The Bay of Pigs’ unfinished battle

By George F. Will, Published: September 13

At 4 a.m. on Jan. 1, 1959, an hour when there were never commercial flights from Havana, David Atlee Phillips was lounging in a lawn chair there, sipping champagne after a New Year’s Eve party, when a commercial aircraft flew low over his house. He surmised that dictator Fulgencio Batista was fleeing because Fidel Castro was arriving. He was right. Soon he, and many others, would be spectacularly wrong about Cuba.

According to Jim Rasenberger’s history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, “The Brilliant Disaster,” Phillips was “a handsome 37-year-old former stage actor” who “had been something of a dilettante before joining the CIA.” There, however, he was an expert. And in April 1960, he assured Richard Bissell, the CIA’s invasion mastermind, that within six months radio propaganda would produce “the proper psychological climate” for the invasion to trigger a mass Cuban uprising against Castro.

The invasion brigade had only about 1,400 members but began its members’ serial numbers at 2,500 to trick Castro into thinking it was larger. Castro’s 32,000-man army was supplemented by 200,000 to 300,000 militia members. U.S. intelligence was ignorant of everything from Castro’s capabilities to Cuba’s geography to Cubans’ psychology.

Fifty-two years and many misadventures later, the invasion still fascinates as, in historian Theodore Draper’s description, “one of those rare events in history — a perfect failure.” It had a perverse fecundity.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: George Will on Bay of Pigs — the Unfinished Battle”

2013/09/16

Paul Craig Roberts: Police Are More Dangerous To The Public Than Are Criminals?

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement

Police Are More Dangerous To The Public Than Are Criminals

The goon thug psychopaths no longer only brutalize minorities–it is open season on all of us –the latest victim is a petite young white mother of two small children

Paul Craig Roberts

The worse threat every American faces comes from his/her own government.

Full article below the line.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: Police Are More Dangerous To The Public Than Are Criminals?”

2013/09/162013/09/16

Chuck Spinney: Andrew Bacevich on David Brooks of the NYT “Always Wrong”

Corruption, Idiocy, Media

This superb piece by Andrew Bacevich (Colonel US Army Ret.) is one the best portraits of what is wrong with self-important warmongering commentariat in the mainstream media: Track records count for nothing in the cozy salons of Versailles on the Potomac.

SUNDAY, SEP 15, 2013 3:30 PM UTC

David Brooks is constantly wrong

Takes a lot to be the voice on the New York Times op-ed page most consistently wrong about war in the Middle East!

BY ANDREW J. BACEVICH, Salon

Full article below the line.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Andrew Bacevich on David Brooks of the NYT “Always Wrong””

2013/09/152013/09/15

Eagle: Cantaloupe vs. al-Qaeda: What’s More Dangerous? (Hint: In 2011, 17 Americans Killed by Terrorists, 33 Killed by a SINGLE Cantelope)

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Idiocy, Law Enforcement, Military

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

One of the most important revelations from the international drama over Edward Snowden's NSA leaks in May is the exposure of a nearly lunatic disproportion in threat assessment and spending by the US government. This disproportion has been spawned by a fear-based politics of terror that mandates unlimited money and media attention for even the most tendentious terrorism threats, while lethal domestic risks such as contaminated food from our industrialized agribusiness system are all but ignored. A comparison of federal spending on food safety intelligence versus antiterrorism intelligence brings the irrationality of the threat assessment process into stark relief.

In 2011, the year of Osama bin Laden's death, the State Department reported that 17 Americans were killed in all terrorist incidents worldwide. The same year, a single outbreak of listeriosis from tainted cantaloupe killed 33 people in the United States. Foodborne pathogens also sickened 48.7 million, hospitalized 127,839 and caused a total of 3,037 deaths. This is a typical year, not an aberration.

Continue reading “Eagle: Cantaloupe vs. al-Qaeda: What's More Dangerous? (Hint: In 2011, 17 Americans Killed by Terrorists, 33 Killed by a SINGLE Cantelope)”

2013/09/142013/09/14

Stephen E. Arnold: Navy Project Pulls Military into the Nineties [Just 20 Years Behind State of the Art]

Ineptitude, IO Impotency, Military

Navy Project Pulls Military into the Nineties

September 13, 2013

Sometimes an initiative comes along that causes me to perk up and declare, “wait, you mean they weren’t doing that already?” That is my response to Slashdot‘s article, “Navy Version of ‘Expedia’ to Save DOD Millions.” I know, I should no longer be surprised by the gross inefficiency of large bureaucracies.

