Communities of Practice – Page 939 – Public Intelligence Blog

By Paul Wolfowitz no less. Worth a full read, with two comments from readers also included.

Paul Wolfowitz | October 31, 2012, 9:19 am

It is hard to understand why Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, in discussing the US response to the attacks on two US facilities in Benghazi, Libya, offered this novel principle as a guide for US action – or inaction – during that crisis: “A basic principle is you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on.”

Of course, no such “basic principle” governs the conduct of US military personnel in Afghanistan and elsewhere, who regularly go “into harm’s way” without “knowing what’s going on,” particularly when they know that American lives are in danger.

Panetta’s comment made it inevitable that people would question – as I did myself – President Obama’s claim that “The minute I found out what was happening . . . I gave the directive to make sure we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to do. I guarantee you everybody in the CIA and military knew the number-one priority was making sure our people are safe.” If that was true, did Panetta’s comment mean that the military was disregarding a clear instruction from the president?

Continue reading “DefDog: Benghazi Round-Up Plus Meta-RECAP”

2012/11/022012/11/02

Mini-Me: WIll De-Classified Watergate Archives Document CIA Orders to Murder US Citizens Including Jack Anderson, and CIA Break-Ins Within the USA?

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government

Huh?

Judge Orders DOJ to Justify Secrecy of Watergate-era Wiretaps

The BLT Blog of Legal Times, November 02, 2012

A federal judge in Washington today ordered the U.S. Justice Department to justify the continued need for secrecy over certain Watergate-era wiretap and grand jury records that remain sealed in a high-profile criminal prosecution.

Chief Judge Royce Lamberth of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia told the government to send him copies of documents placed under seal in the criminal case against G. Gordon Liddy, charged in connection with the burglary at the Watergate Hotel in Washington. The sealed records include grand jury information and “documents reflecting the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.”

Government lawyers oppose the public disclosure of any papers about illegally obtained wiretaps tied to the Watergate scandal. The Justice Department this summer, in response to a demand for those records, argued there's no First Amendment or public right of access to illegally obtained wiretaps. Historical or scholarly interest, the government said, doesn't justify discretionary disclosure.

DOJ lawyers said in their brief to Lamberth that “we are unaware of any court that has unsealed previously undisclosed illegal wiretap content for reasons for historical interest.”

Lamberth's ruling today was issued in a case in which a historian of the presidency of Richard Nixon requested access to court documents that were sealed in the Liddy case in Washington's federal trial court. Liddy was convicted in 1973 on charges that included burglary and conspiracy rooted in the Watergate Hotel break-in.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: WIll De-Classified Watergate Archives Document CIA Orders to Murder US Citizens Including Jack Anderson, and CIA Break-Ins Within the USA?”

2012/11/02

NIGHTWATCH: Syria & Libya Update – US Poor Judgment Faulty Intelligence on Multiple Levels

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, Military

ME NA Enhanced — Click on Image to Enlarge

Syria-US: US can no longer support the Syrian National Council (SNC) as the “visible leader” of opposition forces. US Secretary of State Clinton and other U.S. officials reportedly are fed up with infighting among the SNC leaders and have become convinced that the group does not represent the interests of all ethnic and religious groups in Syria. Ms. Clinton said there is a need for an official opposition umbrella which rejects “efforts by extremists to hijack the Syrian revolution.

Comment: More than 18 months into a rebellion of sorts, this is an astonishing admission of poor judgment and faulty political intelligence on multiple levels. It seems to have taken a year and a half for the US government to appreciate that the Syrian expatriates have no influence over the fighting in Syria. No fighting groups respond to their direction. No fighting groups depend on their dispensation of American funds.

Spokesmen for various Syrian fighting groups have been denouncing the expatriate politicians and the SNC as venal and out of touch for 18 months, openly and sometimes bitterly. The SNC has experienced repeated desertions by its most capable leaders, who also denounced its feckless venality.

The fighting will not stop in Syria because the SNC gets cut off. Even were the Free Syrian Army, which operates in Syria as one of many fighting groups, to lose its funding and supplies, fighting would continue because the rebellion appears to have been hijacked by the jihadists. They do not rely on the West or the US for support, though they will purloin it if given the opportunity.

Libya: Update. On 1 November, about 100 Libyan fighters have circled and occupied the Libyan national assembly to protest the new cabinet lineup.

Comment: Judging from the large number of documents about security in Benghazi that have been leaked or found in Benghazi, the cabinet in Tripoli does not govern Libya beyond parts of Tripoli. The fragmentation of the state actually worsened with the killing of Qadhafi.

