Add to this idea a more open “peer review” process in place of the present obscure, back-scratching, club-based peer review process, and climate science might be well on its way to depoliticization.
Making research papers freely available is about much more than breaking the monopoly of rich academic publishers
Peter Coles is professor of theoretical astrophysics at Cardiff University, The Guardian, 20 April 2012
The Guardian's recent articles about the absurdities of the academic journal racket have brought out into the open some very important arguments that many academics, including myself, have been making for many years with little apparent effect.
Now this issue is receiving wider attention, I hope sufficient pressure will develop to force radical changes to the way research is communicated, not only between scientists but also between scientists and the public, because this is not just about the exorbitant cost of academic journals and the behaviour of the industry that publishes them. It's about the much wider issue of how science should operate in a democratic society.
When we worked on the Manhunting Project for SOCOM, the US Marshall's Service said that fugitive hunting was all about network analysis. The IC doesn't understand network analysis as the bean counters push for numbers….they focus on low hanging fruit and as a result there is always some guy out there ready to step up and take the foot soldier's place (not so much the upper echelons). Try to tell an IC drone that it is all about the network and you will get a deer in the headlight look….
Police forces have spent decades combating organised crime with well-practised techniques, but can the same tactics be the key to defeating insurgencies on the front line? Former police officer, federal marshal, and JIEDDO FOX team member Louis J. DeAnda tells Defence IQ how we need to take a holistic strategy to IED network attack…
Phi Beta Iota: Completely apart from the corruption at the top of both the Department of Justice and the Department of Defense, this is an extraordinary–a gifted–contribution to the literature. It is reproduced in full below the line to preserve it as a reference.
Scott Camil, a veteran of the second-longest U.S. war in history, that on Vietnam, radically changed a discussion of the longest war in U.S. history, that on Afghanistan, on CNN on Sunday.
CNN's Don Lemon tried repeatedly to explain troops posing with body parts as an inscrutable result of war, without questioning the justification of that war. Repeatedly, Lemon instructed viewers not to judge soldiers.
A guest to whom Lemon devoted a great deal of time, Dr. Terry Lyles, followed Lemon's leads and was praised by Lemon as the best guest he'd heard from on the topic. Lyles suggested the problem was one of public relations: “We need to do a better job,” he said, “you know, with them psychologically to help them understand that the world is watching. Be careful about what you do and what you capture while what you're doing every day is very difficult.”
Scott Camil took a different tack, saying: “Well no we don't know what it's like to be in combat unless you've been in combat, but I think the real question is: you're nit picking when you're talking about things like people posing with bodies. The real question should be why are we at war in the first place? Why are we killing so many people in the first place? The concern over posing with someone that's dead, it seems to me the fact that that person is dead and that we're killing people is more important than what happens after they're dead.”
Camil's comment was so effective that the next panelist to speak shifted to his topic. Holly Hughes remarked: “Scott hit the nail on the head because now we've opened a dialogue. What are we talking about now? Shouldn't we be more upset that we're out there killing people? . . . Maybe we need to assess why we're there in the first place.”
Camil continued: “What I understand is what it's like to be in a war zone and I understand the behavior in a war zone. And I would say that, first of all, that war is really an institution made up of criminal behavior. When we as civilians want to solve our problems, we're not allowed to murder people and burn their houses down. I don't see why war is an acceptable means of conflict resolution. And furthermore, the majority of people that die are innocent civilians.”
Some fundamental truths are rarely spoken on television.
Scott Camil was honorably discharged with 13 medals including 2 purple hearts following 20 months voluntarily spent as a Marine in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967. He testified at the Winter Soldier Investigation in 1971, and was a founding member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War Inc. He is an active member of Veterans For Peace and serves as the President of Chapter 014 in Gainesville, Florida.
Veterans for Peace was founded in 1985 and has approximately 5,000 members in 150 chapters located in every U.S. state and several countries. It is a 501(c)3 non-profit educational organization recognized as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) by the United Nations, and is the only national veterans' organization calling for the abolishment of war.
(Washington, D.C.) – The USDA Coalition of Minority Employees (http://www.agcoaliation.org) and watchdog group ACORN 8 (http://www.acorn8.com) united with 40 national and international coalitions of good government, open government, civil rights and human rights groups as well as hundreds of individual Occupy Wall Street protesters from across the country, announce an assembly at the Washington DC Capitol to be held May 20-22, 2012. We are proud to announce that MSNBC Host Dylan Ratigan has agreed to moderate and the PACIFICA Radio Network has committed to broadcast the historic event this year.
Over the last six years members from the Make it Safe Coalition (MISC) have arranged an assembly of whistleblowers in Washington, DC each year for an annual conference originally known as Washington Whistleblower's Week. The USDA Coalition of Minority Employees will co-host this year's Whistleblower Summit—Civil & Human Rights Conference , in Washington, DC. The Coalition has been very active at the US Department of Agriculture since 1994, regarding their continued widespread racism, sexism, reprisal, intimidation, sexual assault, hostile work environment, and other abuses against USDA employees and minority farmers.