The set of bureaucracies that makes up our military, though, is taking a welcome step toward efficiency with this project being tested by the Office of Naval Research. The system would use “an Expedia-like” search to correlate freight and personnel travel needs with open slots worldwide. Writer Kevin Fogarty reports:

“The Transportation Exploitation Tool (TET) is a little more sophisticated than online-travel sites such as Expedia or Travelocity were in 1996: The system consolidates travel schedules and capacity reports for both military and civilian carriers to give logistics planners a choice of open spaces in ships, planes, trucks, trains or other means of travel, along with information about cost, estimated time of arrival and recommendations of the most efficient route. Previously, logistics planners trying to get an engine part to a Navy ship stranded in a foreign port, for example, might spend hours or days looking through separate databases to find a ship or plane able to carry the part that could deliver it within a limited window of time.”

Though it has taken our government seventeen years to take advantage of this technology, I suppose the fact that they finally are is worth celebrating. The TET system is part of the Logistics Information Technology(LogIT) project, which aims to combine information “from separate systems for travel planning, asset tagging, tracking, location, monitoring and analysis of travel options into a single interface.” Logic is a beautiful thing!

The article includes a few details about how the system will work, as well as expectations for the project’s impact. See the article for more information about this belated but important initiative.

Cynthia Murrell, September 13, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

2013/09/13

Steven Aftergood: POLICY RESPONSE TO INTELLIGENCE REVELATIONS LAGS

Ethics, Government

POLICY RESPONSE TO INTELLIGENCE REVELATIONS LAGS

The end of the government's fiscal year 2013 is just weeks away, but an intelligence authorization bill for fiscal year 2014 is nowhere in sight. In past years, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees typically reported intelligence bills in late spring or early summer for House-Senate conference and floor action later in the year. But this year, nothing.

On its homepage, the Senate Intelligence Committee website cites the Committee's report on the fiscal year 2012 intelligence bill under the heading “recent action.” But that report was issued in August 2011. (The Committee website also offers a current compilation of YouTube videos that appear to reflect the use of chemical weapons in Syria.)

Though 2013 has become the most momentous year for intelligence policy in a generation, the Senate Intelligence Committee has not held any public hearings since a March threat briefing, and none at all on surveillance policy. Americans seeking insight into the meaning of current intelligence controversies must look elsewhere.

Continue reading “Steven Aftergood: POLICY RESPONSE TO INTELLIGENCE REVELATIONS LAGS”

2013/09/132013/09/13

Open Mind: CIA PSYOP Against US Public – Labeling Truth-Seekers as “Conspiracy Theorists?”

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of War, Peace Intelligence

CIA Responsible For Labeling Honest Research Into Finding the Truth As “Conspiracy Theories”

Boy does this article by Foster Gamble fit on this blogsite. For more than 40 years anyone attempting to find out the truth about anything that the “controllers” wanted to keep secret, was labeled a “conspiracy theorist”. Of course, then, propaganda was used to discredit any “conspiracy theorist” so no one would take them seriously. Now, the CIA admits what many have known for a long time. There is also a good little video near the bottom of this article where Foster and Kimberly offer suggestions about how to talk to others about “conspiracy theories”.Tom

News Flash — CIA Invents “CONSPIRACY THEORY” Wed, 11 Sep 2013 By Foster Gamble

It is a little-known though well-documented fact that the origin of the campaign to ridicule research into conspiracies was initiated by the CIA in 1967 to undermine the credibility of those who questioned the official claims of the Warren Commission regarding the so-called facts of the Kennedy assassination. Given the challenge we and others feel when speaking out about conspiracies, I think Lance deHaven-Smith is right when, in his new book Conspiracy Theory, he suggests “the CIA’s [covert and illegal] campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited…with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time…”

Of course not all proclaimed conspiracies are true. There are competent conspiracy analysts and incompetent ones, just as there are skilled and shoddy reporters, historians or practitioners of any discipline.

Continue reading “Open Mind: CIA PSYOP Against US Public – Labeling Truth-Seekers as “Conspiracy Theorists?””