Phi Beta Iota: Buried in the small print are severe shortcomings in intelligence support to strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations around the world; TRANSCOM thinking that Guam comprises a long-haul strategy; the Arctic uncovered and the Antarctic ignored; and at the very end, a tiny mention of the alternative concept of joint inter-agency commands–and of course no mention at all of the key concepts of Network-Enabled Capabilities, OSE (technical solution) and M4IS2 (human solution). The new National Security Advisor is inheriting a gawd-awful mess that is out of control, out of money, out of imagination and out of integrity.
You and I, thanks to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Daniel Pipes, and a number of other lesser neocons, and an almost fatally incurious President, spent over a TRILLION dollars of public money, and squandered the lives of tens of thousands of young Americans who were killed, wounded, or permanently maimed, in order to achieve… nothing… for either America or Iraq, as t! his report makes clear.
Historians, I think, will say it was the worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history. It has resulted in the destabilization of an entire region of the world, sucked out the money that should have gone to rebuilding our infrastructure and our schools, and laid the foundation for generations of anti-American hate throughout the Islamic world.
As the previous story pointed out the deaths of thousands of Americans and some far large but never accurately counted number of Iraqis, and the wounding and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Americans and Iraqis produced no benefits for either country and great damage to both. Even on the terms the neocons argued for the war: it would protect Iraq's massive o! il supplies for the U.S. (read the neocons' corporate masters) turns out to be wrong, as this story makes clear. Everything the Bush Administration based its policy decisions on was wrong, and China is the main beneficiary.
I cannot express how strongly I agree with this. My only critique: He does not properly place this in the context of the transition into the Age of the Non-geographical corporate states. If our democracy were functioning properly the lunatic Right Congresspersons would not be elected. Click through to see the interview. It is worth your time.
For his new book, journalist Robert Kaiser intensely researched the political maneuvering surrounding the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. His conclusion? Most members of Congress don’t understand what they’re arguing about.
Speaking on PBS, Kaiser said Wall Street reform only occurred in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse thanks to the unique talents of former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and former Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT). Unlike the rest of Congress, Frank and Dodds had an actual grasp on the financial situation and understood the need to act. Frank provided the brainpower, while Dodds’ political skill was necessary for financial reform to pass.
‘But it was upsetting to me as a citizen to realize how few members understood the issues they were dealing with,” Kaiser remarked. ‘These are, of course, extremely complicated financial matters, how banks work, how they’re regulated, so on.” ‘Not everybody can know this, but at the end, I concluded that you could fit the number of experts in Congress on financial issues easily onto the roster of a Major League Baseball team,” he added. ‘That’s 25 people. I think that is the max.”
Kaiser also said the lack of expertise was resulting in a deadlocked Congress. Rather than trying to craft meaningful legislation to aid the country, most lawmakers were more interested in scoring partisan political points. ‘You don’t really engage on issues in this Congress,” he explained. ‘What you engage in is political warfare, partisan bashing, one or the other. And the result is that serious policy issues, as we have seen again and again, get very short shrift.”
“The United States is not at war with Islam,” President Obama said last week at the National Defense University, in a speech that declared an end to America’s “wartime footing” in the fight against terrorism. President Bush said the same when he launched the war on terrorism in 2001: “We do not fight Islam, we fight against evil.”
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But in America’s sprawling security establishment, not everyone has stayed on message. Until this week, the website of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) — the U.S. government’s primary counterterrorism clearinghouse — featured a map that appeared to identify the entire Muslim world as a terror zone.
All of North Africa, the coast of East Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East, the north of India, and much of Southeast Asia was shaded in red. Wherever Muslims are a majority, the map implied, terrorism lurks.
But this map misrepresented the geography of Islamic terrorism, which has been concentrated in only a handful of civil war zones and is rare or non-existent in most Muslim communities.
The map also misrepresented American policy, which has avoided a blanket association of all Muslims with terrorism. The NCTC map literally threw a red blanket of terrorism over the Muslim populations of Africa and Eurasia.
Plus, the map was half a millennium out of date. A month ago, I finally remembered where I had seen it before. It was almost identical to the boundaries of the Muslim world in 1500, as depicted in William Brice’s Historical Atlas of Islam (see below) . Professor Barbara von Schlegell’s webpage has long posted this and other maps as a teaching resource.
In February the Guardian and BBC Arabic unveiled a documentary exploring the role of retired Colonel James Steele in the recruitment, training and initial deployments of the CIA advised and funded Special Police Commandos in Iraq.
The documentary tells how the Commandos tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi men and boys. But the Commandos were only one of America’s many weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Along with US military forces – which murdered indiscriminately – and various CIA funded death squads – which murdered selectively – and the CIA’s rampaging palace guard – the 5,000 man strong Iraq Special Operations Forces – the Commandos were part of a genocidal campaign that killed about 10% of the Sunni Arabs of Iraq by 2008, and drove about half of all Sunnis from their homes.
Including economic sanctions, and a 50 year history of sabotage and subversion, America and its Iraqi collaborators visited far more death and destruction on Iraq than Saddam Hussein and his regime.
The brutal murder of an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight in the southeast London district of Woolwich raises new questions about the British government's national security strategy, at home and abroad. Officials have highlighted the danger of “self-radicalizing” cells inspired by Internet extremism, but this ignores overwhelming evidence that major UK terror plots have been incubated by the banned al-Qaeda-linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun.
Equally, it is no surprise that the attackers had been seen earlier on the radar of MI5, the UK's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency. While Al Muhajiroun's emir, Syrian cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed – currently self-exiled to Tripoli in northern Lebanon – has previously claimed “public immunity” due to murky connections with British intelligence, compelling evidence suggests such connections might still be operational in the context of foreign policy imperatives linked to oil and gas interests.
I strongly agree with [former US CIA Director] R. James Woolsey and [a former CIA analyst and Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, an Advisory Board to Congress] Dr. Peter Vincent Pry that the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) threat to the U.S. demands our strongest attention (“How North Korea Could Cripple the U.S.,” op-ed, May 21).
