s wrong with American intelligence?

In sum, the thinking goes, we need to gather more information, then work harder to connect the dots.

Those impulses are understandable, but they miss the most important problem. From studying many individual cases, and conducting detailed post-mortems of US intelligence failures in the cases of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, I have found that many common assumptions about why our intelligence fails are misguided.

Open Source On the Table

The problems with our intelligence system aren’t primarily problems with information. They are problems with how we think.

Interpol Project White Flow!!!!  convergence of drug trtade and terrorism (Skip Blank Screen Upper Right)

(Associated Press Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) LYON, France_Interpol has seen no proof so far that terror groups like al-Qaida are profiting from big-money ransoms paid out to pirates operating off eastern Africa, the international police group's No. 2 said Tuesday.

Jean-Michel Louboutin spoke to The Associated Press as Interpol opened a closed-door, two-day conference at its Lyon headquarters on tackling the money trail in piracy.

Interpol will create a task force to crack down on maritime piracy “in all its facets,” said Interpol Secretary-General Ronald K. Noble in a statement Tuesday. It did not elaborate.