If the news and leaked reports may be trusted, Libya has become a political fiction, like Somalia. Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, is an al Qaida base, training location and arms depot for jihadists in Syria and Mali. The rest of Libya is a mélange of competing tribal territories. Libya seems to have devolved as a nation-state – gone backwards.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

2012/11/01

DefDog: CIA offers detailed account of attack in Libya

DoD, Government

CIA rushed to save diplomats as Libya attack was underway

Greg Miller

Washington Post, 1 November 2012

The CIA rushed security operatives to an American diplomatic compound in Libya within 25 minutes after it had come under attack and played a more central role in the effort to fend off a night-long siege than has been publicly acknowledged, U.S. intelligence officials said Thursday.

The agency mobilized the evacuation effort, took control of an unarmed U.S. military drone to map possible escape routes, dispatched an emergency security team from Tripoli, the capital, and chartered aircraft that ultimately carried surviving U.S. personnel to safety on Sept. 12, U.S. officials said.

. . . . . . .

Instead, U.S. intelligence officials insisted that CIA operatives in Benghazi and Tripoli made decisions rapidly throughout the assault with no interference from Washington, even while acknowledging that CIA security forces were badly outmatched and largely unable to mobilize Libyan security teams until it was too late.

Among the new disclosures is that the CIA station chief in Tripoli sent an emergency security force, with about a half-dozen agency operatives as well as two U.S. military personnel, to Benghazi aboard a hastily chartered aircraft while the attack was underway.

Read full article.

Continue reading “DefDog: CIA offers detailed account of attack in Libya”

2012/11/012012/11/04

Winslow Wheeler: Romney’s Unrealistic Defense Budget with Comment by Robert Steele

Ethics, Military

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Romney's defense budget is unrealistic

By Winslow T. Wheeler, director, Straus Military Reform Project at the Project On Government Oversight – 11/01/12 10:45 AM ET

Mitt Romney's proposal to boost defense spending until it reaches “a floor of four percent of GDP [gross domestic product],” as he proclaims at his official website, is an insult to history.

This graph [below] shows how unprecedented it is. It tracks spending for the Department of Defense (DOD) from 1948 to 2022, expressed in inflation-adjusted dollars normalized to 2012. The data up to 2012 are actual spending. The data for the years after 2012 show Romney's plan (in red), President Obama's (in blue), and the spending to be imposed by sequestration (in green) – the result of the Budget Control Act's automatic reductions now scheduled for January 2, 2013.

winslow graph — Click on Image to Enlarge

The Romney Plan shown assumes a gradual build up to his four percent goal, as calculated by Travis Sharp at the Center for a New American Security. Compared to other calculations of Romney’s declared intent, it is one of the more modest. The data for the Obama plan are from his 2013 budget, and the data for sequestration is from the Congressional Budget Office. In each, money has been included to accommodate a rapid drawdown from Afghanistan: all three data lines assume the Obama budget for overseas contingencies in 2013, $88.5 billion; an arbitrary assumption of $50 billion for 2014, $25 billion for 2015, and nothing after that. In other words, the spending levels shown are about as low as one might conceive.

Romney’s plan would boost the Pentagon’s budget more or less $300 billion above the previous post-World War Two highs, namely the Korea and Vietnam wars and the Reagan Cold War peak, and it would more than double the average amount of DOD spending during the Cold War: $440 billion compared to $900 billion.

Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Romney's Unrealistic Defense Budget with Comment by Robert Steele”

2012/11/012012/11/01

GI Wilson: American Thinker on US Arms Smuggling into Syria as Root of Benghazi Attack + Libya / Syria / Video Meta-RECAP

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

Benghazi Reveals Obama-Islamist Alliance

By James Lewis

American Thinker, November 1, 2012

The nature of the Benghazi disaster is now clear. Ambassador Stevens was engaged in smuggling sizable quantities of Libyan arms from the destroyed Gaddafi regime to the Syrian rebels, to help overthrow the Assad regime in Syria. Smuggling arms to the so-called “Free Syrian Army” is itself a huge gamble, but Obama has been a gambler with human lives over the last four years, as shown by the tens of thousands of Arabs who have died in the so-called Arab Spring — which has brought nothing but disaster to the Arab world.

For the last four years, the Obama policy has been to offer aid and comfort violent Islamic radicals in the delusional belief that their loyalty can be bought. We therefore betrayed Hosni Mubarak, our 30-year ally in Egypt, so that the Muslim Brotherhood led by Muhammed Morsi could take over. Obama indeed demanded publicly that Mubarak resign, for reasons that never made any sense at all. Egypt went into a political and economic tailspin, and the Muslim Brotherhood were elected. The Muslim radicals have now purged the only other viable political force, the army and police, to protect their monopoly on power. We have colluded in that betrayal.

Continue reading “GI Wilson: American Thinker on US Arms Smuggling into Syria as Root of Benghazi Attack + Libya / Syria / Video Meta-RECAP”

2012/10/292012/10/29