“But former senior CIA officer Robert Baer told ABC News this week that the loss of assets was more than a mere setback, and not an isolated incident but part of a disturbing pattern.
“When you lose your entire station, either in Tehran or Beirut, that's a catastrophe,” said Bob Baer, a legendary CIA agent whose Middle East exploits were fictionalized in the George Clooney film “Syriana.” Baer said the disaster was due in part to a new generation of agents that has forgotten, or never learned, the traditional methods of intelligence gathering.
“They don't understand tradecraft,” Baer said. “And we have lost our touch inespionage.”” (Emphasis mine)
US officials confessed on Tuesday that Iranian intelligence forces and Hezbollah have unraveled the CIA’s spy network in Iran and Lebanon and arrested dozens of informants, severely damaging the intelligence agency’s reputation and ability to gather vital information on the two countries at a sensitive time in the region.
A CIA-led program in the Middle East is up in the air after officials confirmed to news organizations today that paid informants in Iran and Lebanon working for the US government have disappeared while attempting to infiltrate Hezbollah.
Steele Sends: For DECADES I and others have been pointing out, in legal, ethical, public terms, the incapacity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across all fronts – clandestine operations, covert operations, analysis, administration, and what passes for management, which is merely a conventionally-dressed clown show. We have been called “lunatic fringe,” disgruntled, and worse. The fact of the matter is that I am probably more loyal to the Constitution and more loyal to the Republic and more loyal to the TRUE mission of US Intelligence than anyone now serving. CIA lives immunity, not cover, and that immunity is now over. CIA is incapable of conducting more than a handful of “denied area” clandestine operations, and they are now being confronted with the reality that the entire world is a denied area where they will be held accountable for being inept and where they might even be held accountable for crimes against humanity. Without intelligence and integrity, the US government is nothing more than a front for Congressional looting, and everyone now serving should be deeply ashamed of their role in perpetuating Versailles on the Potomac.
In Passing: I did not want to do a separate post on the reprehensible manner in which CIA is exploiting the death of Mike Spann in Afghanistan. He was totally unqualified to be doing what he was sent to do, and inept CIA managers sent him to his death. When you combine that with Khost Kathy, you get a better appreciation of the utter incompetence, arrogance, hubris, and general pasty-faced bloated psychopathology of CIA management, nowhere more ingained and out of control than in the Directorate of Operations. CIA never had a strong bench to begin with. Today they are, in my view, a danger to themselves and a danger to the Republic.
Footnote: Mike Spann's widow has been in dire financial straits in part because of the self-serving idiocy of CIA managers more interested in putting on a show hiding behind the flag, than in helping her remain employed and sustain her family.
2. Reverse the legalization of the corruption and crime in both banking and related industries (e.g. military-industrial complex.
3. Close loopholes that allow Congress to legally cheat the public at every turn by passing laws favoring their own investments.
Federal Government has federalized state and local law enforcement against its own citizens, and this endeavor is being run by NY Representative Peter King.
The “third rail” of the two-party tyranny has been exposed. A Civil War has begun, between the 99% and the 1%. With the exceptions of Kucinich and Paul Sr., Congress is with the 1%.
Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after clashes with police over the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images
The violent police assaults across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of our political class's venality
Naomi Wolf
The Guardian, 25 November 2012
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by phalanxes of riot police went viral online; images proliferated of young women – targeted seemingly for their gender – screaming, dragged by the hair by police in riot gear; and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
Phi Beta Iota: Occupy must focus on King and burn him (metaphorically speaking) out of office. Then it must read/listen to the Open Letter to Occupy /* and place its full attention on the Electoral Reform Summit that will take place, it now appears that event will occur in Washington DC is a very prominent place easily accessible to broadcast television networks. The lines are drawn. Congress has turned against its own people, publicly.
Economist Steve Keen is one of the few economists to have predicted the global financial crisis and now he says we are already in a Great Depression. He says the way to escape it is to bankrupt the banks, nationalise the financial system and pay off people's debt.
He admits what he is advocating is radical but says it is time governments gave money to debtors to pay down debt instead of to creditors such as banks who have held onto it.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”
Now compare Cordesman’s systematic, detailed, and workmanlike analysis to the bizarre obscurantism peddled one week later, on 22 November, co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings Institution) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (American Enterprise Institute) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled Defining Victory in Afghanistan.
O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz posit the bizarre thesis that the admittedly less than successful outcome against the FARC guerrillas in Columbia is a favorable model for justifying continuing business as usual in Afghanistan. Viewed through the refractions of their Columbian lens, O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz conclude, “Our current exit strategy of reducing American troops to 68,000 by the end of next summer and transferring full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014 is working. In a war where the U.S. has demonstrated remarkable strategic patience, we need to stay patient and resolute.”
Are O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz living on the same planet as Cordesman or do they live in some kind of parallel universe?
Syria is heading for a bloody sectarian civil war. The mutual kidnappings, torture, beheadings and displacement of populations taking place between the Sunni and Alawi communities in the central city of Homs — often described as “the capital of the revolution” — send a fearsome signal of what might be in store for the rest of the country.
To avert this descent into hell must surely be the immediate priority of Arab leaders and the international community.
The Iraqi example next door is there for all to see. The Anglo-American invasion destroyed a major Arab country. The country’s institutions and infrastructure were shattered; sectarian demons were released, triggering a civil war. Hundreds of thousands died and millions were displaced from their homes or forced to flee abroad. The country was dismembered as the Kurds established their own semi-independent statelet.
Syria needs the intervention of a high-powered, neutral, contact group to stop the killing on both sides.
Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week's dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner. The letter is without merit. The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft). DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to. Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead. It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale. As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem. The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years. The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990's.
