Phi Beta Iota: We concur with Contributor John Steiner, who sends this direct message from Link TV for consideration by one and all. They have been added as both a Professional Site and a Righteous Site.
Dear Friend,
Sometimes in the life of an organization, there is a defining moment— one that validates everything you believe in and stand for.
For Link TV, the democratic uprising in the Middle East has been that moment. When the people of Tunisia and Egypt roared for democracy, we brought you more than 14 hours a day of unfiltered global news from Link TV’s Mosaic, Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera English.
Egypt: Protesters in Tahrir Square, Cairo, are asking citizens to take part in demonstrations on 11 February, for the “Day of Confrontation,” Al Arabiya reported. One news service reported tens of millions of text messages about the event. According to a report in the Indian Express, “organizers” want a “big push” on Friday that could include storming parliament and the state television station in Cairo.
In a major shift to reinvigorate the post-9/11 spy world inside the Central Intelligence Agency, Director Leon Panetta has decided to change how the agency's National Clandestine Service operates, potentially impacting up to half the CIA's workforce. The shift is part of Panetta's long-range “CIA 2015″ reorganization plan and should make the agency much more agile and quick to respond in the war on terror and other national security flare-ups.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not a shake-up. This is an abandonment of language skills and cultural knowledge as a foundation for effective clandestine operations, and a general acknowledgment that the clandestine service is merely in liaison business, and “one size fits all” since English is the common languages for both spies and air traffic controllers. A “real” clandestine service would have five classes of personnel in more or less equal measure:
Career Trainees 20%
Mid-Career US Citizen Non-Official Cover Hires 20%
Foreign Liaison Rotationals to Multinational Field Stations 20%
One-Time “It's Just Business” Contracts 20%
What CIA has today is way too many youngsters with no real foreign experience, and way too many annuitants (contractors) and old guys who will finally retire when the money dries up, as it is about to. CIA clandestine operations have no bench, no middle, and no strategy for the future, in part because CIA analytics are not serious, CIA multi-lingual processing at machine speed does not exist, and CIA leverage of global open sources and methods is both out-sourced and pedestrian. At the same time that our Embassies have become “bunkers,” our spies are increasingly uninformed, disconnected, and ineffective for lack of language, context, and leadership.
With colleagues Pete Lewis, Tony Deifell, Kevin Anderson, Andrew Haeg, and Scott Rosenberg, I’m in a two week conversation about the future of journalism on the WELL. The WELL is the seminal online community; this conversation is in the Inkwell forums, where Bruce Sterling and I have our annual state of the world conversation. Inkwell usually has conversations with authors, but for this conversation we’re trying a panel format.
Here’s my latest contribution to the conversation:
Phi Beta Iota: Below the line is an excellent overview from NIGHTWATCH. Here are the key points:
1. Muslim Brotherhood was caught by surprise, not just the US Intelligence Community.
2. This is a revolution of young people focused on fundamentals, NOT an Islamic uprising.
3. There is no overt anti-US aspect within the young, but Hezbollah and others are trying to tie the US to the dictators it supports–left unsaid is that if the US cannot turn on a DIME (pun intented) it will be skewered with its own sword.
4. Dictator Mubarak may be shopping for an exile estate in Egypt.
INSIGHT: The US Government has no one thinking strategically–certainly not the Goldman Sachs lobbyist now enjoying the corner office and pretending to be national security advisor to the President, and certainly not the Department of State, which has lost its one strategic thinker back to Princeton and has no bench. NOW IS THE TIME for President Barack Obama to decide he wants to create a Smart Nation with Whole of Government strategy and operations resting on a foundation of intelligent intelligence. See ON INTELLIGENCE: Open Letter to the President.
The EastWest Institute released the first joint Russian-American report aimed at defining the “rules of the road” for cyber conflict. Prepared by a team of Russian and U.S. experts convened by EWI, Working Towards Rules for Governing Cyber Conflict: Rendering the Geneva and Hague Conventions in Cyberspace explores how to extend the humanitarian principles that govern war to cyberspace.
“Today, nearly all critical civilian infrastructure is online, from the electricity grids that support hospitals to the systems that guide passenger planes through the air,” says EWI Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Fellow Karl Rauscher, who led the U.S. experts group. “And, by and large, it is not protected by international norms.”
Phi Beta Iota: Pity they did not think of this when Winn Schwartau first brought it up in 1990 testimony to Congress, or Robert Steele first documented with precision what was needed in 1994. Colin Gray in Modern Strategy: Time is the one strategic asset that cannot be bought nor replaced. We've wasted 20 years and we look like we are about to waste another 20.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused in the murders of 13 people and the attempted murders of 32 others in the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, appears to be the toughest kind of terrorist to spot: a lone wolf who plots without the overt support of domestic cells or foreign sponsors.
Still, the attack did not come as a complete surprise to some in the Army and the FBI, and that makes this incident all the more tragic. Our Senate committee's 14-month investigation of the Fort Hood killings has concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”
The deaths at Fort Hood could and should have been prevented. The Defense Department's failure to acknowledge the threat of violent Islamist extremism within its ranks, coupled with organizational and communication flaws in the FBI's counterterrorism operations, contributed to the tragedy.
