Category: Ineptitude

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Mini-Me: Petraeus as CIA Says Benghazi was Terrorist Attack — NSA Behind on Relevant Intercepts; DIA Not Being Allowed to Think, Zero HUMINT Sucks

Government, Ineptitude, Military

Short Persistent URL:  http://tinyurl.com/Benghazi-Bathtub

Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Petraeus tells Congress that Benghazi attack was terrorism

By and ,

Washington Post, Friday, November 16

Former CIA director David H. Petraeus told Congress on Friday that the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, was clearly an act of terrorism, but he did not resolve the question of when the agency reached that conclusion, according to law­makers who attended the closed-door sessions.

. . . . . . .

According to accounts provided by intelligence officials, the CIA concluded early on that Benghazi was a terrorist attack by definition, because any assault on a U.S. government installation with heavy weapons and substantial firepower could not be classified otherwise. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

Read full article.

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Berto Jongman: Princeton Focus on Financial Ecosystems, Finds that Big Banks Trample Economic Habitats and Spread Fiscal Disease

Academia, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement
Berto Jongman

In financial ecosystems, big banks trample economic habitats and spread fiscal disease

Posted November 14, 2012; 09:00 a.m.

by Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications

EXTRACT:

Lead author and Princeton mathematical epidemiologist Nimalan Arinaminpathy explained that the paper represents part of an effort to examine how tumult such as the 2007-08 global financial crisis can spread throughout a banking system. Prior to the crisis, regulators typically judged banks on their individual health rather than their potential threat to the overall network, he said.

“In terms of regulation, there was really very little attention to how the financial system worked as a whole,” said Arinaminpathy, who is a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Read full communique.

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Mini-Me: Bimbo-Gate Sisters Khawam Family Fronted for Sadaam Hussein, Grayson Wolfe DC Insider, Akkadian Private Ventures LLC…

Commerce, Government, Ineptitude, Military
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

HAS THE PETRAEUS AFFAIR EXPOSED A BIGGER, DARKER MORE DISGUSTING SCANDAL?

The Astute Bloggers, Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Read full post in annoying capital letters.

Phi Beta Iota:  Here is the executive summary — none of this has been validated from other sources, but what keeps coming back to us, in relation to both who the US Government does business with and who major commanders socialize with, is ZERO counter-intelligence.  We have no clue.  Amateur hour continues.

01  The Lebanese sisters are part of the Khawam family that fronted for Saadaam Hussein in assigning contracts where 50% came back to him.  The family name is allegedly feared still in Iraq.

02  The twin married Washington insider Grayson Wolfe, founding partner of Akkadian Private Ventures LLC and affiliate companies.

03  They work in all the CENTCOM hotspots and many of their contracts can be traced to Petraeus / Allen command periods.

04  Grayson himself was Iraqi Reconstruction and Special Assistant to the Chief Operating Officer of the Export-Import Bank of the USA, appointed by President Bush.  He also served in 2004 as Manager of the Private Sector Development Office of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

See Also:

Graphic: Benghazi Fiasco UPDATED II w/ Marines (FAST Yes, MEU/MSG No) & 173rd Airborne ( – ) + RECAP Adding Bimbo-Gate

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David Isenberg: Warlords Inc.

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
David Isenberg

Make no mistake — the PSC industry in Afghanistan is enormously powerful, having grown from nothing to immense in a decade of war that the invaders wanted to wage with as few uniformed troops as possible. As in Iraq, they are linked to a privatized model of military and development contracting in a highly insecure post-invasion environment.

Afghanistan

Warlords, Inc.

By

Huffington Post, Nov. 13, 2012

While it’s only one among many factors bedeviling Afghanistan, its substantial private-security contracting industry warrants attention. It’s made up of tens of thousands of Afghan employees, mostly armed guards.

Bear in mind that 2014 is the deadline for Afghanistan assuming responsibility for its own security. This is a date the whole world has an interest in because either Afghanistan will be a more or less stable country — or it will lapse back into the chaotic and destabilized state it was after the Soviets left in 1989.

We all recall how that turned out.

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Marcus Aurelius: Thomas Ricks on Generals “Casual Arrogance”

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military
Marcus Aurelius

Combine this with the reporting on toxic leadership (e.g. by LTG(R) Walter Ulmer) and you have the whole picture.  Emphasis added below.

Questioning The Brass

By Thomas E. Ricks

New York Times, November 12, 2012
Pg. 29

Washington–OVER the last 11 years, as we fought an unnecessary war in Iraq and an unnecessarily long one in Afghanistan, the civilian American leadership has been thoroughly — and justly — criticized for showing poor judgment and lacking strategies for victory. But even as those conflicts dragged on, our uniformed leaders have escaped almost any scrutiny from the public.

Our generals actually bear much of the blame for the mistakes in the wars. They especially failed to understand the conflicts they were fighting — and then failed to adjust their strategies to the situations they faced so that they might fight more effectively.

Even now, as our wars wind down, the errors of our generals continue to escape public investigation, or even much internal review. As the Vietnam War drew to an end, the Army carried out a soul-searching study of the state of its officer corps. To my knowledge, no such no-holds-barred examination is under way now. Instead, the military’s internal analyses continue to laud the Pentagon’s top brass while placing almost all of the blame for what went wrong in our wars on civilian leaders.

As Paul Yingling, a recently retired Army colonel, noted during some of the darkest days of the Iraq war, a private who loses his rifle is punished more than a general who loses his part of a war.

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Yoda: The Intertia of Large States – View from Quebec

Government, Ineptitude
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Quebecois, he is.  Author's translation, this is.

States and the inertia

With the commission Charbonneau, now we know what leads the inertia of the state.

René Marcel Sauve
Free forum Vigil
Sunday, November 11, 2012

The State’s force of inertia.

Concerning the imminent economic and political catastrophe awaiting the United States, I tend to agree with most statements produced so far.  However, allow me to express this case with a different language, using the terminology of geopolitics.

Not being different from all other big States of History, one can say  that the United States suffer from what is referred to in geopolitics as the force of inertia affecting all States and large powers in the World.

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Yoda: Data Producing Intelligence — But Not in the “Intelligence” Community

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

Intelligence, this is.

Predicting presidents, storms and life by computer

Associated Press, Saturday, November 10, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — Forget political pundits, gut instincts, and psychics. The mightier-than-ever silicon chip seems to reveal the future.

In just two weeks this fall, computers models displayed an impressive prediction prowess.

It started when the first computer model alerted meteorologists to the pre-Halloween disaster headed for the Northeast from a bunch of clouds in the Caribbean. Nearly a week later, that weather system became Hurricane Sandy and grew into a superstorm after taking a once-in-a-century sharp turn into New Jersey.

Then, statistician and blogger Nate Silver correctly forecast on his beat-up laptop how all 50 states would vote for president. He even predicted a tie in Florida and projected it eventually would tip to President Barack Obama, which is the equivalent of predicting a coin landing on its side. He did it by taking polling data, weighing it for past accuracy and running 40,000 computer simulations at a time.

He then gave his forecast in terms of percentages, saying that Obama had a 91 percent chance of being re-elected.

In the case of Sandy, lives were at stake. With the election, reputations were on the line and some pundits were dismissive of the computer modeling. Bets were made. Challenges issued.

The math majors came out on top thanks to better and more accessible data and rapidly increasing computer power.

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