When David Petraeus got the job of CIA chief, he knew what job #1 was: find out everything he could about al-Qaida and its allies — and then assist in their removal from the land of living. Fourteen months and more than 110 drone strikes later, the breaking of al-Qaida’s core that began under Petraeus’ predecessors is almost complete. Yet a major chunk of the nation’s intelligence community remains singularly focused on terrorism.
It’s time to give that a rest, a former leader of the Central Intelligence Agency says — especially with Petraeus gone. There’s a whole world out there that needs to be snooped on.
Phi Beta Iota: Sorcha Fall is a discredited source still read in Europe that has a gift for connecting dots in strange ways that often make real sense. We do not believe that a coup was planned or that there was a serious plan to assassinate Romney and slip Petraeus in at the last minute. We do believe that across the senior ranks, both uniformed and civilian, there are such strong senses of entitlement, hubris, and immunity from accountability, such that the legitimacy and authority of the President and his designated senior civilian defense leader, have been called into question publicly and in a manner clearly prejudicial to good order and discipline. The US lacks a strong counterintelligence capability, but the one thing that could explain both the many officers being relieved, retired, or otherwise placed out of service, and the FBI's rather wide-ranging inspection of the emails of many flag officers, would be a legitimate concern on the part of the President that his military commanders could not be trusted. We also have the earlier case of US Navy Admirals, first Admiral Cosgriff and then Admiral Charles Gaouette, the first reported to be planning a false flag attack on Iran, the second relieved of command before he got past Guam enroute to Straits of Hormuz. Something is going on. It is not about bimbos but it will in passing flush the flags with personal indiscretions, as well as those who may be considered out of control or disloyal to a degree that mandates their relief or retirement.
I supported the all-volunteer force but I now recognize the wisdom of General Matthew Ridgeway–he warned against relying on all volunteer force.. In combination with a battlefield full of unaccountable contractors — and a military no longer able to go to war without contractors — the failures of our generals are part of a larger picture. Fiasco was the better book, Generalsdoes not cut to the core, the terrible price paid by our youth, with 18 suicides a day among veterans returned home being a strong signal that we have been terribly irresponsible in our training, equipping, and organizing of the US military.
Requiem for the All-Volunteer Force
GI Joe is broken, and is about to be thrown away. Built to be a Transformer; we’ve made him now: an employee.
The All-Volunteer Force (AVF) was America’s gift to itself. It was conceived in the belief that the values of American culture would create the sacrificial willingness on the part of enough of its young to satisfy the requirements of the American People for their defense. Our young people’s willingness to step forward to personal jeopardy consummated their gift to us: their actual sacrifice in nine years of horrific conflict and foreign occupation on our behalf consummated the American Peoples’ obligation to their restoration to full and productive citizenship.
Experience and reason dictate the conclusion that Americans have failed and will continue to fail their restorative obligation to our newest veterans. This is a failure of momentous consequence for the Country. It is the result of the American People’s acquiescence to the moral failures of a generation of its political and military leadership.
In the nearly 40 years of its existence the All-Volunteer Force has been transformed from inchoate policy, to the most robust and successful defense structure the world has known, to a negative influence on the interests of the American people as a wasteland for its young. Those who ostensibly knew American Defense interests best and had the most power to affect its course set in place the preconditions for this debacle during the Administration of George H.W. Bush. Richard Cheney and Colin Powell were is architects, but many have been complicit
How did this happen?
The successful promise and execution of the AVF was built on the values of the generation of which Ronald Reagan was representative. Those values were founded on the unassailable fact that our military is based on our people, and that our people cannot succeed unless supported with cohesive structure, honorable function and ethical integrity. From those values flowed the belief and policy that the AVF was to be an institution designed not only for the betterment of our volunteers in and for the military, but also for the betterment our society through him or her. Those values and policies were systematically abandoned or corrupted by our political-military leadership since the end of the Cold War. A broken AVF and a broken generation of our most valuable young citizens is the result.
Structure is about how something is put together: its size, its hierarchy, and the interrelationship of its parts. The Reagan generation understood and valued institutional integrity in public and private life, in peace and war. Our Military structures are now in shambles.
Logistics, the most justly celebrated sustainment structure of the American military, is now a contract function for companies flipped on Wall Street along side Waste Management and Burger King. As a result, we now have a military that cannot feed itself in the field or in garrison. It is an Army that cannot maintain or move its equipment; that has marginal capacity to protect itself, or to gather tactical intelligence. This is the sustainment structure that failed our volunteers for the past nine years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Function is about the goals of an institution and whether its mission is understood, accepted, and supported. The Reagan generation understood the scourge of war, the value in its deterrence, and the requirements for the successful societal reintegration of those who sacrificed in fighting if necessary. The post cold war generation of leaders turned our historical commitment to deterrence, or necessary national commitment to rapid victory on its head. We are now a nation willing to commit the honor and bodies of our volunteers to undeclared perpetual imperial wars of occupation; in the Orwellian language of our military industrial intelligencia, to “Sustainable Pre-eminence.”