The week's events will include an Opening Plenary, New Media Panel Discussion, No FEAR Anniversary Reception, Civil and Human Rights Roundtable, Book Signing, Movie Night, Citizen's Tribunal, Press Conference, Peace & Justice Demonstration, Congressional Lobby Day, Solidarity Dinner and much, much, more. Featured speakers will include some of the following:
General Michael Flynn (USA) has been nominated to become the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in spite of or because of his severe criticisms of the inability of the U.S. Intelligence System to produce useful strategic intelligence on Afghanistan. As a result among the small portion of the media that even noted his nomination, a good deal of nonsense has been written about DIA. I hope this will clear the air a bit.
The DIA was created by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1961 with the specific mission of providing a single voice for the individual military service intelligence commands. As with many of Secretary McNamara’s ideas, DIA completely ignored reality. The service chiefs simply ignored DIA and the directors of DIA (all general officers of those services) went along. In the press of the Vietnam War Secretary McNamara paid no attention to DIA after creating it. So DIA really had no defined mission and became known as the “redundant agency.”
Since its creation DIA has struggled to find a viable mission that would not interfere with the missions of the service intelligence commands or of the National Security Agency (NSA) which also was under the Department of Defense (DOD) or the independent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which had considerable status as the senior intelligence authority and in the theory the ear of the President. This continues to be a problem with DIA having only Measurement and Signature Intelligence (MASINT) as its exclusive domain. DIA also has numerous heavily classified programs and projects, but when these see light of day they often prove to be pointless or even lunatic. DIA does have one central mission and that is to serve as the J2 (intelligence arm) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (ICS). Having actually worked in J2, I can testify that this does not give DIA a good deal of authority either in the Intelligence Community (IC) or even with JCS.
“If it is 85% accurate, on time, and I can share it, this is a lot more useful to me than a compendium of Top Secret Codeword materials that are too much, too late, and require a safe and three security officers to move around the battlefield.” Navy Wing Commander who led the lead flight over Baghdad in Gulf I
Consequences of Excessive Secrecy & Corruption
“The danger is, you'll become something like a moron. You'll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.” Daniel Ellsberg
“(There is a need) to recognize that just as the essence of knowledge is not as split up into academic disciplines as it is in our academic universe, so can intelligence not be set apart from statecraft and society, or subdivided into elements…such as analysis and estimates, counterintelligence, clandestine collection, covert action, and so forth. Rather, and as suggested earlier in this essay, intelligence is a scheme of things entire. And since it permeates thought and life throughout society, Western scholars must understand all aspects of a state's culture before they can assess statecraft and intelligence.” Adda Bozeman
“Is what we are doing in accepting false numbers beyond the bounds of reasonable dishonesty?” Sherman Kent
“Intelligence without communications is noise.” Al Gray “If you cannot communicate your intelligence to the person who needs it because it is over-classified and they do not have the US rigamarole clearances, it is useless.” DefDog
“Everybody who's a real practiioner, and I'm sure you're not all naive in this regard, realizes that there are two uses to which security classification is put: the legitimate desire to protect secrets, and the protection of bureaucratic turf. As a practitioner of the real world, it's about 90 bureaucratic turf, 10 legitimate protection of secrets as far as I am concerned.” Rodley B. McDaniel, then Executive Secretary of the National Security Council
Phi Beta Iota: In 1993 Robert Steele testified to the Presidential Commission on Secrecy and identified the “cement overcoat” of excessive secrecy. Nothing has changed–indeed, it has gotten much worse. To be effective, intelligence must be multinational and default to the secret level when dealing with plans and intentions, and to the unclassified level when dealing with context. It takes balls as well as brains to come out from behind the green door of zero accountability and zero utility through excessive secrecy.
“The technology of the current satellite architecture is pretty much at its limit, and the commercial satellites are producing just about the same thing at a much lower cost,” said retired Gen. James E. Cartwright of the Marines, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The government’s satellites are better, but the question is, What do you need? Most studies show that about 90 percent of what the military needs can be solved with commercial.”
The military also favors commercial satellites because imagery from the intelligence community cannot be easily shared with allies. “The beauty of commercial imagery is that it is unclassified,” said Walter Scott, chief technical officer of DigitalGlobe, a satellite company based in Longmont, Colo.
Phi Beta Iota: Kill MASINT, shut down the NRO, cut NSA in half, cut cyber-security by four-fifths, fund the multinational clandestine human intelligence field stations, fund the Open Source Agency (with responsibility for open source software, open spectrum, and in passing cyber-security) and move on. This is not rocket science. All it takes is integrity.