Ethics concern the manner, in which an institution conducts itself, how it is used, and what image it has of itself. The Reagan generation understood the value and primacy of rule of law, of professionalism and of human life. To that generation, meaning was derived from the pledges of the Atlantic Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the fundamental quest for fairness embodied in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and the openness which permitted the heroism of Mauldins, Pyles, and Murrows. Our generation of political military leadership sent our volunteers to Iraq in an undeclared war, unready in training and rationale for occupation, and, for eight years, turned the nation’s back on their ultimate sacrifice.
Americans and their political military leadership will turn their backs on our veterans because they turned their backs on them as volunteers. The broken structures, functions and ethics at the heart of the All-Voluntary Force have obliterated the connection between the soldier and the citizens he sacrificed to represent. Ours is now a Contract Force and our ‘volunteers’ contract-employees. Our volunteers, as “veterans,” continue to die: of broken hearts.
Based on notes from a talk at Ingleside at Rock Creek, June 25, 2012 entitled: “The Defeat of Reagan’s Army.”
Phi Beta Iota: The all-volunteer force disconnected society from the military and allowed unethical and even unprofessional generals and admirals, in collusion with corrupt legislators, corrupt corporate chieftains, and ideologically driven presidents and vice presidents, to sacrifice our blood treasure and spirit precisely because of this disconnect. The all-volunteer force assumed that Washington has intelligence and integrity. Not so. Indeed, this resurfaces the entire concept of ending the election of politicians, and instead adopting the lot system — Members should be like jurors, selected at random and given strict term limits.
Post local editor Vernon Loeb, who ghostwrote Paula Broadwell’s David Petraeus biography, offers his impressions of Broadwell and thoughts on the scandal.
The one question I never answered was why General Patraeus was granting such extraordinary access to a reporter. She was the only one with access to Petraeus, I never ever spoke to Petraeus. My job was to craft the narrative. I always thought she was acting with the best of intentions.
Holds individuals and groups accountable for violence.
“Bearing witness” with modern technological tools.
TED2011 Fellow Sanjana Hattotuwa passionately describes his work with Groundviews — a citizen journalism website that sheds light on Sri Lankan narratives that aren't typically covered in mainstream media.
Robert David STEELE Vivas Click on Image for Bio Page
Open Season on CIA? – Are The Days of Living Immunity Instead of Cover Over?
I had occasion to reflect today on the past twenty years, recollecting how easily in 1992 a new path could have been taken, one that reconnected the US intelligence community to “ground truth” using open sources and methods, as well as “full spectrum” HUMINT, a term I coined. It gives me pause to recollect that 1993 was also the year in which CIA was attacked by a lone gunman at its front gate, killing two and wounding three others., an attack inspired by and stemming directly from CIA operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Although I have been an intelligence reformer since first realizing how little CIA actually knows about the business of intelligence (for example, writing the first ever Standard Operating Procedures for a (Clandestine) Field Station in 1985, along with the first ever Guide to Managing the Support Account, I have never sought to harm CIA, nor have I wished for harm to befall those that work for CIA.
Today, in the aftermath of Benghazi, a quick tour of the horizon suggests to me that CIA's days of living immunity instead of cover are over. Although my first book, ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000) addressed the urgency of getting serious about cover — official “cover” as practiced by CIA is a global joke — and I had a foreword from Senator David Boren (D-OK), past Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) — CIA has chosen to ignore all the signals of its looming demise as a global intelligence service.
In recent times, I have been struck by the lack of professionalism and lack of integrity that has characterized CIA's rush into renditions and torture in secret prisons, to the point that CIA officers alive and well in the USA today have been convicted in an Italian court and the way is now open for a formal extradition request. Even if they are not extradited, I would certainly recommend to those officers a complete change of name, location, and even profession. It is a certainty that one day, some angry Italian is going to be moved to hunt them down and kill them and their families–I hope without success. Other countries, other relatives, are going to start coming after CIA, not only from Iraq and Afghanistan, but from the many other countries where CIA has been both amatuerish and cavalier in its covert operations.
A Republican official in Texas called for his state to separate from the United States and the “maggots” who reelected President Barack Obama in a newsletter he sent out this week.
Peter Morrison, who serves as treasurer of the Hardin County Republican Party, wrote in his post-election newsletter that there was a clear solution to the problem of Obama’s re-election.
“We must contest every single inch of ground and delay the baby-murdering, tax-raising socialists at every opportunity,” Morrison wrote. “But in due time, the maggots will have eaten every morsel of flesh off of the rotting corpse of the Republic, and therein lies our opportunity.”
